Ankit Dass - The Blog

Task failed because "resgen.exe" was not found

2010-11-24T11:22:00.002Z

I am using Team City on the build server and have run into an issue while building the client on the build machine.
I get this error:
Task failed because "resgen.exe" was not found, or the correct Microsoft Windows SDK is not installed.
In order to solve this problem, we need to install Windows SDK. However i have read on line that sometimes this does not solve the problem if you are building for Windows Phone 7 or using Ms test. In that case you need Visual Studio to be installed on the build server (Dirty!!!)

Roger Federer vs. Marat Safin - Australian Open 2009

2009-01-22T15:33:00.002Z

Roger has reached the third round of Australian Open 2009. He will be facing Marat Safin to reach the fourth round. Ironically both roger and marat are my favourite players. Marat has exceptional talent maybe only matched by Roger Federer.But as federer mentioned in his last interview, both of their careers went very different ways after 2005. Federer went up and up, Marat went down and down.
I think Federer will win it easily in three sets, but it should be a high quality match.

Roger wins Kooyang. One of the favourites for Aus Open

2009-01-17T13:46:00.002Z

Roger has won the Kooyang 2009 tournament in style. Roger defeated Stanislas Wawrinka in 57 minutes!!! I thought Wawrinka was playing well and looking in good form. But does that mean that is playing at an excellent level that he defeated Wawrinka so easily? I think fed has a good chance of winning the Australian Open 2009, if he does not run into any long matches early on and if he beats djokovic(expected opponent) easily in the semi final. I think if Roger was to play Murray in the final, it not going to be a straight three set win for Federer. I think its going to be a bit tighter than that, but Fed should prevail without much difficulty. If roger was to play Nadal in final, roger might win in straight sets or maximum four sets. We will know all in a fortnight!!!!
Best of luck roger

Moving to WPF

2009-01-16T17:25:00.002Z

Is there a learning curve to WPF, when moving from Winforms. Well okay, i know there is a learning curve. The question is how big that learning curve might be? Time to find out!!! Yes, I am doing WPF

Jumping from Windows to Mac . No Windows7 for me?

2009-01-15T16:38:00.005Z

Last two times at the release of the new microsoft operating system, I got the new pc with the new OS. It was great using Windows XP and to be frank i have enjoyed using Windows Vista. It never crashed on me and i always had a good peformance. My PC was pretty good at the time i bought it (time of vista release - Jan 2007)and is still very good with 4 GB of Ram, Intel Core2 Duo and 160 Gb hard disk. (i dont use much digitla media, so 160 Gb was fine for me).
Now as we are expecting Windows7 release osmetime this year, its time to buy a new PC with the new OS. However i am not sure about it this time. Mind you Windows 7 seems good. I have it installed on my test PC, though i havent done much on it.

However i am planning to jump the ship and move to Mac. I do use Mac occassionally at the uni and i find it really hard to use it, but still i want to move to Mac. Why then i want to move to Mac? Its the iPhone which has convienced me that i got to get the Mac. I got to try it fulltime as my only workstation. Only then will i know if its good for me. As i use Visual Studio for development, i will need to use VMware Fusion. So i ahve decided that my next comp is Mac.
When? - I plan to buy a Mac around summer time. I am still deciding on wihch one..
I dont know if i will ever have a Windows7 PC. Let see what happens in the next 6 months.

Covariance/Contravariace generics in C# 4.0

2008-12-24T22:42:00.005Z

One of the things that we’ll have in C# 4.0 is covariance/contravariace.

Co-variance means that a generic type e.g. an IEnumerable of type string can be used as a generic of any supertype e.g. IEnumerable of type object.

Contra variance means that a generic type e.g. an IEnumerable of type string can be used as a generic of any subtype e.g.IEnumerable of type object.

Mocrosoft to unviel cloud computing efforts

2008-10-26T10:34:00.000Z

Microsoft To Unveil Windows 7, Cloud Computing Efforts Next Week

Microsoft is going to make announcements at the PDC next week about cloud computing. They have already announced the support of Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon's EC2 cloud . This could be a major step as micrsoft tries to make a push in cloud computing.

In my opinion cloud computing is the future of computing, however it might take a while before it catches on for things related to everyday work for common people such as storing all of your data on the cloud, every user request being processed by the cloud and users being confident that the service works.

The major challenges in cloud computing over the next few years would be:

Security
Scalibility
Reliability
Good business model

Amazon, IBM and to some extent google have already taken the lead, so its up to microsoft to catch up and porve the point.

Securtiy hole in Googel Android

2008-10-25T17:40:00.000Z

Hacker finds a security hole in the Google Android software on the T-Mobile G1

Well, i am not surprised that a security hole has been found. in such a large software system, it is quite expected that something could have gone unnoticed in terms of security. The main thing to watch out is what action Google takes. Obviously they will take action, but will it be a quick one, will it convince people that Google is serious about their security? Earlier it was usually only Microsoft which use to bear the brunt of the journalists and others because of the huge install base of their operating system. But now we have the Apple as well as Google in the game as well. It will be interesting to see how these companies handle such reports.

BBC SPORT | Tennis | Federer on course for Halle title

2008-06-14T22:46:00.000Z

BBC SPORT | Tennis | Federer on course for Halle title: "Federer on course for Halle title
Roger Federer
Wimbledon champion Federer is chasing his fifth Halle crown

Roger Federer reached the final of the Gerry Weber Open in Halle on Sunday with a 6-1 6-4 win over Nicolas Kiefer.

The unseeded Kiefer was the last man to beat Federer at the event in the 2002 semis, but he was swept aside by the Swiss world number one.

Top seed Federer has now served 39 times without being broken at this year's tournament, and has extended his winning streak on grass to 58 matches.

Federer will face Philipp Kohlschreiber who beat James Blake 6-3 7-5."

Federer wins his first match at the French Open 2008

2008-05-28T10:19:00.001Z

Federer won his opening match 6-4, 6-4, 6-3 yesterday over Sam Querrey of the United States. He was more aggressive than usual and seemed to go for his shots, especially his forehand down the line. He will now face either Spain’s Albert Montanes or close friend Kristof Vliegen of Belgium for a third-round spot.

Visual Studio 2008 and ReSharper v3.0

2008-05-01T09:40:00.001Z

I have been using Visual Studio 2008. The official version of Resharper ot be used with VS 2008 is v4.0 However the version 4.0 is still not out (expected anyday this month) and the bank has no plans to approve it soon.
So i had to find a solution to use my ReSharper version 3.0 to work with VS 2008. After searching for a while on the internet i found the solution.
After installnig VS 2008 you have to manually install it from the command line as follows:(because by default it only installs it for 2005).
C:\Program Files\JetBrains>msiexec /i ReSharperSetup.3.0.2.VS80.CSharp.msi VSVERSION=9.0

Product Owner role in Agile Teams.

2008-04-13T11:17:00.000Z

I am currently working on my assignment (from Oxford University) Adopting Agile in a project and while doing that i started wondering as to what exactly is the role of the product owner? What does a prodcut owner do, day in day out. I came across a few points after searching for product owner role on the internet.

As the Product Owner you're responsible for the features that get delivered.
You own the Product Backlog.
Plan one iteration ahead of the developers.
Prioritise effectively so that you get the biggest bang for your buck.
Identify what is valuable to your company and find out the cost of each backlog item by getting provisional estimates from the development team. Then prioritise.
Managing expectation between the business and the project team.

Is that it? Is that all what a product owner does and gets paid a huge sum of money for? Let me know if anybody out these has any other pointers.

Roger Federer at Estoril Open

2008-04-13T11:06:00.000Z

Roger is starting his clay season at the Estoril Open in Portugal from Monday 14th April.

He will look to improve his perfect 5-0 record against Olivier Rochus in the 2008 Estoril Open first round. Federer has been drawn in the same quarter of the draw as sixth-seeded Frenchman Nicolas Mahut, who he could meet in the quarterfinals. That wil be an interesting match.

Best of luck to roger

Roger federer gets a coach..

2008-04-13T11:01:00.000Z

Roger Federer arrived at the Estoril Open in portugal on Saturday with tennis coach Jose Higueras.

Federer has been without a coach since splitting with Tony Roche almost a year ago. After suffering a bout of mononucleosis at the beginning of the season, he has not gone beyond the semifinals in any of the four events he has played this year. His title drought has triggered speculation about a slump and calls to bring in outside help.

Higueras has previously worked with Michael Chang, Jim Courier, Sergi Bruguera and Jennifer Capriati and is known for his conditioning and clay-court expertise. Nobody knows yet if this is a short- or long-term coaching arrangement, nor whether Higueras will be regularly traveling with Federer to tournaments.

But i fell that federe will be back to his best soon and is a real contender for the french open 2008.

My iPhone

2008-03-19T17:22:00.000Z

I got a new iPhone. Though its been a month now, but i thought i will post it here anyway. Its an awesome piece of device. Functionally my windows mobile does everything what the iPhone does. But the difference is the way iPhone does it. Yes..Its all about the user experience with the iPhone which i am really enjoying.

Agile Methods course - University of Oxford

2008-03-02T21:59:00.000Z

Tomorrow i am going for the "Agile Methods" module to Oxford university. I have been working feverishly to finish my pre-assignment which is a presentation on "Scrum on a large distributed team". After doing lot of study on scrum in last 2 weeks, i have really started appreciating this practice. Though in my current project we are following scrum(daily stand up meetings, release backlog and usage of wiki for task tracking), but what i have learned in my last week of study has truly been an eye opener. More details to come from tomorrow
Next post from oxford..........

How will i prepare for my dream MBA?

2008-02-03T00:14:00.000Z

I am planning to apply to the MBA schools in Fall 2009. Thats gives me roughly 18 months to prepare. I have to plan every step to the minutest detail and got to feel good that it is the right time to apply.

My preparation will involve:

1) GMAT.
2) Essays preparation.
3) Geeting the right recommenders.
4) Top notch experience including leadership.
5) Successfull completion of Oxford University degree.

I am back after a 3 month gap

2008-02-02T23:55:00.000Z

Its been a long time since i last blogged. Its been a strange and absolutely wonderful time from Nov to Jan 2008 end. A lot happened during this time, some was good some was ok.. I have some sweet memories.
But now after three months of letting myself loose, i am back in business. I will blogging much more regularly from now on.

FogBugz based on Event Bsed Scheduling

2007-11-07T10:56:00.000Z

Fog Creek is currently demo-ing their new bug/task tracking system FogBugz.

Most of the systems which we currently see (for example Jira, Bug tracker) are based on the fact that they are good at reporting, maintaining and tracking (somewhat) bugs and tasks. That's it. The role of a bug/task tracker system usually ends there. (if you been making more use of a bug tracking/task management system, drop me an email).

There is where FogBugz is different from rest of the systems. Probably the most interesting part of FogBugz is Evidence-Based Scheduling, which uses a statistical technique called bootstrapping (a variation on Monte Carlo) to determine the probability that you'll ship on any given date. In short, this is how it works. You estimate features as usual. But then, instead of adding up all the developers estimates—instead of taking them on faith—FogBugz does a Monte Carlo simulation looking at what speeds developers worked at in the past, vis-à-vis their estimates.

