The site StackOverflow.com is available for a few months, but I just recently discovered it. It is created by Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Jarrod Dixon, Geoff Dalgas, Jeremy Kratz, and Brent Ozar.
The idea behind a site is a Question / Answer forum for all things development related. Not language specific at all. Definitely recommended place to visit.
I’ve finally rebuilt my PC. The installation Vista install was relatively painless, except for one minor snag. When I booted from the DVD Drive, and deleted my old partition, Vista refused to install with a message: “Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets it's criteria for installation.” Ohh Sh*t… Well a quick search on Google (using a laptop), provided a solution. Removing USB from the boot-up sequence in BIOS settings resolved this problem.
Before rebuilding the machine, I’ve spent a few hours backing up data from my desktop to DVDs. However, after reinstallation, I found out that I missed to backup my music collect. I don’t have that much, only 8 gigs or so, but it is still not something that I would want to miss. So here’s were Mozy comes in. I subscribe to Mozy’s online backup solution (http://www.mozy.com) For 4.95 a month, it provides a complete “Set it and Forget it” backup solution. After my machine was back up and running. I logged into the Mozy website. Selected “Restore using Web”, and chose my music folder. In about an hour, Mozy sent me an email notifying my that my restore files was ready. The email contained 3 links to file downloads: 3, 3, and 2GB files. About 1 hour for download, simple extract to the c:\ and I am back having my full music collection restored.
Mozy provides a pretty neat interface, very simple, yet pretty powerful. Ability to create multiple backup sets, bandwidth throttling, explorer integration (for Backup and Restore functions). Professional version provides even more functionality. And if all that didn’t get you excited, guess this: All that functionality is available FREE for up to 2GB of space. Yep. Completely Free. So check it it out: http://www.mozy.com
I've just encountered a blog entry on managing offshore consultants: http://blogs.msdn.com/techleaders/archive/2008/12/18/how-to-manage-remote-employees-part-1.aspx
At my workplace we are pretty big into using offshore consultants. As a matter of fact, half of my team is offshore.
We use a Globant for an offshore resource provider (http://www.globant.com) In two words: Highly recommended. Our interaction with the Globant team is somewhat different then what I am used to with an offshore development team.
There are always certain inefficiencies of working remote, some of them I can relate to (I work away from the main office most days of the week). However, there are always ways around them.
Offshore consulting is not something to be afraid of. Most people I know, work for companies that are split across multiple locations, sometimes across the street, but sometimes across the country or the world. Who knows, your business partner might be considering you "offshore"
Update: Interesting set of answers on the Stack Overflow : Offshoring: does it EVER work? (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/502995/offshoring-does-it-ever-work/503037#503037)
Recently my laptop had been spinning its hard drive a bit too much and I thought to my self "when was the last time I defragmented?" Apparently too long ago:
I have Diskeeper Lite (a free version) - and ran that overnight. The picture became slightly better, but not quite what I wanted:
Its very hard to defragment the harddrive with less then 20% free space available. So after removing some old files, and freeing up some space, 2nd run was much better:
Running it for 3rd time did not help much, so for now I am leaving it at that.
Overall.... The machine definitely seems faster. Lesson: Defragment regulargly. I'll update the post in a few days to note if the performance stayed good.
I am fairly new to Eclipse, but the more I use it, the more I like it.
My latest discovery is how efficient it is to use of shortcuts to find "stuff" in Eclipse. The lookups are incredibly fast and are very useful.
There is Open Type (CTRL+SHIFT+T) and start typing
Open Method (CTRL+O) and start typing
The typing part is critical. It is available even in preferences setup.
I really wish this functionality would exist out of the box in Visual Studio.
I am using GoogleMaps on my blackberry curve. I don't have a GPS, however, I find the tower based location pretty usefull. Now I am in Paris, and for kicks I tried to use the future here. Well, to my surprise, Google Maps correctly found me in the middle of Paris with accuracy of 1700 meters. That's pretty damn close. This app rocks!!! If you still don't have it, get it at http://maps.google.com/mobile/
CAB defines a very clean way of defining a translator for converting objects from one type to another. A typical use for this is to convert from an "wire" object a business object and back. This is done by creating an EntityMapperTranslator. Defining two methods: BusinessToService and ServiceToBusiness. And then registering the translator in the IEntityTranslatorService.
Often, the business object identical or nearly identical to the wire object. The code below will copy every property from the SourceType to the TargetType. Of course, this can be used outside of the EntityMapperTranslator as well for the same purpose.
class TypeTranslator : EntityMapperTranslator<SourceType, TargetType> { protected override TargetType BusinessToService(IEntityTranslatorService service, SourceType value) { TargetType target = new TargetType(); foreach (PropertyInfo pi in value.GetType().GetProperties()) { PropertyInfo newPi = target.GetType().GetProperty(pi.Name); if (newPi != null) { if (service.CanTranslate(newPi.PropertyType, pi.PropertyType)) newPi.SetValue(target, service.Translate(newPi.PropertyType, pi.GetValue(value, null)), null); else newPi.SetValue(target, pi.GetValue(value, null), null); } } return target; } }
Continuing with my adventures in porting java code to .Net, I am dealing with moving JUnit unit tests to .NET. My first move thought was to convert to Microsoft Unit Testing framework. However, after spending quite a bit of time to get it to work, I gave up and switched to NUnit.
