Developer's RoadMap To Success

Book Review: “Silverlight 4 in Action”

2012-01-22T17:24:00.001+02:00

In the light of Microsoft’s decision on the future of Silverlight it doesn't sound heroic that I read "Silverlight 4 in Action" also taking into account that Pete Brown already released new edition of book for latest and last 5-th version of SL.

But I had read book couple of months ago before SL5 was released. I read it with my friends at work and it was joy.

“Silverlight 4 in Action” on Amazon

It is somewhat standard step by step tutorial on particular technology. But it provides really comprehensive look at Silverlight.

If you use this technology, book is great asset to understanding Silverlight.

Book Review: “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”

2012-01-22T15:28:00.001+02:00

This book is very interesting. Even it might not bring lot of eye-opening information for software developer as we are on the edge of innovations in many respects (my personal thought) it supplies us with information for deeper understanding of why we do what we do.

“Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” on Amazon

Indeed this books uncovers inner mechanisms of motivation gears inside of us. Some gears refuse to spin or just slip when we try to solve different problems. Sometimes we need to unpack brand new gears and install those to gain additional boost.

Book reveals evolution of motivation principles from Motivation 1.0 which is based on instincts to Motivation 2.0 which is based on stick and carrot and finally to Motivation 3.0 based on inner drive and not external factors.

Watch this video for inspiration:

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Dear Reader, I would recommend this book for your leisure.

Book Review: “Steve Jobs”

2012-01-22T00:09:00.001+02:00

An astonishing book about life of amazing man, who changed the world.

“Steve Jobs” at Amazon

Book reveals many interesting facts about his youth, his addiction to the excellence of things, his contradictions and way he dealt with people.

For me reading this book was extremely enjoyable. I never thought that biography can be so much gripping and thought-provoking.

The more I think about the kick-off reason for him being so much great person the more I’m about to conclude that he attained success by constantly feeling that something is wrong with himself, and feeling the lack of something big in time when he was kid and youth. We know he was adopted son and he sought for wisdom in buddhism, and he took drugs and had other strange behavior. His strong self-confidence in his superior status allowed him to do stuff many would be scared to step into. His Reality Distortion Field allowed people do things they would never do.

From this book I got insight into what it means to be different, to live different, to think different and to build different world by your own acts.

Book is inspiring, provoking to think about world perception and business in deeper and more philosophical way.

Dear Reader, I would highly recommend you to read this book.

Where Do You Want to Be In a Year?

2012-01-21T23:20:00.001+02:00

Dear Reader,

This is continuation of my year plan/report thread. I had similar plan for 2010 and for 2011. Completion of 2010 list was almost 100% successful, and completion of 2011 was much harder and not so successful, but 2011 brought many life turning events and decisions.

I’m frustrated to admit that my head doesn’t carry this phrase all the time:

Remember, life is limited in time, so if you don’t move in the right direction you might waste it entirely.

Here below is my resolution list for 2012

Buy a car in Europe (some used German car)
Travel though major cities in Austria (Vienna, Salzburg, Linz, Graz, Innsbruck, Bregenz, Eisenstadt, Klagenfurt)
Sport activities (have two-three summer hikes into Alps & ski in Alps)
Learn German for at least A2 level (which is elementary)
Improve English and rich C1 level (which is advanced)
Show kick-ass performance at work
Get promotion (get clear idea on career opportunities)
In Vienna find local .net community (user group, whatsoever) and join
Visit TechEd Europe (if possible because of budged considerations)
Have new friends in Austria, who share same opinions
Write couple of WP7 applications and post them to marketplace
Write couple of Win8Metro applications for fun
Release “Design Patterns” Book – I have 1 month to do this
Read 15 books (see my LinkedIn reading list)
Learn programming language(s). I will start with “7 languages in 7 weeks” and then pick up one for deeper insight (not compulsory from book)
Discipline myself to get up at some certain time
Have more public visibility and community impact – my way to MVP

My next annual report should contain evidence in facts to prove completion of above resolution.

This resolution is bit smaller than 2011 list, but as reality shows it should be more achievable because of this.

Please share your year resolution list! I will read with pleasure.

What I have done in 2011

2012-01-12T22:20:00.001+02:00

Looking back at my “Where do you want to be in a year?” blog post for the Jan 9, 2011, I regret that I did not do many things I planned, but I’m also proud about many things I did, because many of them are not small ones, but rather life changing, like marriage and moving to other country.

