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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Really good article i read today.

The master strategy by Microsoft

(Mis)Uses of Technology

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

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

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

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

When Your Need Is Speed

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.