In Joel's words:
Using that same distribution of probabilities that we had in the past and if we run a simulation of 60 futures each of which will occur with equal probability, what we get, instead of a date, is a probability distribution curve that shows the probability that the product will ship on such-and-such a date.

Now thats what i call an awesome sfotware tool, which really stands out. Well how reliable and accurate FogBugz is, is another question.

I think i got to try it to find out!!!

Facebook Developer Garage London October 2007

2007-10-23T09:37:00.000Z

Ever wondered how you could create the next mega app for Facebook. Do you know what FBML is? Well i will tell you that. It is "Facebook Markup Language".

"Get wise and monetise"....This is the title for the upcoming Facebook developer Garage event in London on 24th October 2007.

I will be there and you should be there too!!!!

Network with other developers and entrepreneurs to create the next mega hit application. Your audience is the 40 million users on the world's most exciting web platform.

Speakers will include:

* Affiliate Window - Monetising Facebook Applications Through Affiliate Marketing (David Hall)* Paypal (Anthony Hicks) - How to take payments (and subscriptions) with Paypal for your Facebook App.
* M&C Saatchi (Speaker TBC) - Online advertising in the UKIn addition there will be two application showcases from garage developers.

You can get your tickets here:
http://londongarageoct07.eventbrite.com/

Sapient to enter in Interactive media space in India

2007-10-12T08:10:00.000Z

In London and NA we have been making rapid strides in the Interactive Media market for quite soem time, now its India's turn!!!

Our studios will synergise real-time work: Sandeep Dhar- Interviews-Opinion-The Economic Times

Silverlight video

2007-10-09T12:47:00.000Z

Just got this off of Glenn Block's blog. Scott Hansleman posted a Silverlight video of Scott Guthrie demonstrating MVC to ALT.NET Crowd. See it here.

Orcas

2007-10-08T13:12:00.000Z

I tried Orcas (new version of visual studio) over the weekend. I really like the new interface. Though the interface is not drastically different, but its sleek look on Vista is awesome. Feature wise, there are quite a few, but one feature which i liked a lot is the ability to multi target. As i heard from scott guthrie, Orcas is the first version of Visual Studio that enables developers to target multiple versions of the .NET Framework. This means that you can open or create a project that explicitly targets either the .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 releases, and Visual Studio will automatically filter intellisense, toolbox controls, and add reference dialog items (among other things) to only show those features supported within that specific version of the framework.

Then there are good C# features such as automatic property generation. So from now we do not need to write both private memebers and thier public properties. The compiler can automatically generate this for you!!!!!

Another feature which i ahvent tried much but read about is the object and collection initializers. Though i felt that isn't an Object Initializer already present in the language in the form of a constructor? I dont know yet, will have to dig deep to find out whats going on inside.

Credit Crunch - Will this lead to recession?

2007-09-15T07:13:00.000Z

Northern Rock the UK's fifth-largest mortgage lender, has asked The Bank of England to provide emergency financial support. This has made the Newcastle-based firm the highest-profile UK victim of the global credit crunch, triggered by the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US. But the question is how many more to come? Following the widespread losses made by investors in loans to US homebuyers with poor credit history, the so-called sub-prime loans, banks and investors who have had their fingers burned have become wary of buying any mortgage debt.

As financial times stated: “When the patient is in seizure and the extremities are starting to turn blue it is not the time to worry about the patient’s longer-term dietary plans or about undesirable side-effects of the current treatment. Yet I fear this is what central banks will do. The next set of steps had better be convincing and decisive, otherwise a much wider financial implosion and economic recession will become very likely.”

How will it affect the jobs in the city? Will we see a slowdown? Lets wait and watch

Artificail Intelligence - Machines taking over?

2007-09-11T10:42:00.000Z

Continuing from m earlier discussion about Artifical Intelligence, i found the following from one fo the technology writers who went to the Singularity Summit

Singularity Institute Research Fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky explained over the weekend at the Singularity Summit why many believe that machines will eventually be smarter than their makers. The stunning progress in packing more computation power onto silicon chips, married with software designers’ increasing ability to take advantage of this power, virtually guarantees that machines are progressing faster than humans are. One day, machines will start building themselves, he predicted. And at that point, humans will certainly no longer be the smartest creatures in the room.

All that conference goers could agree on is that life with machines won't be the same. And even if the machines that take over from the geeks are friendly, these new masters of the universe may not serve pinot noir.

Artificial Intelligence - Where are we heading to?

2007-09-10T12:39:00.000Z

Recently the Singularity Summit was held in San Francisco and it was attended by record number of people.

I had been reading quite a lot on the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence recently. The singularity institue exists to confront the new world of Artificial Intelligence, both the opportunity and the risk. I have been interested in this field since 2003, when i took a module on AI in my Computer Science degree and thus have my own views to share.

Do you think the machines can take over mankind someday? - Well currently i cant imagine something like that. However i can imagine computers taking over most of our jobs. People worry about competing for jobs with people from Mexico or from China, but what about competing with computers for jobs? People will be friends with robots who tend to understand them better than other humans!!! It will be robots who will make decisions as to when are we supposed to sleep, when are we supposed to eat and what are we supposed to like. Now that seems scary right. I think in 20 -25 years time we might also have the first Human-Robot relationship(partners/marriage). In short, robots will be good enough to replace humans for almost everything.

Robots are already to the level of rather dumb/stupid pets. Given moore's law, they will be to the level of smart pets within three to five years... That much is just simple exploitation of systems that have already been developed... This is such deep stuff, and there is so much of it that it will really take a human+ intelligence to fully use the data that we have now, much less the data that we will generate before we are able to create that human+ intelligence.

Increase in spam in gmail

2007-09-04T13:33:00.000Z

In the last few weeks or so, I've noticed a marked increase in the number of spam emails that are making it into my Gmail. All are filtered to the spam folder though, but I still dont like it as the number has gone up sharply.

I used to get maximum of 3 to 4 spam mails in my spam folder in a week. However nowadays i receive 15-20 spam emails everyday. I dont know what is the reason behind this sudden increase or if others are also facing this situation recently. I tried searching on the internet but no related events have been reported by anybody.

One possible reason could be the fact that i registered on facebook around the same time and then suddenly i noticed the increase in spam. Is it something related to facebook? Are spammers getting hold of my email address from facebook? I wont be surprised actually as i have already started receiving job adverts/mails from agencies through facebook!!!

Let me know if anybody else faces the same situation.

Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival - Bricklane

2007-09-02T21:08:00.000Z

Today i went to the Tiger Beer Singapore Chilli Crab Festival at bricklane. I had heard so much about bricklane, but never been there. So i othught it was a good chance to go there.

I tried the Singapore's unofficial national dish (crabs!!! - you would have guessed by now), as well as other regional specialities such as Hainanese chicken rice, char kway teow and laksa.

You could even get henna tattoos there, watch Chinese dragon dancing and browse market stalls at this event organised by the Singapore Tourism Board.

Morveover walking around bricklane made me feel that it was quite similar to Camden Market. There were artists, musicians and lots of junk stuff being sold and bought. It was a nice expereince to see another aspect of life and ponder over it.

Still thinking about it actually.....

Sharapova's US Open wardrobe is inspired by New York's skyline

2007-08-31T09:06:00.000Z

For 2007 U.S. Open Sharapova is wearing tennis dresses decorated with graphic interpretations of the cityscape on the chest.

The dress is a sleek garment made of a breathable wicking jersey and constructed with a no-sew technique with seams bonded with heat and silicone instead of thread.
There are more than 600 Swarovski crystals incorporated into the design, adding a little flash to the outfit, but Sharapova said it's simple and classy, which suits her taste. "I don't like things with too much pattern ... things that are tacky.''
There also are three crystal buttons down the back, creating a keyhole effect.

No thats a quality dress i reckon. By the way she is through to the third round as well.

Behave# and NSpec - Behaviour Driven Development

2007-08-30T13:15:00.000Z

I found something new today. I was reading casper's blog and came across Behave# and NSpec.

Behave# is a framework for defining and executing application requirement goals. These characterizations are modeled after the Behavioral Driven Design (BDD) terms Story, Scenario, Given, When, Then.

Behaviour Driven Development, or BDD, represents the evolution of current coding practices with respect to Test Driven Development (TDD).

One of the good points of behave# is that that if you want to specify Exceptions as part of your story, this forces you to move away from [ExpectedException]. Which is a Good Thing anyway.
It is quite verbose, although the verbose-ness is one of the qualities that could make it attractive to product owners or PMs. The code is really to express acceptance tests rather than developer-focused 'unit' tests. (Have a look of Behave# code example on casper's blog)

I think i am going to try a real world example and see how it goes or to put it more appropriately to see if it grows on me and how comfortable i feel.

Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications Book

2007-08-29T22:52:00.000Z

Today evening, i borrowed the book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications from a friend of mine. While iwas in the train heading home, i started reading the first chapter which is so meaningful in a programmers day to day life. The content of the book is very well organized and the flow of writing is just too good. It is a must read book.

On the first of page of first chapter i came across a few lines which really made me think how appropriate and improtant this book is for a progammer.

Quoting form the book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications:

"Debugging is also a part of software development that's famous for causing you to pull all-nighters. I'hv yet to run into an engineer who has called his or her partner to say, Honey, I can't come home because we're having so much fun doing our UML daigrams that we want to pull an all-nighter! However, I'hv run into plenty of engineers who have called their partner with the lament, Honey, I can't come home because we've run inot a whopper of a bug"

Well, I am sure any programmer (I mean a real programmer) would agree with this. Let me know what you all think

Google's gPhone

2007-08-29T09:03:00.000Z

I have been hearing about Google's gPhone for over six months now but it was mostly speculation and hype by somebody on his blog or some avid google follower who thinks google is not only working on a gPhone, but also on an Operating System, a revolutionary gComputer and etc. etc.. list goes on.

However, the on again, off again offering to the mobile world by the search giant is reaching fanatical levels of hype and thanks to a recent news story by Rediff News in India, the hype is only getting worse. The story published by Rediff said that the gPhone is two weeks away from launch!!!! Now that is some serious speculation. Sources close to the development said a simultaneous launch across the US and Europe and India is expected, and announcements would be sent to media firms in India and other parts of the world in a week.

Well but all this is still simply a rumor, but a good one nevertheless. Lets wait and watch if google makes an official announcement. If they come out with a gPhone by any chance i am definitely going to get my hands on it asap, as i just love the way they make software.

Opps...aren't we talknig about hardware too over here!!!

.NET Stock Trader Application

2007-08-27T18:21:00.000Z

Microsoft has created a sample online stock trading application to demo the securities industry that its Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and .NET technologies can be used for high-performance applications within a service-oriented architecture. The application also offers full interoperability with J2EE and IBM Websphere sample application.

