Chathuranga Implements Blogger

How many times you've noticed i18n/L10n understood and skipped without looking further ?

2014-04-23T11:14:00.001-07:00

Working on Internationalization for an application is not something we do everyday, or rather worry that much. When ever we get the requirement, we check on how to apply it to our applications on the specific technology stack we are currently working on and proceed with the best approach. The two words we come across on this are mainly i18n and L10n. But have you ever wondered why would we use these words.

Here's a quick tip and little more details for the curious one.

Microsoft taking control of Skype

2013-11-18T09:19:00.001-08:00

Starting from few weeks back I have been getting a warning message when my Skype extension client application getting started. And i got to know the bad news, when I checked what it is all about, that Microsoft has decided to close down the nice little gem came with Skype Desktop client, the Desktop API.

What microsoft calims is that it's for the tehcnology advancement, but a real question raises whether a technology advancement should be dropping features, whether there's a point if an advancement makes such limitations.

It seems community has taken steps to atleast try correcting this, and seems to have resulted somewhat in the favour of the Desktop API features, Chat still going away, call recording and device compatibility to stay for now.

So all in all, this may be the end of a lot of innovative ideas and missing peices not provided by Skype itself. Including my own tool that I used to love using, SkypePop - Skype Notifications Enhanced.

Personally I hate seing skype messages come in with the Skpe highligthed on the taskbar, not knowing the message until I have to do several clicks to see what the message is. So my extension client was helping me to respond with the minimum effort while working on something else. So it seems I'll be remembering Microsoft for applying this restriction everytime I have to do these extra clicks to read a Skype message starting from December 2013.

Slow Cheetah to the rescue in .Net application deployments

2013-02-20T08:10:00.001-08:00

Managing deployments of .Net components into different environments is not going to be that easy if we are going to rely on manual editing of config files after deployment. Web.config Transformations is an official feature to support this but it's lacking the support for other .Net project types as well as it's not that a developer friendly mechanism.

Recently when I was looking to use config transformations to manage publishing .Net components into different environments (to avoiding the possible mistakes in manual config editing), this nice extension came up on the search results, which was a life saver with its support for other project types as well as the nice "Preview" feature.

SlowCheetah - XML Transforms

Avoid developers miss using ASP.Net Session

2012-12-14T08:45:00.001-08:00

ASP.Net is a powerfull framwork and also it is one of the best in terms of developer friendliness. It has been identified as such developer friendly because of the set of features which are readily available to the developer. Out of the vast collection of such features ASP.Net Session should be one of the leading features that's being miss-used by the developers. Even though the feature is there, one of the guide lines I follow and mentor others to follow is strctly restrict on using the Session object in ASP.Net. Rules of thumb for using a Session variable should be, to ask your self whether it doesn't change through out a users's web session (the variable that you are going to use). If the asnwer is yes it is a better candidate to use as a Session variable, but if not you'll have to seriaously re-consider.

It's not just us miss using the ASP.Net, even Microsoft too miss use it (although they woud have reason to explain). Here's a post of mine related to one such situation, SQL Server Reporting Services using "our" Session state.

That being said, one of the way's to better manage the ASP.Net Session in a project is to access ASP.Net Session using a facade or an adapter pattern. Here is a nice article on the facade pattern usage for it. Even if we follow this type of a facade pattern to access ASP.Net Session, yet some developpers tend to avoid it and directly access it through the ASP.Net Page classes Session property, and work with magic strings and all sort of bad things. Looking for a simple solution for this lead me to below workarround just to avoid using Session property directly in ASP.Net Pages. I know this is not purly inline with Liskov substitution principle, no stricly avoid usage at compile time, but serves the purpose through the use of a PageBase.

ReviewPal available on Visual Studio 2012 !

2012-10-06T21:54:00.001-07:00

It's been months, the Visual Stuio 2012 release was out. But I couldn't get my hands on to it with the busy line of work.