Overview of 2011

At the beginning of the year I continued passing my MS exams, which seemed somewhat important and very valuable for me at that moment, also I enjoyed end of winter spending many days at skiing hills in mountains. Near that time me with girlfriend decided to let our parents know our decision about future marriage in summer. They started to be in rush, but not me - at the beginning of sprint I had been thinking more about choosing my first car, which I successfully bought for 7000$. It is used Chevrolet Aveo 2005 of fully equipped, except it has manual transmission. At the day I bought car I did not have place to live in Lviv – me with best friend where looking for new apartment to rent, because of crazy and alcoholic owner of apartment, we rented before.

My blog did not go well previous year. There are couple of months without blog posts. One of them is July. It was very hot month – I got married on 16th of July and while still having vacation we went to Europe trip to see Hungary, Austria and Switzerland the most.

Besides of Europe trip we with my wife visited really many places in Western Ukraine. Now we had car, so travelling was more quick and spontaneous.

By coincidence I was asked if I’m not interested to pass interview and relocate to other country just before my marriage. It went well and I was asked for other interview which by great coincidence was on-site in Austria when I was there with my wife. She was admiring Belvedere in Vienna, while I had my 1,5 hour interview. So in August I got an offer and accepted it. But as it is relocation to other country it involves lot of paper work to get work permit there, and took almost half a year to get approval.

This year also brought more responsibility for me at work, I had much of Technical Leader responsibilities & activities. I think that I worked in the most amazing and truly collaborative team from all of those I had chance to work in. We worked on WP7 project and challenging Silverlight project. I left those guys just before the winter, hoping to have few weeks of rest before final approval and relocation to Austria.

Before the New Year of 2011 I didn’t get approval so my “vacation” took longer, but I spent it reading a lot, sleeping even more, doing some pet coding and getting extremely lazy. To summarize: you won’t enjoy being unemployed for longer than month, not because of the money, but because of lacking social relations and absence of external challenges.

Was 2011 going according to my year plan?

See plan here.

- Release awesome free Design Patterns book in Ukrainian

I failed to do this in 2011, but I composed book, sent it to people willing to review its raw unedited version. As for now I have 5 our 25 responses on book. I’m going to create small web site for book and publish it there.

- Enterprise certification (finishing with 565 exam, very likely till the end of Winter)

I passed exam and got MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer at the beginning of the year.

- Learn to ski & swim well (I can both, but I want to be good at that)

I’m now above intermediate in skiing, but this is subjective view. Fact is that I can handle most difficult hills in Ukraine, like trostian on picture below and “black” trails in bukovel, can do basic ski-jumps and ski backwards.

As of swimming I did complete fail as I’ve been in water only 2 times during the year.

- Show kick-ass performance at work

I did not get official promotion, but I played role of Technical Leader, coded a lot and tried to show best of myself. I think I did great and could have done even better. Leaving this job was not an easy thing to do. I think SS is great Ukrainian company.

- Learn WP7 and Silverlight

Whole year I did coding for WP7 and out of browser application in Silverlight. Also with my friends won at Hackathon event, where we created small game for the WP7.

I also introduced weekly discussions around reading “Silverlight in Action” in my team.

- Start working on some “real” book (just collecting ideas on book)

As of now I don’t have any clear idea on “real” book. But the more I think on this matter the more I’m close to something on the edge of technology and people collaboration.

- Read 24 books (this year I will definitely hit this score)

Let’s count: 5 in reviews on blog, 4 more read, but no posts on blog yet. And also 5 in progress, 4 of which are almost read. (I tried hard to read as much as I can before New Year and that lead to 5 in progress).

In total it looks like not more that 13 books, which is even less than previous year report (15). Seems one book a month is my pace.

“Take quick look behind to analyze, don’t stop, think positively, go forward!” – I said to myself on this subject.

- Marriage (yeah, this really is in the list “OMG” I’m saying to myself…)

It is one of the things I’m proud about. Despite this world’s shifted mind I think that two can get married in their twenties and be happy for many years. I was really surprised by marriage statistics in Western countries. For example this statistics show that less people are getting married and along more are getting divorced. And this shows that my country is also at the top of divorce list. Too much about that crap.

Here we are:

And here are more of those photos at Picasa:

Wedding-Preview-900px-2

I’m extremely glad that I have so cute and smart wife. Just after marriage we travelled even more than before it. We have been enjoying each moment of being together.