I am working as a Technology Consultant in capital markets domain and have noticed that microsoft technologies are still not popular and not the first choice as development tools for trading applications. However i think this sample application might open a few doors and show people the power and flexibilty of microsoft technologies.

The .NET stock trader application uses:

Service-oriented, n-tier design with ASP.NET and WCF.
NET 3.0 with Windows Communication Foundation.
.NET Enterprise Application Server Technologies.

Check it out here: .NET Stock Trader App

YouTube role grows as U.S. election nears

2007-07-23T20:13:00.000Z

Candidate Forum on You Tube

Democratic U.S. presidential candidates (L-R) Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Maurice Gravel, William Richardson, Barack Obama, Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden take part in a candidates forum at the NAACP annual convention in Detroit, Michigan July 12, 2007. YouTube members are uploading video questions for upcoming CNN/YouTube debates.By yesterday evening, more than 1,700 videos had been put on YouTube's site for tnights debate among Democratic candidates. Now thats what i call Technology influencing Mankind.......or lets say influencing politics

IObjectReference interface.

2007-07-02T16:47:00.000Z

Recently during my project i came across IObjectReference interface. We had a situation where we were serializing and deserializing an object. During this process, the object returned is the one which the serialized stream specifies. Here comes in the IObjectReference to save us!!!!It returns the real object that should be deserialized, rather than the object that the serialized stream specifies.

Here's an example showing how it can be used:

[Serializable]
class S : IObjectReference
{
int i;
static S S5 = new S(5);
S(int i) { this.i = i; }
public static S Get(int i) { return (i == 5) ? S5 : new S(i); }

#region IObjectReference Members
public object GetRealObject(StreamingContext context)
{
return Get(i);
}
#endregion
}

Indexing by integer: Array vs List vs Dictionary

2007-06-21T15:48:00.000Z

I really wanted to find out about the performance of an array as compared to a List and a dictionary.
So i just wrote something to check it. (See the results below:)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class LookupPerformanceTest
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// ten million
int iterations = 10000000;
string[] array = new string[iterations];
List list = new List(iterations);
Dictionary dictionary = new Dictionary(iterations);
int now = Environment.TickCount;
for (int i = 0; i < now =" Environment.TickCount;" i =" 0;" now =" Environment.TickCount;" i =" 0;" now =" Environment.TickCount;" i =" 0;" s =" array[i];" now =" Environment.TickCount;" i =" 0;" s =" list[i];" now =" Environment.TickCount;" i =" 0;" s =" dictionary[i];">

Results (running in Release mode)
Array population took: 94ms
List population took: 141ms
Dictionary population took: 719ms
Array lookup took: 15ms
List lookup took: 32ms
Dictionary lookup took: 593ms

Team System Unit Tests and Deployment Items

2007-05-29T15:40:00.000Z

Deployment files for unit tests

The files to be deployed with the tests have to be setup so that the tests can run successully on local machine and also on the build machine. Data files such as .cvs, .xml files etc. usually sits in the project directory along with everything all of the rest of my code files.

However the tests when run on the build machine fail because the files cannot be deployed to the "out" directory of the test results. I get a file IO exception – my .Xml file could not be located.

To make it work i had to do 2 things:

I select my data files in the solution explorer, and look at the properties window. I can then find the "Copy to Output Directory" setting and change it to "Copy always".

Secondly "DeploymentItem" attribute has to be applied to the items to be deployed other than the test assemblies.

You can use either absolute path or relative path to specify the location of the deployment files.

If you are using MSBuild and TeamCity for build, then you have to use a realtive path rather than the absolute path to make it work, because msbuild on the server uses relative paths as configured usually in the .build file.

To add a path for a deployment item please follow the following steps (as it is the easiet way to do so):

Select a test in the Test View window or in the Test Manager window.

Press F4.The Properties window for that test is displayed.

Click the Deployment Items property. An ellipsis (...) appears in the value column.

Click the ellipsis.The String Collection Editor dialog box is displayed.

Before the test is run, type a path to a folder or a file that you want to have copied to the test deployment folder. Press Enter and type additional paths to specify additional folders and files to be deployed.

Click OK.

Engadget's blunder

2007-05-18T08:24:00.000Z

Yesterday Engadget posted that the iPhone was going to be delayed several months, relying on what turned out to be a bogus email for the story. Four billion dollars in market cap was wiped off of Apple’s stock price in six minutes as the “news” hit the market. Engadget quickly corrected the story and the stock recovered within twenty minutes, but many investors had lost a staggering amount of money in the amount of time it takes to brush your teeth!!!!

Evaluating .NET/J2EE for your Enterprise Applications

2007-05-10T15:01:00.000Z

Many orgnizations are currently considering and evaluating .NET and Java (J2EE) as their enterprise application development platform.
I found a very good site which contains extensive materials designed to help you evaluate Microsoft .NET vs. J2EE application server technologies. It contains downloadable whitepapers, benchmark comparisons, and sample source code.

Evaluating .NET vs. J2EE

Well I am sold on .NET for a long time now. I hope the link above helps to make your decision easier.

Microsoft Silverlight launched

2007-05-03T11:45:00.000Z

I know i am late by couple of days but still i want to mention, Microsoft has launched Silverlight. Silverlight provides compelling cross platform user experience. It creates richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance. It also delivers media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.

If you’ve got the time, I’d recommend (though i havent done it myself yet, but i wil be doing it today evening) watching the Mix keynote video (warning it’s 2.5 hours). In this you’ll get an overview of Silverlight, the cross platform CLR, ruby in the browser, and some very, very cool demos.

You can download silverlight from Microsoft site.

Asynchronous Programming Model - 2.0

2007-04-25T14:36:00.000Z

I have been reading about the Asynchronous Programming Model in Jeffrey Rithcer's book CLR via C#. I have really enjoyed reading it and i thought of writing something about it.

The Asynchronous Programming Model (APM), as implemented by Delegates, consists of three parts:

- BeginInvoke,
- EndInvoke and
- Rendezvous techniques.

BeginInvoke starts an algorithm, impelmented via a method, on a new thread. EndInvoke retrieves the result of that method. The Rendezvous techniques allow you to determine when the asynchronous operation has completed.

There are three different types of Rendezvous techniques you can use to retrieve the results of an asynchronous delegate invocation

1. Wait Till Completion
2. Polling
3. Method Callback

Wait Till Completion

Wait-Till-Completion is implemented via EndInvoke. Calling this method will block the current thread until the results of the asynchronous method are available. This is the least effective method, because it eliminates all the benefits of APM.

private delegate string StringReturningDelegate();

private void Main()

{

// create an instance of the delegate pointing to a method that takes ten seconds to complete.

StringReturningDelegate fd = new StringReturningDelegate (MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete);

// Begin invocation of this delegate

IAsyncResult result = fd.BeginInvoke(null, null);

// Immediately call EndInvoke, which will block for, oh, say, right about ten seconds

string s = fd.EndInvoke(result);

Console.Write(s);

Console.Read();

}

// A method that takes 10 seconds, then returns a string private string.

MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete()

{

Thread.Sleep(10000);

return "Done!";

}

Polling

In this technique, you check a property of the IAsyncResult object called IsCompleted. This property will return false until the async operation has completed.

// a delegate for a method that takes no params and returns a string.

private delegate string StringReturningDelegate();

private void Main()

{

// create an instance of the delegate pointing to a method that takes ten seconds to complete

StringReturningDelegate fd = new StringReturningDelegate (MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete);

// Begin invocation of this delegate

IAsyncResult receipt = fd.BeginInvoke(null, null);

Console.Write("Working");

// Poll IsCompleted until it returns true; Sleep the current thread between checks to reduce CPU usage

while (!receipt.IsCompleted)

{

Thread.Sleep(500);

// wait half a sec

Console.Write('.');

}

string result = fd.EndInvoke(receipt);

Console.Write(result);

Console.Read();

}

// A method that takes 10 seconds, then returns a string

private string MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete()

{

Thread.Sleep(10000);

return "Done!";

}

Method Callback

In this technique, you pass a delegate to the BeginInvoke method that will be called when the asynchronous operation has completed. It will not block your execution, or waste any CPU cycles. This is the most effective emthod of Rendezvous.

//a delegate for a method that takes no params and returns a string.

private delegate string StringReturningDelegate();

private void Main()

{

// create an instance of the delegate pointing to a method that takes ten seconds to complete.

StringReturningDelegate fd = new StringReturningDelegate (MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete);

// Begin invocation of this delegate

fd.BeginInvoke(AsyncOpComplete, null);

// Do tons of work here. No, seriously.

Console.Read();

}

///
/// Retrieves the results of MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete when called asynchronously///
///

The IAsyncResult receipt.

private void AsyncOpComplete(IAsyncResult receipt)

{

// Cast to the actual object so that we can access the delegate

AsyncResult result = (AsyncResult)receipt;

// retrieve the calling delegate

StringReturningDelegate gsld = (StringReturningDelegate)result.AsyncDelegate;

// Retrieve our results; this is guaranteed not to block, as the async op is complete

string result = gsld.EndInvoke(receipt);

//write the result to the console

Console.Write(result);

}

// A method that takes 10 seconds, then returns a string

private string MethodThatTakes10SecondsToComplete()

{

Thread.Sleep(10000);

return "Done!";

}

Scientists break internet speed record

2007-04-25T12:41:00.000Z

A group of researchers in the Internet2 consortium has set a new record for sending data through the Internet at more than nine gigabits per second.The team broke the old record of 7.67 Gbps, which was set last December. Using modified protocols, they were able to send data across a 20,000 mile path at a constant rate of 9.08 Gbps.At this speed, a high definition version of a movie could be downloaded in just a few seconds, instead of over 40 hours on a typical broadband connection.....

Google vs. Microsoft: reality check

2007-04-24T21:01:00.000Z

I know google has been doing great work over the past year or two, but is it that Microsoft is out? I odnt think so. I came across Jobsblog and read quite a few intersting things. I have collected a few of those facts and here they are:

Why Google IS Afraid of Microsoft, Big Time

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ARTICLE:
Microsoft pummels Google in the “In-Game Advertsing” space. How? Google buys a small San-Fran company to meet the challenge. Microsoft buys the world-leader in the industry for In-game advertising.
Microsoft delivers a solid uppercut in Voice-activated local directory assistance. How? Google announces an experimental service that may not be available at all times and may not work for all users. (Cute) Microsoft acquires TellMe Networks. Heard of them? Most likely, you’ve been using them for the longest time. Almost half of all directory assistance calls are processed on TellMe’s voice platform, and roughly one in three Americans use Tellme every year to get things done.

Assertion that Microsoft's 'Dead' Doesn't Compute
QUOTES FROM THE ARTICLE:
“When a software runs more than 90% of the desktops on the planet — and will for the foreseeable future — it's simply not dead.”“Windows runs on the vast majority of desktops in the world; Linux and OSX make up less than 10% combined”(Microsoft) “…earned $12.6 billion after taxes in its last fiscal year.