People out there have not only started playing around with it, but have started to really use it with all their plug-ins, extensions. As with everyone, no one want's to leave their dev toys when moving into a new version of the beloved developer IDE, and I'm glad to hear from a few out there asking whether my Visual Stuio exteion on MSDN Gallery, ReviewPal supports the new version of Visual Stuio and if not when would it be available.

So I had to put some time over the last weekend to make them happy (aka being happy by making others happy), which lead me to play around with the new Visual Studio version too (not to mention how cool the new version of Visual Studio is).The end result, ReviewPal is ready for Visual Studio 2012 in a few hours.

What's new

Upgrade for Visual Studio 2012.
Fixes for items reported in CodePlex Issue Tracker.
Updates to set more appropriate default values.

Please leave your feedback on MSDN Gallary and I would get back to your requests soon.

Explore assemblies with dotPeek

2012-08-10T07:55:00.001-07:00

Time to time we get are required to investigate on .Net assemblies without having their source code with us. Reflector was the ultimate friend for this purpose for a long time among the .Net community, untill it became a commercial product. Then it came the ILSpy from SharpDevelop, which helped us on the same purpose quite nicely.

But now here's our ultimate .Net developer tools provider JetBrains comming up with yet another cool tool for decompiling and assembly browsing, with all the goodness of what we have experienced in Resharper and best of all for free. Have a sneak peek at it below.

dotPeek

String enumerations for C#

2012-02-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

As a language C# has come a long way from the days beginning from version 1.0 beta. But still it's hard to believe that there's no Enumeration support for strings built in. There are several solutions available by several people on the internet, but I thought of putting together my version because it contains a slight additional bit to it (thanks Aravinthan on your thoughts)
The main reason for which I felt it's needed was to give a type safely to methods so that the level of mistakes done in method usage could be reduced through string enumerations rather than being just strings.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about.

As you can see above, the sender email address was just type of string, making it possible to easily make a mistake and pass in any string value into it. Actually in our case the sender email should be one of the configured email addresses in the web.config. So instead of the sender email being string, a string Enumeration was ideal.

With the above Enumeration class the method could be made more type safe and avoid mistakes like below.

And the icing on the cake is , the implicit operator implementation, which makes nice to read when using the same enumeration in places like assignments, without explicit casting.

Jupiter is lot closer than you think. Umbraco - The friendly CMS

2012-01-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

I checked out Umbraco back then when it was at version 4.0 and it was showing promising stuff with it's extensible and friendly features. Even though it was great even at that time, it was built on top of ASP.Net Web Forms technology together with XSLT based extensibility.

When I recently checked the status of it, I was amazed to see that the Umbraco team has revamped the whole implementation with the latest and great new technologies like ASP.Net MVC 3 together with Razor view engine. Code named version "Jupiter" is now at RC2 and almost near for it's final release.

And trying it out even the RC versions was pain less.
http://umbraco.com/

Update:It was a shocking news, that Umbraco team have given up on the version 5, the whole community eagerly awaited for. v5 RIP
According to the keynotes at the CodeGarden, it's for the betterment of Umbraco itself, to re-focus on the key values Umbraco promised to provide.

Pushing Visual Studio Extension updates - ReviewPal

2011-10-03T11:35:00.000-07:00

I found a little time lately to have a look at the status of my Visual Studio Extention "ReviewPal", to do some enhancements and I noticed that there are some enhancements already being asked by some users on Codepex where it's shared on.
ReviewPal on Codeplex

Given that were around 600 downloads and user comments, I had to to the enhancements and actually I addressed the once reported in Codeplex.