Before I left work, we had been living in separate apartment not far from my friend and team-mate. Each day she prepared awesome breakfast and lunch to take to work. Then I picked up Taras and drove to work. It was routine, but it was great.

- Travel abroad (I’m planning for Europe tourist tour)

I had awesome week travelling though Europe after my wedding. See photos:

2011.07.23-29.Europe.Trip.Honey.Week

- Learn one more programming language (probably everyone heard about learning one language per year, why not?)

I read bits about Haskell and tried F#, but I’m not satisfied with my progress. So will have another try in 2012.

- Frequent dev meetings (this is hard, because preparing takes lot of time for me)

I did probably very few so called “developer’s meetings”, one of which was even paid. Despite this I introduced technical status meeting for my team in addition to scrum standup.

Karpaty alpinism (again health stuff, want to do this with my girlfriend)

We took Hoverla – the highest mountain in Ukraine:

Read complete story and see photos at my wife’s blog here.

We also been on hard Pikyj, read here and more enjoying Lopata (read here).

- Became known presenter (couple of outside the company presentations)

Lviv .Net User Group – WCF

Kiev.ALT.NET – NHibernate from Inside

- English (watch films, find guys to talk in English)

For anything of video I watched myself I preferred English. Which of course didn’t work for cinema where I go with wife and friends. Also I had to watch amazing “The Big Bang Theory” translated, but some series watched with pleasure in English.

And what is funny now I’m learning German :).

- Start coffee-and-code in Lviv

Fail. I thought about this many times and always lacked confidence in my social skills to do this. Probably it can be as easy as mentioning on blog and in twitter something like “Hey, guys! Tomorrow I will be in the XYZ coffee shop doing some coding. Come along and join.”

- Write couple of personal-small programming projects / contribute to open-source

Not much here – dozen of try-it-out projects, small open-source orm system CustomORM, wp7 project we wrote at Hackathon and maybe 3 wp7 i-started-it-and-left projects, ah and few competition type projects at TopCoder.

- Visit one of the solid conferences

I visited couple of conferences like Uneta Plus and Mobile Professional Days in Kharkiv, and of course many events here in Lviv like LvivIT and regular Lviv User Group events.

- Get money machine / some ideas / investments / whatever

I haven’t invented anything better than deposit accounts, which now don’t work that good as if they worked in 2009 while crisis. Month interest income is enough for one full tank of my car, which usually runs out in 1-1,5 weeks.

- Start some business even small and crappy – but have it to learn

Fail. And even more – complete fail. I didn’t even think about this much. But from other point of view, there must be something exciting me to start with and I haven’t found anything like this. At least I’m happy that I will be eligible to have wp7 developer account in Austria.

Became better-and-better in planning and achieving, continue growing, etc, etc…

Subjective. Isn’t it? I think I did great with this one, but you decide. I move into embrace of 2012 year which will definitely bring me lot of nice surprises, emotions and great time.

Book Review: “Code complete”

2011-12-15T02:40:00.001+02:00

Finally this happened. I’ve read this long book. I started reading it probably 2 years ago :). I was not reading it the whole time of course, I did it in 3 phases. For some reason, you might figure it out late in this post, I dropped it few times.

As “Code Complete” goes very long, I’m not sure I will be capable to write in any way appropriate review. But rather few words, so here they are:

Book was intended to be comprehensive software development reference handbook with accent on construction. And indeed it was such kind of book maybe 10 or more years ago. I think that this book is bit outdated. Even with publishing 2cond edition contemporary trends are not included or are covered at surface. It can be even seen that they appeared in book later. But we can look at this from positive perspective – which is learning how was programming when you dad was in charge :). In some places it was boring to read too-long and too much detailed explanations to obvious things. For example such trivial construction thing as loop was discussed in 20 pages long chapter. How many books do you know that observe loop from all possible viewpoints? Title of the book talks for itself.

Nevertheless book is full of examples and dozen of very interesting facts about software. In any way it was enjoyable to read brilliant metaphors, astonishing facts, discover new in known old. If you sharpening your skills axe and on your way of software craftsman “Code complete” has lot of advices for you, with references to hundreds of other books. In fact author worked hard to gather all information and create this masterpiece, and I’m really sorry that reality of software industry slightly kicks this book out of the shelf.

Do I recommend this book?

Yes, but don’t read it – review it and then read only the tasty bits.