Well this article was written by a guy who currently works for Microsoft (you might have guessed that) and is an ex-googler

2007-03-08T13:01:00.000Z

I have been working recently quite extensively on ADO.NET and using data bindings. As we know ADO.NET work very well with DataSets and custom classes to create the entities to represent the data objects. We have decided to use custom classes for our application. We are using object data sources since we have created class entities. I got this piece of code from MSDN which shows a very nice way of using DataBinding. As we can see it is very easy to use and let me tell you from personal experience it is fast as well than using a normal dataset or xml for accessing data.

private void SetupBindings()
{
BindingList orderList =
new BindingList(Order.GetEntityList());
orderBindingSource.DataSource = orderList;
BindingList customerList =
new BindingList(Customer.GetEntityList());
customerBindingSource.DataSource = customerList;
BindingList empList =
new BindingList(Employee.GetEntityList());
employeeBindingSource.DataSource = empList;
}

Thus i reckon .NET winforms provide great support for databindings and it is one of the best options to use.

My new PC with Vista Ultimate

2007-02-07T09:07:00.000Z

Yesterday, i got my shiny new Dell computer with "Windows Vista Ultimate". It is just awesome. It's quite alrite spec machine with Core 2Duo Processor (2.0 Ghz), 2 gig of ram and a 256 mb Nvidia turbocache graphics card.
Windows Vista Ultimate is surely ultimate. It is mind blowing. my favourite key is the windows key and tab, to show multiple windows. The gadgets are obviously cool.
I arranged a short "Windows Vista Launch Event in Croydon". It was nothing official, i just named it as such. My collegaues came over to my palce after work and played around with vista. Even non technical guys are coming today evenning to have a look. Everyone's welcome to come and have a look.....

Creating custom cultures in .NET

2007-02-03T15:49:00.000Z

Recently i have been using CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class to create custom cultures in .NET.

With CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class you can define a custom culture that is new or based on an existing culture and region. You can specify the culture and region information for example the associated language, sublanguage, country/region, calendar, and cultural conventions to great detail by using specific CultureInfo and RegionInfo classes. The custom culture can also be installed on a computer and subsequently used by any application running on that computer.

I highly recommend using this feature in .NET to create custom cultures for the application.

Wolfgang Loder's Blog

2007-02-03T11:34:00.000Z

My previous Team Leader Wolfgang Loder has started his new blog. Its called "Loder on Software Development". He has immense software development experience and a great sense of humour too.

His recent entries are:

Video about Rails and Django
Rails - worth the trouble?
Multiple Inheritance with C#
Online Conference AJAX

Check out his blog at:
http://wolfgangloder.wordpress.com/

Do have a read guys and let him know how do you find his posts.

Windows Vista and Office Developer launch - Jan 19-20, 2007

2007-01-12T09:16:00.000Z

Vista and Office launch time is fast approaching. They are giving FREE copies of Windows Vista and Office for UK developers. As far as i know, attendees to the physical launch will get a choice of either Windows Vista Ultimate, or Office Professional 2007 (but not both). These will be shipped to the attendee after the event. I just cant wait to get my hands on Vista Ultimate.

RegistrySecurity class

2006-12-05T14:29:00.000Z

Recently, i was going through System.Security.AccessControl namespace and i came across DirectorySecurity class, FileSecurity class and RegsitrySecurity class.

I was really impressed by the RegistrySecurity class. it represents the Represents the Windows access control security for a registry key.A RegistrySecurity object specifies access rights for a registry key, and also specifies how access attempts are audited. Access rights to the registry key are expressed as rules, with each access rule represented by a RegistryAccessRule object. Each auditing rule is represented by a RegistryAuditRule object.

This mirrors the underlying Windows security system, in which each securable object has at most one discretionary access control list (DACL) that controls access to the secured object, and at most one system access control list (SACL) that specifies which access attempts are audited. The DACL and SACL are ordered lists of access control entries (ACE) that specify access and auditing for users and groups. A RegistryAccessRule or RegistryAuditRule object might represent more than one ACE.

How cool is that

2006-10-30T13:54:00.000Z

Heineken is refreshing its supply chain to ensure its beer doesn't reach parts it shouldn't.

Heineken is to trial a tracking system which will tell it exactly where its beer shipments are, even in the middle of the Atlantic. The brewer has deployed the solution to track ten containers full of beer travelling from the UK and the Netherlands to its distribution centre in the US. The project, which it calls "The Beer Living Lab", uses triangulation techniques of both satellites and cellular base stations to locate exactly where the cargo is. The SOA-based architecture will also allow the creation of distributed data sources, rather than Heineken having to run a large central database.

Dynamically calling an unmanaged dll from .NET (C#)

2006-10-03T11:00:00.000Z

I like to keep collecting small snippets of code in my blog, which i know will be useful later on.
Below is the code snippet for "Dynamically calling an unmanaged dll from .NET (C#)" from Jonathans blog on MSDN blogs:

To start and to refresh our memories, let's create a very basic C++ dll that does very little..... your code should resemble the following (check out my previous post for more info on this):

Header file

extern "C" __declspec(dllexport) int MultiplyByTen(int numberToMultiply);

Source code file

#include "DynamicDLLToCall.h"

int MultiplyByTen(int numberToMultiply)
{
int returnValue = numberToMultiply * 10;
return returnValue;
}

As you can probably infer from the function name, an int is passed into this function and it will return the number passed in multiplied by ten. Told you it would be simple.

Now comes the more interesting part, actually calling this dll dynamically from your C# source code. There are two Win32 functions that are going to help us do this:

1) LoadLibrary - returns a handle to the dll in question
2) GetProcAddress - obtain the address of an exported function within the previously loaded dll

The rest is rather simple. We use LoadLibrary and GetProcAddress to get the address of the function within the dll we want to call, and then we use the GetDelegateForFunctionPointer static method within the Marshal class to assign this address to a C# delegate that we define. Take a look at the following C# code:

static class NativeMethods
{
[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
public static extern IntPtr LoadLibrary(string dllToLoad);

[DllImport("kernel32.dll")]
public static extern IntPtr GetProcAddress(IntPtr hModule, string procedureName);
}

class Program
{
[UnmanagedFunctionPointer(CallingConvention.Cdecl)]
private delegate int MultiplyByTen(int numberToMultiply);

static void Main(string[] args)
{
IntPtr pDll = NativeMethods.LoadLibrary(@"PathToYourDll.DLL");
//oh dear, error handling here
//if (pDll == IntPtr.Zero)

IntPtr pAddressOfFunctionToCall = NativeMethods.GetProcAddress(pDll, "MultiplyByTen");
//oh dear, error handling here
//if(pAddressOfFunctionToCall == IntPtr.Zero)

MultiplyByTen multiplyByTen = (MultiplyByTen)Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(
pAddressOfFunctionToCall,
typeof(MultiplyByTen));

int theResult = multiplyByTen(10);
Console.WriteLine(theResult);
}
}

The only item worthy of note is the UnmanagedFunctionPointer attribute, which was introduced to version 2.0 of the .NET framework,

Using Settings in C#

2006-10-02T16:29:00.000Z

The .NET Framework 2.0 allows to create and access values that are persisted between application execution sessions. These values are called settings. We can use settings by accessing the Properties namespace.

There are two types of settings:
Application Settings
User Settings

Settings have four properties:

Name: The Name property of settings is the name that is used to access the value of the setting at run time.
Type: The Type of the setting is the .NET Framework type that the setting represents. A setting can be of any type. For example, a setting that holds a user preference of color would be a System.Color type.
Scope: The Scope property represents how a setting can be accessed at run time. There are two possible values for the Scope property: Application and User. These will be discussed more in this section.
Value: The Value property represents the value returned when the setting is accessed. The value will be of the type represented by the Type property.

Creating a New Setting at Design Time
You can create a new setting at design time by using the Settings designer. The Settings designer is a familiar grid-style interface that allows you to create new settings and specify properties for those settings. You must specify Name, Type, Scope, and Value for each new setting. Once a setting is created, it can be assessed in code using the mechanisms described later in this article.

To Create a New Setting at Design Time

In Solution Explorer, expand the Properties node of your project.
In Solution Explorer, double-click the .settings file in which you want to add a new setting. The default name for this file is Settings.settings.
In the Settings designer, set the Name, Type, Scope, and Value for your setting. Each row represents a single setting.

Changing the Value of an Existing Setting at Design Time
You can also use the Settings designer to change the value of a pre-existing setting at design time, as described in the following steps:

To Change the Value of an Existing Setting at Design Time

In Solution Explorer, expand the Properties node of your project.
In Solution Explorer, double-click the .settings file in which you want to add a new setting. The default name for this file is Settings.settings.
In the Settings designer, find the setting you want to change and type the new value in the Value column.

Changing the Value of a Setting Between Application Sessions
At times, you might want to change the value of a setting between application sessions after the application has been compiled and deployed. For example, you might want to change a connection string to point to the correct database location. Since design-time tools are not available after the application has been compiled and deployed, you must change the setting value manually in the file.

To Change the Value of a Setting Between Application Sessions

Using Microsoft Notepad or some other text or XML editor, open the .exe.config file associated with your application.
Locate the entry for the setting you want to change. It should look similar to the following example:

This is the setting value

Type a new value for your setting and save the file.
Using Settings at Run Time
Settings are available to the application through code at run time. You can access the value of settings with application scope on a read-only basis, and you can read and write the values of user-scope settings. Settings are available in C# through the Properties namespace.

Reading Settings at Run Time
You can read both application-scope and user-scope settings at run time with the Properties namespace. The Properties namespace exposes all of the default settings for the project by using the Properties.Settings.Default object. When writing code that uses settings, all settings appear in IntelliSense and are strongly typed. Thus, if you have a setting that is of type System.Drawing.Color, for example, you can use it without having to cast it first, as shown in the following example:

this.BackColor = Properties.Settings.Default.myColor;

Saving User Settings at Run Time
Application-scope settings are read only, and can only be changed at design time or by altering the .exe.config file in between application sessions. User-scope settings, however, can be written at run time, just as you would change any property value. The new value persists for the duration of the application session. You can persist changes to user settings between application sessions by calling the Settings.Save method. These settings are saved in the User.config file.

To Write and Persist User Settings at Run Time
Access the user setting and assign it a new value, as shown in the following example:
Properties.Settings.Default.myColor = Color.AliceBlue;

If you want to persist changes to user settings between application sessions, call the Save method, as shown in the following code:
Properties.Settings.Default.Save();

Scotland Trip (15/09/2006 - 18/09/2006)

2006-09-20T12:58:00.000Z

Before I forget let me capture the events and moments:

15: Edinburgh castle,
Hollyrood House, Edinburgh chapel
Authentic Fish and Chips.
16: Old town visit, dads office search, Royal botanical garden, Rosilln village and
chapel(The DaVinci Code Chapel), Authentic scottish beers and excellent food,
nightclub with champs.
17: Muselborough village and beach, John Muir Walk, Dad old house search,
Portobello beach, BenBradley, Champs discussion, Lots of beer.
18: Champs shopping. Mum shopping. Dad calling,I drinking.