One of the nice features of publishing an extension on Visual Studio gallery was, it provides an automatic Updates checking and update installation feature. So I went ahead and published the updated version on the Visual Studio Gallery. But when I try to check updates through Visual Studio Extension Manager, it was reporting a message like,

"A connection to the server could not be established because the following error occurred"

Actually this seems to be an issue with the Visual Studio (hard to believe this type of issue still exists on Visual Studio), and a little configuration change fixed the issue, which gave me the expected update working for ReviewPal.

reference to setting the Visual Studio Config file to get the online updates working.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2859148/visual-studio-2010-cannot-connect-for-any-online-resource

Missing SQL Server 2008 profiler Templates

2011-09-01T23:34:00.001-07:00

Recently I noticed that the default trace templates coming along with the SQL Server 2008 were missing and even worse when ever we save our own trace templates, goes missing as well. quick search pointed that it's a known issue and the workaround is to copy the folder
SQL Server 2008 Profiler has no templates
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Profiler\Templates\Microsoft SQL Server\100"
into a folder named "1050" at the same level.
i.e.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Profiler\Templates\Microsoft SQL Server\1050

SkypePop - Skype Notifications Enhanced

2011-08-19T12:07:00.001-07:00

Instant messaging is something that we can't work without these day, (I'm talking about those who work on computers all day). As good as IMs help us in day today work, they give us enough distractions when we are working on something with full concentration.

If you are used to multiple IMs (yahoo, Live, Gtalk, Skype etc..) it could be a disaster :). To overcome the problems with multiple IMs, Digsby was one of my favorites. Even though I don't use it now, it had a great feature, in their own words

"Multitask while you chat. Minimize the IM window and you see popups of new IM's. Best of all,

you can reply right from the popup and get back to what you were doing."

Digsby didn't support Skype as well as I didn't find Skype having the above feature or anything closer to it (new layouts Skype coming up is not that user friendly, so I'm still stuck with their multi-window mode).

All that said, I couldn't stand the fact that, when ever new Skype message comes in, I have to click on the Taskbar Skype and focus the Skype window to see the new message and in case it's a group chat, mostly I end up just reading the message and hardly replying. So after searching for a readily available option and not finding one, I had to comeup with a solution for my problem and the result was "SkypePop", a Utility application to run hand in hand with Skype to provide the Digsby like feature, to work with Skype with less distraction.

Try it out yourself and your feedback could lead me to enhance this application further, with features you'd like to be included.

Usage Instructions:

Download the full package here.

Once downloaded, run the "InstallCom.bat" to get the "Skype4COM.dll" registered on your machine.
When you run the "SkypePop.exe", Click "Allow access" for the confirmation popped up from Skype.

Updated exe with enhancement and bug fixes here
Update History
version 1.0.1

Display from which chat, the message came in.
Show to whom the typed in message would be sent to, in watermark text.
Fix for mouse event behavior on the edge of the screen.

version 1.0.2

Settings added for Start-up on windows start-up and customizing the popup location.
Now handles Skype start-ups exits together with windows shutdown events.
Slide out made to be fade away so that it's less prominent to users.

version 1.0.3

Avoided Poping the message when the user is on "Do not disturb mode".

Be close to your SVN repository with Commit Monitor

2011-07-16T04:42:00.001-07:00

Subversion (SVN) being a source control supporting working in a disconnected manner, it's always good to be working on top of the latest code base to avoid the possible conflicts with others work. One way to be in synched is to be alerted on the latest SVN commits.

SVN supports this through SVN hooks. We had a SVN post-commit hook setup to send out an email to the team with a link to a WebSVN so that we can see the diff just by clicking on the link. Viewing the diff is specially important to those who want to track what's going on and to give feedback to the team for improvement. Drawback on this setup is we'll end up with lot of emails in the mailbox as well as we need to maintain WebSVN additionally.
In order to avoid above drawbacks, I looked outside for an option and what I found seemed to fit well for the requirement.

I.e. CommitMonitor.

Free
lightweight
Integrates with external diff applications via Tortoise SVN
have a portable edition too

Avoiding Code Duplications

2011-04-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

Many programmers, actually almost all would agree Code Duplication (Copy/Paste) is bad. But when we look at existing code, we tend to notice there are duplicate code here and there in a project. So it's good to look why this happens and why it's important to avoid it. Some argue that code duplication have a value in short term, but definitely not in the long run.
Mostly code duplications happen due to reasons like ignorance or not thinking it's that important or the universal answer, limited time. Actually in short term it re-leaves the developer from thinking of any refactoring required to get the code reuse rather than duplication, but in the long run such code with duplications will be hard to change, because it may be required to change all the duplicate instances and it's not readily available where the duplications are.

