Process owner

Some people own the process they are using, the others are owned by the process. It is especially sad when the people who invented the process in the first place start being owned by it.

QTP license blues

After a few times when QTP refused to find a license server I finally found a solution: in Windows firewall you need to open UDP port 5093.

Evangelists

There are so many Microsoft evangelists now, so I started wondering if there is also a Microsoft seminary.

AquaLogic® BPM

AquaLogic® BPM seems to be way more advanced workflow engine than Microsoft WF. In particular it is designed to work for human workflow, which Microsoft WF is not.

Typemock

If you have $450 per developer to spare consider buying TypeMock Isolator. It is especially useful when writing unit tests for a legacy system that is not well-designed. It is interesting to see how you can make sense of the spaghetti code by mocking everything: public methods, private methods, etc. Of course before that you should get ReSharper for much cheaper...

How to avoid session expiration

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001100.html

Create a background JavaScript process in the browser that sends regular heartbeats to the server. Regenerate a new cookie with timed expiration, say, every 5 or 10 minutes.

VS2008

How is Visual Studio 2008 improving developer's productivity if it is twice slower than Visual Studio 2005?

VS2008 web projects

I was so happy when in VS2005 the web projects did not require any virtual directory to be set up. This allowed me to be working on multiple branches of the same web applications. In VS2008 we are back to the old stuff of requiring that the physical directory should match the virtual directory specified in the project file. WHY? This thing does not make any sense to me!

Web Client Software Factory

http://www.codeplex.com/websf

I have an impression that this was called something like "Composite application block" or something, because I tried it a year ago. At that time it impressed me with complexity. Did not quite fit into what Microsoft is trying to sell as "Software Factories". We'll see if some of the shortcomings are addressed in this incarnation.

CI Factory

Wow! Continuous integration out of the box. Everything integrated! Just install and configure it! CI Factory

What is happening at Microsoft?

Microsoft promoting FireBug: extension to Firefox. Weird.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337891.aspx

Why can't I throws an exception in .Net?

I used to belong to the camp that says that throwsing exception in Java is useless and you would rather not catch any exception until in the outer program catching all exceptions. Now working on the code I see a lot of random "catch all" statements that were originally meant to catch only OracleException or ParseException, but eventually that knowledge was forgotten and we started also swallowing other exceptions that we did not intend to do in the beginning. Thus if there is a problem in the code I cannot diagnose it until I start debugging it.

Instead if, like in Java, the methods were throwsing the exceptions forcing the client methods to catch them or to throws them further the developer's task would be much easier figuring out what exceptions need to be caught or rethrown.

Get Your Database Under Version Control

Great post:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001050.html

TFS 2005 installation problems

While installing TFS 2005 you may get many error messages during the system health check. Some of the messages may be quite misleading. To find out more details you can open a file called hcpackage.xml (in the folders at, dt or atdt) and find the error message. The file also has WMI queries that are being executed to determine if an error condition exists. Sometimes there are multiple WMI queries that result in a single error message, so you have a much better chance to troubleshoot the problem and resolve the installation issue. You can also try to edit the file and remove the WMI if your environment cannot conform to the TFS 2005 requirements.

Unit test generator

Just an idea: what if we had the software that would automatically generate unit tests for all success scenarios? It would work like this:
1. Attach to the running process as a debugger
2. The user would use the application to test all success scenarios
3. The generator program would record all the method invocations with all the parameters.
4. After the application that is being debugged exits the generator program would use the information about methods invocation and generate NUnit tests.

Object-oriented design

The goal of object-oriented design is not only to reduce dependency, but also to remove ambiguity.For example, using DataSet as a universal data transfer object definitely reduces dependency, but increases ambiguity a lot, requiring you to understand the non-documented contract of what data should be in the data set and what do they represent. By using strongly-typed objects you document the contract and reduce ambiguity.

Here is the strong point of the strongly typed languages vs. dynamic languages. The contracts in the strongly typed languages are usually more pronounced. Unit tests can compensate for the missing contract details but cannot themselves become a part of the object contract.

Find all files that contain 'something'

In PowerShell

ls -r | ? {select-string $_ -patt something}

Exam 70-529 training kit

The training kit is written quite poorly with a lot of typos and mistakes. Some of the examples are only given in VB.Net. What is most exciting (and funny) are the "words of wisdom" of the book:

"It is nearly impossible to write more than a few lines of code without there being some type of error in the execution of the code" (page 239)

"You should always expect the unexpected" (page 242).

Delayed Load

Cool technique for delay loading is provided at http://www.codeproject.com/Ajax/DelayedContentLoading.asp. Just use UpdatePanel, Timer and MultiView controls.

PageDefrag

I must admit that PageDefrag does make a lot of difference in omputer performance.