1 year since we finished our Masters Degree

2006-08-31T07:59:00.000Z

Well its been exactly a year when we finished our dissertation and thus our Master's degree. I just cant believe that time has gone by so fast. I still clearly remember we all working like mad to meet the deadline. Jamie was the first one to finish his dissertation in the whole of the uni i reckon. Ben was struggling to finish his dissertation as well. I remember in the start of august, he was already considering toher options. Writing the actual dissertation (the report) was actually the hardest part for me. Champs and BaoYuan had finished their dissertation early and left Hull. ioulieta was as usual so stressed!!!! We have come a long way from that. Ankur and Rob Miles were cool as it goes with their personality. Ankur i reckon spent equal time in lab and in "Fuel" in July. I partied a lot during July to Aug mid and watched loads of wimbledon. But yeah finally we all got there. Congrats people.

And best of luck for years to come.

Earn or Learn

2006-08-19T17:13:00.000Z

Though its a saturday, but i had to go to work due to the huge amount of work left to be done with the deadline approaching.

I was chatting to a friend of mine and he said what am i doing in office on saturday .When people get a job, most of them as far as i know enjoy their work for a few weeks and then it becomes routine job for them. The main purpose of job then is to earn a living and be satisfied.

However as i just finished work i was thinking of the difference between the words "Earn" and "Learn". If any of you did not notice what i mean,
Learn = L + earn.
I also need money, i also want to be really rich but......and yes there is a but here.
Since finishing my Masters Degree last year i have been working as a software developer.I see my work as a learning experience through which i earn, and i dont see it as an income source, where i might learn a bit. i am learning every second of my job. i am exploring new ideas and this gives me immense satisfaction.

I thoroughly enjoy my experience of work. What can be better than getting paid for something you like to do for most of the time of your day.
Thus:

Learn = "Earn through what you love to do"
= Loving the work you are doing + earning.

Another thing which i would love to od and get paid for is travelling. Right now iwant to concentrate on my career as a software developer. However in the future it would be nice if somebody paid me to travel all around the world:).

Even better, a job as a professional software developer where i get to travel a lot and meet new people, see new places. That would be a dream come true job.

Web2.0

2006-08-16T14:26:00.000Z

This picture above shows that I am Web2.0 enabled too....

Passed my driving test

2006-08-15T15:44:00.000Z

I have passed my practical driving test. Today was my test at the DVLA croydon centre.

Today 15th of August is India's Independence Day. I am missing the Parade in delhi, which iused ot watch on TV.

Came across this quote on TFS team blog:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” - Albert Einstein

IBM PC turns 25. Incredible history on the way

2006-08-14T12:37:00.000Z

I know, i am a bit late in posting it..but anyway something to be proud of..

It was a match made in computer heaven.
The May-December marriage of a young company called Microsoft and business powerhouse IBM would change the landscape of offices and homes across the globe.
August 12 (today) is the 25th anniversary of the IBM personal computer launch, a pairing of MS and DOS, Microsoft and the disk operating system.
"MS-DOS moved computer access from a community measured in thousands to one measured in millions
"It was a key transition from the hobbyist and 'geek' environment to business applications".

Several popular home computers existed before the 1981 IBM PC launch. But the regimented business world considered Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack's Tandy products "toys."
The IBM stamp of approval on a personal computer changed that mentality for good.
"Almost overnight, with IBM introducing the PC, it became OK to use it for real business applications," said Tycho Howle, CEO of nuBridges in Atlanta, a provider of business-to-business services.
Howle remembers with fondness his first desktop PC."In 1981 I had an IBM PC, two-floppy system," Howle said."To give young people these days a comparison: It would take 10 of those floppy disks to be able to hold the music that is on one MP3 song," he said.
A floppy disk is a thin, plastic disk that was coated with a magnetic substance used to store data. Earliest disks were 8 inches wide, more efficient disks shrunk to 5 1/4 inches, then 3 1/2 inches. Unlike a CDs or DVDs of today, the disks were floppy, or flexible.
IBM, the 800 pound gorilla of the business world at the time, flooded trade papers and television with promises that this new device would provide "smoother scheduling, better planning, and greater productivity."
Early '80s status symbol, the first available PCs cost between $1,600 and $6,000. Little about this early version was user, but that has changed considerably over time and they are much cheaper now.

Long live the PC........

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-14T08:31:00.000Z

I just came to know from MSDN blogs that "Windows Live Writer" Beta is available from today 14th August. Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service.
Teh cool feaure about writer is you can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it.Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page.

Croydon Life

2006-08-10T14:29:00.000Z

Police looking for human remains are preparing to begin a finger-tip search of the former home of a convicted paedophile in south London - croydon.
Detectives began an investigation after receiving an anonymous letter last year which claimed human remains linked to events 35 years ago were buried there.

Now that is scary..

2006-08-09T16:45:00.000Z

Blogging from PDA

Police looking for human remains are preparing to begin a finger-tip search of the former home of a convicted paedophile in south London.
Detectives began an investigation after receiving an anonymous letter last year which claimed human remains linked to events 35 years ago were buried there.

Friend Assemblies

2006-05-22T21:04:00.000Z

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.

GooglePages

2006-05-15T18:44:00.000Z

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.

.NET vs Java World on Google Trends

2006-05-14T09:35:00.000Z

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.

25 Things I Learned on Google Trends

2006-05-11T22:05:00.000Z

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?

Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now

2006-05-08T21:36:00.000Z

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

Ten Essential Tools

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

2006-05-07T09:17:00.000Z

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.

Pattern for resolving Association classes many - many relationship

2006-05-06T08:02:00.000Z

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.

The master strategy by Microsoft

2006-05-03T11:30:00.000Z

Really good article i read today.

The master strategy by Microsoft

(Mis)Uses of Technology

2006-05-02T16:57:00.000Z

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.

When Your Need Is Speed

2006-04-30T10:00:00.000Z

Came across a recent article form MSDN magazine (The Performance Benefits of NGen.). I have been really intersted in these CLR nitty gritty's, and Ngen is one of my favourite discussions with my CLR crazy freinds.

Typically the methods in managed executables are JIT (Just in time) compiled.The machine code generated by the JIT compiler is thrown away once the process running that executable exits; therefore, the method must be recompiled when the application is run again. Moreover, the generated code is tied to the process that created it and cannot be shared between processes that are running the same application. This can be a performance drawback.

But When Your Need Is Speed Ngen can be the answer.NGen refers to the process of precompiling Microsoft intermediate language (MSIL) executables into machine code prior to execution time. This results in two primary performance benefits. First, it reduces application startup time by avoiding the need to compile code at run time. Second, it improves memory usage by allowing for code pages to be shared across multiple processes.

Mind you, ngen is not jsut another traditional static back-end compilation tool.Unlike statically compiled binaries, NGen images are tied to the machine where they are created and hence cannot be deployed. Instead, the application's installer needs to issue commands to create native images for the specific assemblies on the client machine at setup time. Also unlike traditional binaries, NGen images merely form a cache-managed applications will continue to run correctly even if all the NGen images are deleted. Of course, there will be a performance hit if that happens, but there will be no correctness issues.

NGen typically improves the warm startup time of applications, and sometimes the cold startup time as well. Cold startup time is primarily dominated by the number of pages that need to be fetched from disk. The improvement in cold startup time while using NGen can be attributed largely to the fact that pages of MSIL that need to be touched during compilation no longer need to be accessed at execution time.

Improvements in warm startup time come from reusing pages of the NGen images that were brought in when the application had been running earlier. This is especially beneficial to large client-side UI applications where startup time is critical to the user experience.

NGen also improves the overall memory usage of the system by allowing different processes that use the same assembly to share the corresponding NGen image among them. This can be very useful in both client and server scenarios in which the total memory footprint must be minimized.

Cool Designer event in London

2006-04-26T07:27:00.000Z

For all of my design programming friends Ben, Ioulieta, Chang and all others who are currently working on designing. This is a really good one. Check it out

Cool Designer event in London

Team Foundation Server continued...

2006-04-24T18:53:00.000Z

Team Foundation Server:

As promised my research into Team Foundation Server has continued and here I am with some information (censored. I had to remove the part I prepared as part of my report to my Manager)

A Microsoft official at the VSLive! Conference said Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server represents a shift from a developer-centric focus in building software to a collaborative one. As much as I have read and explored about it, this seems to be correct.

Team Foundation Server works with the company’s Visual Studio 2005 Team System platform to enable collaboration between multiple roles -- such as project managers, architects and developers -- in the development process.
One of the things I was concerned about was the Team Foundation Internationalization.
The text below I got from Aldo Donetti Blog
Most of you know that Visual Studio is currently localized into 9 languages (English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian). Team Foundation will be localized in the same languages, but it has not been designed to be multilingual in its first release, therefore system administrators will have to select one language for the server.

In a distributed/multilingual organization it might not be uncommon to have users installing Visual Studio in their favourite language. Most of the User Interface is stored on the client, but not all of it. A number of error messages come from the server and will show up in the language of the Team Foundation Server installed. Or else, in case of server exceptions, the call stack is provided by the .NET Framework in whatever language it was installed on the server and this would be pushed to the client, though we always wrap exceptions in a user friendly way. It’s easy to understand why a fully localized experience will be achieved only if both the Team Foundation server language and the Visual Studio client language match.

Setting up your server to support international data

Most of the international issues you might have to deal with can be avoided by properly installing and configuring SQL Server on the Team Foundation server. Because some of these changes are hard to undo, you should plan the usage scenarios of your Team Foundation server in advance.

You should at least take into consideration the natural language your teams will be using and set the collation accordingly, because it will obviously affect sorting. Based on the language you plan to use, you might also want to appropriately set switches to allow Case, Accent, Kana and Width sensitiveness (see screenshots below). We highly recommend using a case insensitive collation. Also, should you wish to extensively use Extended Unicode characters (Surrogates), we recommend using one of the “_90” collations. Please see the SQL Reference manual to understand what option is best for you.

Hu understands the thoughts of chairman Bill

2006-04-23T20:27:00.000Z

You got ot read this. I got this from google news feed (The Observer). This is hillarious.

John Naughton
Sunday April 23, 2006
The Observer

When President Hu Jintao of China arrived in the US last Wednesday, his first appointment was dinner with Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, at Gates's mansion (aka San Simeon North) on the shores of Lake Washington. They dined on smoked guinea fowl, which had been shot at by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney. (He missed, and hit one of his friends instead; the guinea fowl was later killed by humane means.) The pair were joined by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, the Chinese ambassador to the US, a number of the President's aides and the deputy assistant head of protocol at the White House. Owing to an unpatched security hole in Gates's Windows-powered home-monitoring system, the meeting of the two Great Leaders was bugged and a transcript of their conversation has been obtained by The Observer ...
Gates: You Hu?

Hu: I am the President of China.

Gates: Cool. I'm the Chairman of Microsoft. (Hu bows.)

Hu: Because you, Mr Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I am a friend of Microsoft.

Gates: Wow! That's really cool. We're very interested in China, you know. Big market. Smart people.