Some of the counter arguments are like these,

Code getting copied are already tested code - true, but what normally happens is slight modifications are needed in the destination and it ends up with mistakes
Copying the code make it less dependent on other components, which makes deployment/configuration ease - true, but dependency within self-written code shouldn't be a reason for duplication (DRY principle should be applied to only self-written code)

Avoiding Code Duplication and Increased Dependency is like two sides of the coin and it's important to know why we should choose the first side most of the time.

Mainly it's the maintainability the first reason to avoid the duplications
Copy/paste tends to copy more than we require
Copy/paste of comments tends to make the comments inaccurate by just a bit which increase inaccuracy over time

As with any accepted principle in the world, this is not universally applicable. In the pragmatic world we could end up with duplicate code, but it's important to take them up as refactoring, and when it comes to this stage, it'll be really useful to have the right tools in place. Specially for addressing Code Duplication, following are two good tools I came across lately for handling a large code bases.

Simian - Similarity Analyser - This is not as user friendly as other developer tools, more of a command line tool.

Atomiq - Code Similarity Finder - This is much more user friendly and provides nice features.

Jolicloud - For people who live on the Web

2011-03-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

I was looking forward to install and see Chrome OS my self, but it not being available officially, restricted me to install it only on top of VM. And that lead to not a good firsthand experience with the Chrome OS.

But what I stumbled upon yesterday was unable to neglect but to try out soon as possible. So tonight I had to try it out. This is nothing other than Jolicould

It's target machines are Netbooks but it's ready to boot up your 10 years old machine as well. Boots up in seconds and no driver issues. Even thought it can access the local hard drive, primary idea is to use the applications on the could. Even though some of the applications are natively installed (ex. skype), it questions the point whether we really need a local storage or high performance machines from a normal web user's perspective (very practically). A good example is, I looked for a music player on jolicloud, and immediately noticed that "Grooveshark" is there, which doesn't really need locally saved mp3s anymore but play them directly on the web.
Last but not least, Jolicloud has approached the current market with a good strategy of co-existence with Windows. That is, it can be installed along side windows as a dual boot and installation is very safe. Can be installed on the same partition as windows and I even so a possibility of uninstalling Jolicould from windows control panel (which I haven't tried yet).

ReviewPal now on Visual Studio Gallery

2011-01-30T01:38:00.000-08:00

Finally my extension for Visual Studio made it to the Visual Studio Gallery,"ReviewPal on Visual Studio Gallery". Feel free to use it and your feedback is more than welcome.

ReviewPal continues... Visual Stuio 2010 extension is ready

2011-01-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

ReviewPal extension for Visual Studio 2010 is ready. This time I'm not only publishing the extension, I'm open sourcing the code for both the Visual Studio 2008 Add-In and 2010 Extension at Codeplex. You can check it out at reviewpal.codeplex.com. You are more than welcome to try it out and give feedback.

Following are some screen-shots from the Visual Studio 2010 Extension.

1. Installing the extension

2. ReviewPal shown in Extension Manager

3. ReviewPal running within Visual Studio 2010

4. Review summary Window

5. Adding a new review item

6. Saved Review list from ReviewPal, readable using any browser

Hopefully the Extension will be published on Visual Studio Gallery tomorrow.

Review Pal - Visual Studio 2008 Plug-In, Continues...

2010-12-29T20:36:00.000-08:00

It 's been more than a year, since I published the first version of my .Net code review add-in, ReviePal for Visual studio back in November 2009 (here). Since then I always wanted to put some time on this to do some enhancements and share it with others. After all this time, I found some spare time for this recently and did some modifications to it. I think a set of screen shots would explain it better.

1.Active the ReviewPal Add-in / Reopen the ReveiwPal tool review list

2. Review entries

3.Update review summary

4.Save review details.