Two things that are NOT supported by the Microsoft framework and forced me to switch
Both are fully supported by NUnit.
For the last month I've spent as much time writing Java code as C# code. And its definitely been a great learning experiences. Even though the core languages are very much alike, and you can usually find a function in .NET that corresponds to Java and the other way around, I've spent quite a bit of time yesterday trying something that should have been completely trivial.
The Problem:
having a Date variable loadDate that includes Date and Time, create two variables startDate and endDate where StartDate is the portion of the loadDate, and endDate is the startDate + 1 day
C# Code:
DateTime loadDate = DateTime.Now; DateTime startDate = loadDate.Date; DateTime endDate = startDate.AddDays(1);
Java Code#
GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar( loadDate.getYear() + 1900, loadDate.getMonth(), loadDate.getDate()); Date startDate = cal.getTime(); cal.add(Calendar.DATE, 1); Date endDate = cal.getTime();
Why is the Date.getYear() function returning 108 for a year 2008? What is the logic behind that? Are the Java developers afraid of running out of integer values?
Why the Calendar class supplies the clearDate() function, but no clearTime() function?
Why I can't dd Dates the way I can other classes?
Why the Calendar.add() function doesn't return a result instead of replacing the internal value, the way other classes do?
Why is this not documented in the Date class?
I had to search through an audit table to find times when the value changes in a specific field. Considering an audit table
DateModified DateTime
ID varchar()
Quantity decimal
Price decimal
I wanted to find the rows when Quantity changed for the same ID.
I've been able to accomplish that using the ROW_NUMBER function of SQL 2005
Here's the query:
select Row_Number() OVER (PARTITION BY ID Order BY ID, DateModified) as RowID, DateModified, Quantity, ID INTO #TempData from AuditTable select a.ID, b.DateModified, a.Quantity as FromValue, b.Quantity as ToValue from #TempData a inner join #TempData b on a.ID = b.ID and a.RowID = b.RowID-1 and a.Quantity != b.Quantity order by 1, 2 drop table #TempData
A friend of mine started a blog and started posting nice support entries.
http://yunetasblog.blogspot.com
I came cross an interesting blog entry that said that Windows Server 2008 will have SP1 label already applied to it. Take a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/iainmcdonald/archive/2008/02/15/windows-server-2008-is-called-sp1-adventures-in-doing-things-right.aspx
Now, how will this effect people's rule not to install a Microsoft server, until SP1 is released (or did the rule implement this version scheme due to that rule :)
Firefox team released a public Beta 3 of the new version of Firefox 3 browser. Here are some first impressions
Some minor annoyances
Sara Ford's Tips Blog is an excellent source of tips. This one especially helpful for me.
Sara Ford's WebLog : Did you know... You can use Shift+ESC to close a tool window - #142
I stumbled upon an excellent utility for WCF Testing that comes with Visual Studio 2008 - WCFTestClient.
The tool is an simple way to test WCF clients HTTP and TCP bindings. Some things are not supported, however, for basic WCF Testing, this definitely beats the old ASMX test page.
Note: Also check out the WCFSvcHost utility from Visual Studio to host an arbitrary WCF Service.
I finally got a chance to release a binary of the latest Query ExPlus v.2.0.2.8
I didn't put time into the project for a while, however, some developers in the community did, and I'd like to extend my appreciation to those guys.
The new functionality since last version is:
The project is still a one executable 172KB in size. The only prerequisite is the .NET 2.0 framework
You can access the project homepage on Source Forge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/queryexplus
The direct download link for the release is
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=176790&package_id=206668&release_id=567994
The download is available as either compressed executable or compressed source
One of the requests that I've received from other developers is the ability to use SCSF for developing a module without including the shell in the solution. We develop a large number of modules independently in different groups and having the shell be a part of every module was getting to be a problem.
The only issue that I was getting with getting this to work was that SCSF guidance package would fail in ViewTemplateCS when I would right click on a folder and tried to add a new view to the project.
To solve the issue, I was made a small tweak to the source in the ViewTemplateReferenceCS.cs. (The code comes with the SCSF, however, you will have to install it separately after the SCSF is installed) The culprit is the function ContainsRequiredReferences(Project project) Specifically the call to ContainsReference(project, prjCommon.Name)
Since the common project is not in the solution, the call failed with Null Reference exception. All I had to do was to change the last line of the function to be ContainsReference(project, "Infrastructure.Interface"); Then recompile the GuidancePackage solution and place the Microsoft.Practices.SmartClientFactory.GuidancePackage.dll into the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Smart Client Factory\Guidance Package folder.
I've encountered a problem trying fix the WCF / WPF Visual Studio 2005 Integration components after I've installed Visual Studio 2008.
Installing a VS 2008 will install .NET 3.0 SP1 and remove the installation of .NET 3.0. When trying to install the WCF / WPF Extension, installation display's a message
Setup has detected that a prerequisite is missing. To use Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP you must have the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime installed. Please install the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime and restart setup
You really can't install .NET 3.0 since a newer version (.NET 3.0 SP1) is already installed.
I found a solution on the MS Forums http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2550726&SiteID=1
It involves either going creating a registry key to full the installers into thinking that SP1 is installed. To fix the issue, add the following value to the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{15095BF3-A3D7-4DDF-B193-3A496881E003}] "DisplayName"="Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0"
Thanks Erich for the solution.
Note: I got a comment that this can also be forced using command line: msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1
Thanks