Hu: We are pleased that many great US companies are coming to China - for example Google.

Ballmer: (Heatedly) Those sons of bitches. They stole one of our top Chinese execs ...

Gates: Cool it, Steve. Hu doesn't know about that.

Hu: We also have Yahoo in China. They are very co-operative in rooting out undesirable elements.

Ballmer: (Mutters.) Maybe they could help root out Google ...

Hu: We like Google very much. They are most understanding of our needs. Chinese people do not want to know about freedom and democracy. They just want to know where to buy BMW cars and plasma TVs and such things.

Gates: Now that you're here, Hu, I gotta problem I'd like to share with you.

Hu: I will be honoured to help you, Mr Bill Gates. What is your problem? Or, as your Harvard Business School says, should I call it an 'opportoonity'?

Gates: Eh? Oh, I see. Well it sure looks like a problem to me. You see you have a lot of PCs in China ...

Hu: (Proudly) Yes, we have already 500 million PCs...

Gates: ... and they're mostly running Windows XP.

Hu: (Beaming). Certainly. The latest version with Service Pack 2 installed. We are becoming a most leading-edge economy. Also they have Office Productivity Suite including PowerPoint. It is a most excellent situation. What is your problem, Mr Bill?

Gates: The problem is that, as far as we can see - and Steve here has looked at the figures - we only sold 153 Windows XP and 25 Office licences in the whole of China last year. Those damn PCs are all running bootleg - pirated - software and we haven't made a dime in licence fees on any of them. This is not good, Hu, not good at all ...

Ballmer: Too damn right ... And it all happens because your factories are shipping cheap PCs with blank hard drives and no pre-installed operating system. Then those lousy schmucks install ripped-off versions of our software on them.

(At this point, a Chinese official whispers in the President's ear. After a few moments, Hu turns back to Gates.)

Hu: (Gravely). I see why you are distressed, Mr Bill. And because China wishes to be friends with Microsoft, your distress also distresses me. But my officials tell me that we have solved the problem.

Gates: Cool. How?

Hu: Chinese factories will no longer turn out these - how you say? - naked PCs. All will come with operating system pre-installed.

Gates: Great stuff! Which version? Windows 2000 or XP? And don't forget Vista - we'll be shipping that soon.

Hu: No. Red Flag Linux. Made in China.

(At this point, Ballmer screams, picks up a chair and hurls it at the $250,000 video-wall in Gates's dining room, shattering screens and shorting the lights.)

Gates: That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard, Hu.

Hu: I do not understand, Mr Bill. First you tell me that you don't like these PCs with no operating system, and then you say you don't like them with operating system. I am confused.

Gates: The thing is, Hu, that Linux system is bad news.

Ballmer: You said it, buddy. Spawn of the devil.

Hu: What is wrong with it?

Gates: Well, for starters, it's a system put together by a bunch of hippies.

Ballmer: It's like, totally un-American.

Hu: Does that mean it doesn't work?

Gates: No, it works fine. Better than that goddam pre-release version of Vista, in fact.

Hu: So why do you dislike it so much, Mr Bill?

Gates: Well, those damn hippies just give it away.

Ballmer: It's basically, well, communistic.

Hu: (Shocked) Ah, now I see. We are totally opposed to communism too, Mr Bill. How much will you charge for 500 million Vista licences?

Talking about Software Engineers are #1

2006-04-22T21:31:00.000Z

One of my current best sites for career and jobs is the JobSyntax site. It is a new company started by our very own Zoë Goldring and Gretchen Ledgard.

Here is a quote below from their latest blog entry. Really informative

Software Engineers are #1

Team Foundation Server

2006-04-19T20:34:00.000Z

the project i am working at my job is planning to shift to Team Foundation Server. Thus i am looking for the most common questions related to it.
Here are a couple of them.

Is it a good idea to use the same machine as "build machine" and "team foundation server"?

It is not a good idea to make Team Foundation Server machine as build machine for real life deployment (ok for demos/trials etc). The main reason is for debugging build failures etc, many people in org may need access to build machine and that could pose a security threat to the server.

Where all do I need to install the fxcop tool (that came with the VSTS for developer DVD) to enable static analysis in Team Build?

Only build machine.

Over the next few weeks i will collect some more questions and post them on my blog, so as to createa sort of repository for common questions related to Team Foundation Server.

Software as a Service

2006-04-10T20:27:00.000Z

I believe that Software as a Service (SaaS) is the future of the ever expanding software industry. The Software as a Service (SaaS) model differs fundamentally from traditional enterprise application delivery. To successfully provide SaaS to end users, software companies must evaluate nearly every facet of their business: pricing, billing, sales compensation, revenue recognition, code, infrastructure, end user support, and more.
The end users are demanding it and competitors are already providing it, but how do software companies overcome the model, code, and operational issues preventing them from bringing SaaS to market?
One succesfull example is IBM. IBM's Software as Services Showcase provides an online directory that allows customers to search for IBM Business Partner solutions that are available to them as a service. The Showcase includes solutions that span a range of industries, such as retail and insurance, and solution areas, such as compliance and human resources.

Rotor 2.0

2006-04-09T07:17:00.000Z

As part of my University Masters degree, i used Shared Source CLI aka Rotor. I was so fascinated by it, that it has become my favourite area to explore whenever i have time from my busy work schedule. Take a look at the fetures highlighted below.

Features
The Shared Source CLI archive contains the following technologies in source code form:
An implementation of the runtime for the Common Language Infrastructure (ECMA-335).
Compilers that work with the Shared Source CLI for C# (ECMA-334) and JScript.
Development tools for working with the Shared Source CLI such as assembler/disassemblers (ilasm, ildasm), a debugger (cordbg), metadata introspection (metainfo), and other utilities.
The Platform Adaptation Layer (PAL) used to port the Shared Source CLI from Windows XP to other platforms.
Build environment tools (nmake, build, and others).
Test suites used to verify the implementation.
A rich set of sample code and tools for working with the Shared Source CLI.

Now, Rotor 2.0 is out there and is available for download here!(http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8C09FD61-3F26-4555-AE17-3121B4F51D4D&displaylang=en)
Now, when we are writing your CLR 2.0 application, and want to debug into the BCL, we can.

New in this Release

Full support for Generics.
New C# 2.0 features like Anonymous Methods, Anonymous Delegates and Generics
BCL additions.
Lightweight Code Generation (LCG).
Stub-based dispatch.
Numerous bug fixes.

cost benefit analysis of the Composite UI application Block

2006-03-26T11:05:00.000Z

Composite UI application block provides common infrastructure components and a programming model for smart client applications that are composed out of views and business logic that might come from different teams or need to evolve independently. It has been architected considering many a convergence of many patterns observed in large successful customer applications and where the platform and tools are going in the future in this space.
The benefits of using Composite UI application block can be immense, especially considering the infrastructure of it.
It contains:
• WorkItems: a programming abstraction to simplify encapsulating use cases into 'contexts' that have shared state and orchestrating logic and nested recursively
• Plug-in infrastructure: providers for enumerating available modules and loading them into the environment, and orchestration of the application bootstrap
• Shared shell abstractions: a set of interfaces that allow logic to 'share a shell' and to facilitate separation of concerns between UI-intensive shell development and business logic development
o Workspaces - a set of interfaces that specify how to show controls in an a given area or style - such as portal, tabbed, MDI windows, etc
o UI Extension sites - named 'slots' in a shell where controls are to be added such as menus or status bar panes
o Commands - a common way of hooking up multiple UI events to a specific callback inside the application
• Composition infrastructure that helps objects find each other and communicate - such as the ability to share state, auto-wire-up of pub-sub of events
• A service locator/lifetime container/dependency injection++ foundation
o Built on ObjectBuilder - which allows extending the architecture specifying what it means to 'contextualize' an object.
• A reflective architecture that can be explored to see the current state of the application, and a visualization architecture that allows architects and troubleshooters have views that exploit this reflective nature and can show you the internals of the application structure and how it's running while it's live

Moreover the application block is designed to support the development of smart client line-of-business applications such as the ones found in the following scenarios:
• Online transaction processing (OLTP) front-ends, in areas such as stock distribution centres or data entry applications
• Rich client portals to back-end services, such as portals to government services or bank teller applications

• UI intensive information-worker standalone applications, such as those used by call centre staff, IT support desks, or stock traders

The good thing is that all these benefits from the Composite UI application block can be had for free of cost as this is a freely available tool on the Microsoft patterns and practices website. Support is available in terms of forums and user groups who actively contribute and thus highlighting the advantages of using this block as well as troubleshooting guidelines.

Deployment Procedure

2006-03-25T18:12:00.000Z

Introduction
This document describes the deployment procedures for the Project i am currently working on.

Creating a Deployment Project Plan comprises of:
• Creating a project plan outline.
• Deciding the appropriate timeline for the deployment.
• Planning the deployment, as defined in the general MOF guidelines.
• Determining resources.
• Gathering information about the current environment.
• Determining technical considerations and dependencies.

All the above mentioned factors have been considered and reviewed before considering deployment on the development and test servers.

There are currently 2 alternatives to deploy components:

a) Copy the components to the broker sever proxies bin directory (or root) the components will be loaded and registered with the available brokers using the standard Fusion (CLR Loader) policy. This means that the components will be locked for the duration the process is running
b) Copy the components to the path configured as the “Business Component Path” components loaded from this location are shadow copied so they can be replaced, additional the broker server proxy watches for changes to these files and reloads when a new version of the component is deployed to this location.

[NOTE: Do not use option (b) at the current time as there issues which we are currently resolving with this mechanism]

Deployment Process

The deployment process is from the development machines to the test servers is carried out in three steps as mentioned below.
4.1 Deploying the build on local machine and verifying the work

A local instance of Service broker has been installed with the help of Framework team on every development PC.
The main steps involved in deploying the build on the local development Pc are:
• Configuring the ‘Mondial.Common.BrokerServiceHost.exe.config’ file for Service broker, Service Gateway and Data Access Service access.
• Configuring the client Config file for accessing the Service Broker on the appropriate server using the appropriate transport protocol.
• Deploying the relevant BPC’s and all other dependent DLL’s.
• Restarting the Windows Service:
Service Broker (Broker) and
Service Broker (Server) for new server registration files.

Note: If we need to re-deploy the BPCs then, you should stop the services and then copy the BPCs and then re-start the services.

Deploying the build on development server and verifying the work

After successful deployment of work on development machine, the solution is deployed on the development server. All the steps mentioned above for local machine deployment have to be followed in addition to the setting up of the environment for prime entity access.

MQ services have to be setup on the development server. A queue manager has to be created. The current queue manager on development server is: PHX.PHXSG.UAT.QM02
Additionally the local reply queue and clustered request queue has to be configured.