5. Saved review pal visible on from a browser.

The main feature added in this version (other than the tool menu item and nice icons), is instead of having two features,

1. Save the review list to a XML file
2. Export review list to a html file.

Now I have merged the two things together as SAVE, so that user doesn't need to maintain two files, but all in the same html file universally accessible on a browser. This update to the Visual Studio 2008 version was done , because I'm working on to move this forward as a Extension for Visual Studio 2010. For anyone to use this add-in with Visual Studio 2008, you can download it from here. Contact me if anyone needs the source code.

stay tuned for the Visual Studio 2010 Extension soon.

Lag between Commit and select with Distributed Transactions when two connections are enlisted to the transaction in Oracle with ODAC

2010-12-18T09:26:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across a wired behavior in the application we are currently working on, to simply put a SELECT on the database doesn't return the data we committed to the same database just a few milliseconds before. The environment was .Net 3.5 connecting to a Oralce 11g database over ODAC (Oracle Data Access Components for Oracle).

For this behavior to be visible, the code has to be accessing the same record soon after doing an update (just after several milliseconds) and the operation has to be incorporated with a distributed transaction with another oracle database too. May be due to the too specific nature of the conditions to see this issue, I couldn't find any resources even on the internet for several hours. and finally I came across some links which described an issue with Oracle which became a feature in later releases, which possibly be related with the problem I'm facing.

These links were talking about a possibility of controlling the commit behavior of Oracle, it to be synchronous or asynchronous. But with ODAC, this feature didn't appear to be exposed. In fact, ODAC documentation provided two methods Commit - which is SAID TO BE synchronous, and also a BeginCommit method for asynchronous usage. It was very disappointing to not find much documentation on this as much as I would have liked.
In the end, the only viable solution for us was to implement a retry after a delay behavior in our code, to retry the operation after about 10 milliseconds, to recover from the problem which occurs very rarely.
Here's the StackOverflow question I asked on this.

Keep your precious files backed up on the web with "SugarSync"

2010-12-02T10:08:00.000-08:00

As anyone would like, I'd like to not loose my notes, snippets etc on an unexpected situation like a hard disk failure. So recently I had a little time searching for a solution for this, and basically I wanted to backup some of my files online so that I won't loose them unexpectedly.

Additionally I had more preferred requirements,

Backed up files should be available even offline, when I don't have internet access.
Backing up of data should be automatic, so that I should not be required to remember and backup time to time.
I should have access to backed up files even from any another computer , which I might want to get access suddenly.

I came across many options for online backups, few of them being,

Google Docs - which misses requirement #1.

Windows Live SkyDrive - which misses requirement #1 & #2.

But luckily I found a good solution, SugarSync which provides the features I was looking for, seamless offline access to files, automatic backing up of file then and there when I update files, and also the accessibility to my backed up files from any machine with a internet connection, as they call it,

"Access all your data Anytime, anywhere, from any device"
,and the best part, free account starting with 5GB.

Cool art work on top of the Browser

2010-09-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

This is totally different kind of thing I recently came across, sharing here because it was just great.

the wilderness downtown

be sure to check it out, a nice art work on top of the browser (chrome) with Html 5.

Deployment tips for ASP.Net web applications, which uses Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC)

2010-08-22T01:20:00.000-07:00

I had not time to do any blogging for nearly a month, due to being busy with a new project we undertook in Vancouver Canada. And yet it was an interesting piece of software to work on, a data synchronization software between an Enterprise Oracle database and a large number of SQL Express data bases on client locations.

Things were working well in the development environment, but we had trouble when we tried to deploy the same on a Windows Server 2003 64 bit box. The issues mainly were seen due to the fact that server was running on 64 bit OS.

Firstly the issue was that we built the .Net code in 32 bit development machines with the target platform as - Any CPU. But since the ODAC components were not available for 64 bit Oracle 11g), we had to rebuild the code specifically targeting x86 , from the project properties for .Net projects. This was easy to track down and worked for Non IIS based application server components.
But when it comes to IIS based application server components, the story was different, since they are hosted within the IIS/ASP.Net runtime. The IIS on the server box was by default set to run in 64 bit mode. And our IIS based application was not able to load properly, since our applications were relying on the 32 bit ODAC components. So the trick was to run the IIS 6.0 on windows server 2003 in 32 bit mode (of cause after some hours of digging in).