Deploying the Service Broker on test server

Deployment of Service Broker on Test Server is carried out by the Framework team. Only the Broker host is supported on test serer and there are different test servers, different components respectively

Deploying the build on test server and verifying the work

After successful deployment of work on development server, the solution is deployed on the test server. All the steps mentioned above for local machine deployment have to be followed in addition to the setting up of the environment for prime entity access.
For each deployment a MSI (UI installer with Build number) will be handed to test for installation of the client user interface. Test team will use different database for testing.
The MSI contains:

• All application files, in compressed mode.
• All options available through the installation process, when using either a graphical user interface or automatic unattended mode.
• Location of application files.
• User environment settings, such as Start-menu entries and desktop shortcuts and icons.
• Uninstall information.
• Registration requirements, if necessary.
• Other configuration settings required to successfully install and register the application.

Deployment is considered successful only if the client application works as desired on the test servers.

Windows Vista News

2006-02-23T22:49:00.000Z

It's just released and its official.
Microsoft Corp. is giving businesses a preview of Vista, the next version of its flagship Windows operating system. Microsoft now says Vista is now "feature complete," with the release of Vista Build 5308,meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in. Development efforts aren't slowing-the user experience will continue to evolve, bugs will get fixed, performance and compatibility will improve-but the basic shape of the operating system has been solidified, and from here on out we expect to see mostly fine-tuning rather than wholesale changes.

Earlier this year, the Windows SDK team started working on the "Windows Vista Developer Story". This massive 500+ page document provides real content to developers looking to get started writing Windows Vista applications using the new Windows SDK.They have named the document as:

"Making Your Application a Windows Vista Application: The Top Ten Things to Do".

From the developer pint of view, the main features that i am looknig forward to are:
Search, Organize and Visualize in Windows Vista
Security for Applications in Windows Vista,
Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")
and
Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon")

5 careers: Big demand, big pay

2006-02-18T12:24:00.000Z

Recently i came across an article on CNN Money, which mentioned five top jobs in demand at the moment. It says that if you're in one of the jobs listed here, you may be able to negotiate a sweet pay hike for yourself when changing employers. It sounded ineresting and going through the article i found that .NET jobs is among one of the five mentioned.

The List is as follows:

Accounting (CPA designation)
Sales and marketing (healthcare and biomedical fields)
Legal (Intellectual property attorneys specializing in patent law and the legal secretaries)
Technology (.NET Developers)
Manufacturing and engineering (quality and process engineers)

It feels good to see that my main stream (.NET Enterprise Software Development) is one of the most in demand jobs. I hope i improve my skills even further and cash in on this boom.

For the full article check it out here
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes

Deployment Process for .NET applications

2006-02-11T10:40:00.000Z

Long time i havent blogged. Actually i had been really busy with my past wednesday deadline and after that my health was not keeping up.

My dissertation project involved a windows service, an ASP.NET web application and SQL Server 2000 Database. I had to create a single setup which would install my windows service, my ASP.NET web site and SQL Server 2000 database on to the server machine. It is pretty straightforward to create seperate setups for windows service and ASP.NET web app. But a single setup handling all the stuff is a bit tricky issue.
After more than two days of research and fiddling around with different setup projects and merge modules, i found out that i had to create a custom installer class and provide the output of it to my setup project. It was a great learnnig expereince.

Now while i am working as a .NET Developer in the company, i also handle the deployment of the software and creating the installers so that the managers can install it on thier machine and analyse as to what is the current project stage.

Recently i have been assigned a new task to smoothen the deplyment process and come up with astrategy and a process to carry out effective and hassle free deployment process for over 500 machines some of which are running on Windows 2000, some on Windows XP and a few on Windows Server 2003 and deploying those applications efficiently and reliably throughout the company environment.

As i research more about the best ways to handle all the dependencies realted to depolyment and frame up an effective solution for the deployment process, i will be posting and sharing my expereinces with all of you here on this blog.

Consideration of Time Zone in new Logging Application block

2006-01-23T22:04:00.000Z

While working on a project around 3 months back, it was once a requirement for me to correlate logging timestamps across timezones and to deal appropriately with the transition in and out of daylight savings time.

I just came to know from Tom Hollanders blog that the new Logging Application block of the Enterprise Library changes the LogEntry.TimeStamp property from being a local time to a UTC (aka GMT) time, which i think is great.
Check it out in the new Enterprise Library 2006 for .NET Framework 2.0.

Essence Pattern

2006-01-23T18:17:00.000Z

My Blog readers would know that for past 4 months I have been working as a professional Software Developer.
Recently we came across a tricky situation. Let me explain the scenario first.

We make use of IBM’s Insurance Application Architecture (IAA). Not many people have heard of IAA. Briefly, IBM Insurance Application Architecture includes a business model; a design model of components, interfaces and messages; a generic design framework for product definition and agreement administration; and design models for the creation of data warehouses. Integrates with legacy systems from different platforms to leverage your previous investments and is compatible with widely-used design tools and methodologies, supporting open standards-based technologies.
In our project, the Business Process Components make call to business components which are part of the IAA solution.
Problem:
The parameters required on individual BPC/BC are passed in main calling BPC operation. This results in the calling BPC operation becoming too parameter specific.
Design Requirement:
Cannot View one BPC operation requirement from another.
Need to populate required parameters independently.

In simple terms, we cannot change the IAA method signature, so we need to pass in the parameters in some other way.
Here in comes the Essence Pattern: The Required parameters at various component levels need to be pushed as attributes on calling BPC. i.e. using Essence Pattern.

Essentially the Essence Pattern provides a way to enforce users of an object to enter valid properties for that object. We can use for our purpose by tweaking it a bit and verifying that only the appropriate parameters are passed to the Business Components and the other parameters are pushed as attributes.

There are some advantages and disadvantages to be had from this:
Advantages
1) Main BPC operation will not be parameter specific
2) Can expose multiple output parameters
Limitation
1) Client Creation of object out of design control
2) Cannot Enforce Compulsory/Optional attributes on class
3) Also order of attribute execution

In the present scenario it solves our purpose and provides an elegant solution. This was my first design pattern implementation at the company. I have done quite a few for my personal projects, but never before at the company level. And tell you what I enjoyed every bit of it.

For your reference:
Essence Pattern Paper:
http://jerry.cs.uiuc.edu/~plop/plop98/final_submissions/P10.pdf

Essence Pattern C# Implementation:
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/essencepattern.asp

Creational Design Patterns

2005-12-28T10:48:00.000Z

One of the goals of object-oriented design is to delegate responsibility among different objects. This kind of partitioning is good since it encourages Encapsulation and Delegation. Creational design patterns are based on these above principles. They can be further classified as:

Abstract Factory Creates an instance of several families of classes
Builder Separates object construction from its representation
Factory Method Creates an instance of several derived classes
Prototype A fully initialized instance to be copied or cloned
Singleton A class of which only a single instance can exist

Design Patterns in C#

2005-12-23T10:48:00.000Z

I saw a book on the desk of my boss who is also a software architect. The book is called Design Patterns in C#. It is a really good read. According to me any software developer nowadays needs to be well aware of the different architecture patterns, because only if you are aware of the various architecture design, you can truly appreciate as to what enterprise software development is all about. With good architecture design principles you can wonders with your coding skills.

The Gang of Four (GoF) patterns are generally considered the foundation for all other patterns. They are categorized in three groups:
Creational,
Structural and
Behavioral.

In my coming posts, i would discuss each category in detail. These are the basic design patterns, which every developer should be aware of atleast to some extent.

Who said this about programming? (Another good entry from joel's website)

2005-12-19T13:36:00.000Z

The task of instructing [a programmable machine] could never become tedious, because given a tedious task, there would automatically be the interesting task of instructing the machine in the correct way to perform the tedious task for you.

I think its like:

"Drinking tequila can never become tedious because the task of trying to remember what the heck you did while drunk will always be interesting."

Does Refactoring Make Unit Tests Irrelevant?

2005-12-19T12:25:00.000Z

I came across a very nice discussion on joel's website (www.joelonsoftware.com).

Argument 1:
I like the idea of using unit tests to help ensure that adding new code or refactoring old code doesn't introduce bugs.
I want to start using the idea, but I can see a problem...
When I'm refactoring, I'll probably be rearranging the "units" of software. If my unit tests refer to the old "units", haven't I just broken all of my tests? So I now have to write new unit tests for my refactored code? New code to test new code -how does that help prevent bugs?
What am I missing here?

Argument 2:
Refactoring as I understand it is rebuilding code within the same unit. Such as rewriting a search function from one algorithm to another that at least in theory is more efficient based on the needs of the application.
However if we ARE changing how units are organized it would have a good chance of forcing a rewrite on unit tests. But then again being forced to acknowledge such a fundemental system change is important as it tends to imply we may be about to break other parts of your application that assume a piece of code is in one particular file/class/etc.

Arguemnt 3:
You'll be writing and fixing tests as you refactor so there is no time when you are writing all new tests or fixing all old tests. You are implementing small chunks at a time and creating/fixing unit tests as you go.

Refactoring requires unit tests. If your code changes breaks the test, then the test has done its job to tell you you have not refactored correctly.

To put it simply:
Refactoring makes Unit Tests ESSENTIAL.

Long time no blog

2005-12-16T13:58:00.000Z

Its been long, really long that i havent blogged. I had written a blog last time on 29th Spetember. A lto has happened since then. The biggest thing is that i have got a job. Yes i am working as a .NET professional now. Its been more than two months and tell you what i am just loving my job. I am working as a .NET Developer. Christmas is approaching now. It would be fun.
Would update all of my blog readers later in detail.

Have a nice weekend everybody
Ankit

.NET Remoting Interview Questions

2005-09-29T19:02:00.000Z

Came across a MSDn blog with these questions. They are quite useful.

What’s a Windows process?
It’s an application that’s running and had been allocated memory.

What’s typical about a Windows process in regards to memory allocation?
Each process is allocated its own block of available RAM space, no process can access another process’ code or data. If the process crashes, it dies alone without taking the entire OS or a bunch of other applications down.

Explain what relationship is between a Process, Application Domain, and Application?
A process is an instance of a running application. An application is an executable on the hard drive or network. There can be numerous processes launched of the same application (5 copies of Word running), but 1 process can run just 1 application.

What are possible implementations of distributed applications in .NET?
.NET Remoting and ASP.NET Web Services. If we talk about the Framework Class Library, noteworthy classes are in System.Runtime.Remoting and System.Web.Services.

What are the consideration in deciding to use .NET Remoting or ASP.NET Web Services?
Remoting is a more efficient communication exchange when you can control both ends of the application involved in the communication process. Web Services provide an open-protocol-based exchange of informaion. Web Services are best when you need to communicate with an external organization or another (non-.NET) technology.

What’s a proxy of the server object in .NET Remoting?
It’s a fake copy of the server object that resides on the client side and behaves as if it was the server. It handles the communication between real server object and the client object. This process is also known as marshaling.

What are remotable objects in .NET Remoting?
Remotable objects are the objects that can be marshaled across the application domains. You can marshal by value, where a deep copy of the object is created and then passed to the receiver. You can also marshal by reference, where just a reference to an existing object is passed.

What are channels in .NET Remoting?
Channels represent the objects that transfer the other serialized objects from one application domain to another and from one computer to another, as well as one process to another on the same box. A channel must exist before an object can be transferred.

What security measures exist for .NET Remoting in System.Runtime.Remoting?
None. Security should be taken care of at the application level. Cryptography and other security techniques can be applied at application or server level.

What is a formatter?
A formatter is an object that is responsible for encoding and serializing data into messages on one end, and deserializing and decoding messages into data on the other end.

Choosing between HTTP and TCP for protocols and Binary and SOAP for formatters, what are the trade-offs?
Binary over TCP is the most effiecient, SOAP over HTTP is the most interoperable.

What’s SingleCall activation mode used for?
If the server object is instantiated for responding to just one single request, the request should be made in SingleCall mode.

What’s Singleton activation mode?
A single object is instantiated regardless of the number of clients accessing it. Lifetime of this object is determined by lifetime lease.

How do you define the lease of the object?
By implementing ILease interface when writing the class code.

Can you configure a .NET Remoting object via XML file?
Yes, via machine.config and application level .config file (or web.config in ASP.NET). Application-level XML settings take precedence over machine.config.

How can you automatically generate interface for the remotable object in .NET with Microsoft tools?
Use the Soapsuds tool.

Basic C# fundamentals

2005-09-29T17:49:00.000Z

In today blog post i want to discuss various general C# terms, which are useful for any .NET related interview.

Remember C# does not support multiple inheritance. But yes .NET does support multiple interface inheritance. It means that a class can implement more than one interface. The methods declared in an interface are implicitly abstract. If a class implements an interface, it becomes mandatory for the class to override all the methods declared in the interface, otherwise the derived class would become abstract.

e.g. Inheritance
class MyNewClass : MyBaseClass

Can you prevent your class from being inherited by another class?
Yes. The keyword “sealed” will prevent the class from being inherited.

Can you allow a class to be inherited, but prevent the method from being over-ridden?
Yes. Just leave the class public and make the method sealed.

What’s an abstract class?
A class that cannot be instantiated. An abstract class is a class that must be inherited and have the methods overridden. An abstract class is essentially a blueprint for a class without any implementation.

What is an interface class?
Interfaces, like classes, define a set of properties, methods, and events. But unlike classes, interfaces do not provide implementation. They are implemented by classes, and defined as separate entities from classes.

What’s the difference between an interface and abstract class?
In an interface class, all methods are abstract - there is no implementation. In an abstract class some methods can be concrete. In an interface class, no accessibility modifiers are allowed. An abstract class may have accessibility modifiers.

What is the difference between a Struct and a Class?
Structs are value-type variables and are thus saved on the stack, additional overhead but faster retrieval. Another difference is that structs cannot inherit.

How does C# achieve polymorphism?
Polymorphism is also achieved through interfaces. Like abstract classes, interfaces also describe the methods that a class needs to implement. The difference between abstract classes and interfaces is that abstract classes always act as a base class of the related classes in the class hierarchy. For example, consider a hierarchy-car and truck classes derived from four-wheeler class; the classes two-wheeler and four-wheeler derived from an abstract class vehicle. So, the class 'vehicle' is the base class in the class hierarchy. On the other hand dissimilar classes can implement one interface. For example, there is an interface that compares two objects. This interface can be implemented by the classes like box, person and string, which are unrelated to each other.

What does the keyword “virtual” declare for a method or property?
The method or property can be overridden.

How is method overriding different from method overloading?
When overriding a method, you change the behavior of the method for the derived class. Overloading a method simply involves having another method with the same name within the class.

Can you declare an override method to be static if the original method is not static?
No. The signature of the virtual method must remain the same. (Note: Only the keyword virtual is changed to keyword override)

How is method overriding different from method overloading?
When overriding a method, you change the behavior of the method for the derived class. Overloading a method simply involves having another method with the same name within the class.

Can you declare an override method to be static if the original method is not static?
No. The signature of the virtual method must remain the same. (Note: Only the keyword virtual is changed to keyword override)

SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 UK Launch

2005-09-27T18:32:00.000Z

The launch of Visual studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 in UK
Check this out:

Joke

2005-09-27T18:30:00.000Z

I just came across a joke regrading programmers on dotnetjunkies.

The girl gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover:

"Can't you see the warning written on the cigarette packet,

Smoking is dangerous to your health?"

The boy replies back

"Darling, I am a programmer, we don't worry about

WARNINGS, we only worry about ERRORS!

By skiff

Test Driven Development in .NET - NUnit forms and NunitASP

2005-09-26T08:50:00.000Z

Continuing the discussion further on Test Driven Development, I came across two tools just a month back. And yes they are NUnitforms and NunitASP.

NUnitASP
NUnit is an indispensable tool. I use it as part of test driven development for all the applications i develop.But testing the the .aspx pages themselves is a problem. How can you test that the UI reacts to the user correctly? That the postback events happen in the right order? That the correct next page is loaded after the user completes the page? Testing these things requires that your code is running inside the ASP.NET worker process. Your pages need access to the HTTPContext, the Request and Response objects, everything else that ASP.NET provides them at runtime. If you attempt to test your compiled .aspx pages directly from the NUnit test runner, none of them will even load, let alone pass your tests.
Ref: Testing ASP.NET Applications with NUnitASP and NUnit. The server side.net

NUnitAsp is a tool for automatically testing ASP.NET web pages. NUnitAsp is for unit testing ASP.NET code-behind only. It's meant for programmers, not QA teams, and it's not very good for QA-style acceptance tests. It only tests server-side logic. JavaScript and other client-side code is ignored. But if you're using ASP.NET, it's an essential part of your programmers' toolset.

NUnitAsp is just an assembly, it'll work with all .NET languages, so yes it will work with VB.NET.

Controls supported in version 1.5.1:

System.Web.UI.WebControls
Button
CheckBox
DataGrid
DropDownList
ImageButton
Label
LinkButton
ListBox
Panel
RadioButton
TextBox
UserControl
ValidationSummary

System.Web.UI.HtmlControls
HtmlAnchor
HtmlInputCheckBox

NUnitForms
NUnitForms is an NUnit extension for unit and acceptance testing of Windows Forms applications. Support is already built in for Buttons, Labels, TabControls, and Context Menus, with many others coming soon. It is very easy to add support for additional types of controls.

NUnitForms also provides a Recorder application that will Record your interactions with a Windows Forms class and write a Unit Test for you that duplicates your actions. You can perform asserts during this process by right-clicking on your controls and selecting the property to assert.

Currently i am trying to use these tools and in my next blog entry, i would post some code to show as to how it works.

Test Driven Development in .NET - NUnit

2005-09-23T10:00:00.000Z

I heard about Test Driven Developemnt for the first time when i was working on my coursework to develop an instant messenger back in October 2004. One of the requirements for coursework completion was to have unit tests for the piece of code to be written using NUnit. Thus i heard the word NUnit.

There are several articles available on thw web about Test driven developemnt and NUnit.

In this blog post, I am going to summarize my expereince and what i have learned till now regarding Test Driven Development.

The first question is
"What is Test Driven Development?"

According to me, it is a three step process:
- Write test,
- Write code,
- Refactor.
Putting it in another way:
Instead of designing a module, then coding it and then testing it, we turn the process around and do the testing first. The typical programming sequence is something like this:
- Write a test.
- Run the test. It fails to compile because the code you're trying to test doesn't even exist yet! (This is the same thing as failing.)
- Write a bare-bones stub to make the test compile.
- Run the test. It should fail. (If it doesn't, then the test wasn't very good.)
- Implement the code to make the test pass.
- Run the test. It should pass. (If it doesn't, back up one step and try again.)
- Start over with a new test!
(Ref:Test-Driven Development in .NET By Peter Provost)

Reasons for Test Driven Development (TDD)
A unit test provides an example of what a piece of code is supposed to do. It gives a much clearer idea as to how the code is executing, once a particular set of input is provided. Going through the code in the debugger only tells us what it is doing, not what it is supposed to do. Moreover when we fix any bug in the code or if we change even a single line of code, we can never be sure as to how that change would affect the rest of the code. Many times it happens that one fix leads to another bug. In this scenario unit tests can be very useful, because they allow checking to analyze if we broke something else in the code. Also Test Driven Development leads to the overall improvement of the design of the application, because it makes the developer think right form the starting point as to how the application should behave and thus how should it be designed.

What are Unit tests?
“A unit test verifies that a function or set of functions "honors its contract" - in other words, that the function(s) under test meet the requirements. Unit tests inspect both black boxes and white boxes.”

NUnit test Framework
NUnit is an application designed to facilitate unit testing. It consists of both a command line and Window's interface, allowing it to be used both interactively and in automated test batches or integrated with the build process.

Error handling in Stored Procedures

2005-09-22T14:26:00.000Z

I had an intrview today and the interviewer asked me about Error handling in SQL Server 2000. I am afraid to say that i could not answer as i had ignored this aspect for a long time. So today i decided to get my head around Error handling related to stored procedures.

I have used the help of article

http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=2463

There are two type of errors in SQL Server: fatal and non-fatal.

Fatal errors cause a procedure to abort processing and terminate the connection with the client application.

e.g. The SELECT in the procedure references a table that does not exist, which produces a fatal error.

Non-fatal errors do not abort processing a procedure or affect the connection with the client application. When a non-fatal error occurs within a procedure, processing continues on the line of code that follows the one that caused the error.

The actions that cause a fatal error are not well documented. Each error has an associated severity level that is a value between 0?25. The errors with a severity level of 20 or above are all fatal, but once we get below this value there is no well-defined rule as to which errors are fatal. In truth, though, worrying about which errors are fatal is a bit useless because there is no code we can implement that will allow you us to handle them gracefully.

So how do we implement error handling code for these errors?

@@ERROR
The @@ERROR system function is used to implement error handling code. It contains the error ID produced by the last SQL statement executed during a client's connection. When a statement executes successfully, @@ERROR contains 0. To determine if a statement executes successfully, an IF statement is used to check the value of the function immediately after the target statement executes.

IF @@ERROR <>0
BEGIN
PRINT 'Error Occured'

RAISERROR

The RAISERROR statement is used to produce an ad hoc error message or to retrieve a custom message that is stored in the sysmessages table.We can use this statement with the error handling code to implement custom error messages in our applications.

To go into more depth, we can also do error handling using cursors.
Refer:

http://www.sommarskog.se/error-handling-I

LINQ.Its Amazing

2005-09-21T11:08:00.000Z

I just came across the LINQ project two days back. Though did not have much time to try it out, but just by reading about it has got me really excited.
LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query.
LINQ project provides the ability to add general purpose query facility to the .NET framework.It can be used to query relational data sotres without leaving the compile time environment of the programming language being used.Thus we can make use of the existing CLR types to acress SQL Database directly frm or C# code. Wow!!!
Read more about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/linqprojectovw.asp

Also worth watching is the Anders Hejlsberg interview on Channel 9 regarding LINQ:
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114680

2005-08-28T15:48:00.000Z

Hello Folks!!!

This is my first entry