Here are the steps to do it.

Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
Type the following command to enable the 32-bit mode:
cscript %SYSTEMDRIVE%\inetpub\adminscripts\adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32bitAppOnWin64 1
Type the following command to install the version of ASP.NET 2.0 (32-bit) and to install the script maps at the IIS root and under:
%SYSTEMROOT%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
Make sure that the status of ASP.NET version 2.0.50727 (32-bit) is set to Allowed in the Web service extension list in Internet Information Services Manager.

More details on How to switch between the 32-bit versions of ASP.NET 1.1 and the 64-bit version of ASP.NET 2.0 on a 64-bit version of Windows

We were not yet over with the problems, as our WCF based server component was still throwing an exception which was working fine in development environment. The exception was as below, which seemed more like a WCF configuration issue, making us rethink about the WCF bindings and endpoint configurations. But it wasn't the case.

An error occurred while receiving the HTTP response to http://serverName/WCF_VirtualFolderName/ServiceName.svc. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP protocol. This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by the server (possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more details.

After digging more into the issue, the last point to fix was giving permissions to the Network Service user account on the 2003 server to Oracle home folder. It was pretty disappointing from the Oracle documentation point of view on this area, as this should have been documented properly.

WebMatrix - ASP.net going light weight

2010-07-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

Microsoft made yet another option of developer tools available, WebMatrix making the tool/edition selection one more step confusing for the the users or developers. The primary target of this seems to be packaging up the light weight solutions they have been making publicly available lately, so that it'll be even easier to setup a complete developer environment, along with supporting open source projects.

Here's a nice post on this,Introducing-webmatrix

Installer for your Visual Stuio Add-in - Inno Setup to the rescue

2010-06-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

Recently I was looking for a way to create an installer for a Visual Studio Add-in I wrote, to make the deployment easy. The first choice was the Visual Studio based deployment projects. But I did not have much time to spend on this to play around with Visual Studio setup projects or to check up on the up coming Windows Installer XML (Wix)
But I came across something that was ideal for the task, free and open source Inno Setup. It won't be that easy to catch up, for a .Net guy like me, since it's based on Pascal scripting. But guess what I found Create a setup 2008 add-in using Inno Setup, the ideal article I was looking for and it works as it says.

And the best part, Inno Setup makes creating multilingual installers a breeze (once you understands the model of it ;) of course )

Following tools would be handy, to create setup projects and also to learn about scripting for Inno Setup.

ISTool (You'll get this if you install the Inno Setup QuickStart Pack)
Inno script generator

Power up SQL Management Studio with Free 'Search' from Redgate

2010-04-20T22:43:00.000-07:00

It's not always that we get to design a fresh data base and work on fresh code. And when that doesn't happen (i.e. when we get a working product to do enhancements or re-design), not always we get a clearly documented code base and database layer with properly managed SQL scripts.
Specially on the database side, either you have a good code base (SQL scripts) or not, this tool is going to be really handy to work with to

Identify references to objects
Find fragments of SQL text within database objects, and navigate to them quickly
Find impact of changes we are going to apply
etc

SQL Search from RedGate

And the best part is, it's totally free, thanks to redgate. I could recommend this as a must have tool :), for who ever uses SQL Management Studio.

Get to your frequent Visual Studio projects fast...

2010-04-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

If you are on Windows 7 and loving the ability of accessing recent documents per application, you'll be definitely blaming for Visual Studio 2008 not supporting this. But There's a workaround until you starts working fully on 2010 Visual studio projects.
Find your Visual Studio “VSLauncher.exe” application. For me, it was located in: “C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv\VSLauncher.exe”. Pin that to the taskbar. You now have access to your most recently used items and you can also pin shortcuts to solutions and projects to that icon.

Additionally you have Visual Studio 2010 icon on your Taskbar as pinned programs ;) if you have installed 2010 of course.