Book Review: “Kama Sutra for speaker”

2011-12-14T02:12:00.001+02:00

Yeap what a gripping title for the book! It is in Russian originally and it talks about speaker skills, while comparing them to lover skills.

Time to time I deliver some speeches to local user group or at some events. I used to do this a lot inside of the company. After I talked about NHibernate at Kiev ALT.NET, I decided that it’s time to read some comprehensive thoughts from people who speak proficiently. So I took this book.

I cannot rate this book or say it is good or bad, because it is first book I read about speaking. Book is very simple, easy to read and rather short one. It compares giving public speech to the sex. Speaker has to be “man” in connection between him and audience. Also book provides you with lot of exact and specific tips on how to resolve particular presentation issues, such as nervous trembling, parasitic words, gesticulation, etc…

Despite that occasionally I thought some of the things written ridiculously, I enjoyed reading very much and found many advices I’m going to use next time speaking for you.

You might want to go and visit Author’s web site: http://www.radislavgandapas.com/

Just about to start with programming as first job?

2011-12-13T00:38:00.001+02:00

Recently I’ve got e-mail from guy, looking for some advice. At glance it sounds like he is worrying about finding his first job as software developer and willing to get some hints/advices.

First of all I would like to thank very much to those people who read my blog posts and who comment or send me e-mails. This is the best feedback I can get and it is the only true measurement of blog’s success.

So, I’ve got this well-written e-mail from student (I guess):

Hi Andriy,

Hope you are doing well. My name is Wes, I just read your articles, I have to say, I am your fan now.. Guys like you make a difference.

I am writing to you because I have the similar passion for programming as you, and that is why I went for my bachelors in Software Engineering, and while in school, I learned many languages like C, C++, Java, VB.NET and ASP.NET.

Out of all, .NET excites me the most. But now when I am about to graduate, I dont really feel good about my programming skills, and getting a job.. The best I have done in VB is made a calculator, made connections to the database, and executed some queries.

What I want from you, is some tips about what my approach should be at this point AND are their any sample projects that you recommend I should do, that will help me learn more and expose me to different sides of the programming world..

I would highly appreciate, if you write back, and I am sure you will.

Thanks - and good luck with your career!

Cheers!

Wes

I’m replying publicly, so I can share with other’s who have similar questions. Wes is not mentioning his last name so you won’t identify him :). Anyway I think that this e-mail is good one and it raises good questions. Starting from now “you” means either Wes or any other starting programming guy looking for some advices.

First of all seeking for personal improvement is great step towards it. I think that once you have clear goal and passion about it you won’t waste your time and life.

I just came across small e-book where found great answer for you from Karl Seguin:

“… If you're willing to take the time and try it out, you will see the progress. Pick a simple project for yourself and spend a weekend building it using new tools and principles (just pick one or two at a time). Most importantly, if you aren't having fun, don't do it. And if you have the opportunity to learn from a mentor or a project, take it - even if you learn more from the mistakes than the successes.”

So I will expend this thought a little bit further.

You would need to write many projects – the more the better. Keep your hands dirty and work with the code, every other day you should feel that code, you wrote yesterday is crap and you can write it better today. If you are still student in Software Engineering be sure that you are fulfilling you time with programming. If you feel that learning courses are not supplying enough tasks for you, just create them for yourself.

I know that when being a student it is very interesting to take part in some sport programming competitions. So do it. You can also take part in some online competitions like Algorithm competitions at TopCoder. Those can be for your gym.

Definitely you need big projects to work on as well. These projects should take from couple days to couple of weeks. Write your own “paint”, not comprehensive one, but at least with basic functionality. Write your own money accounting system with your database, so you learn all basics of data access. You then can change data access from simple ADO.NET to ORM (try Entity Framework or NHibernate), you then can try to explore non-relational databases, like NoSQL. Do some web programming, if you did ASP.NET you can explore MVC ASP.NET. Explore mobile development by just writing same simple calculator for Windows Phone 7. You will get familiar with some Silverlight/XAML. If you are excited about .NET make sure you know C# (personally I cannot understand why Microsoft promotes VB that much, trend is C#).

Find your peers interested in programming. Learn programming in fun way, enjoy it.

Whatever you do, make sure that google in your force.

You will need to learn continuously. Read many books, but know that human forgets 90% of things heard, 60% seen & only 10% of things done. So if you read, but not try things read your time can be wasted. I have another blog post where I propose some tips on how to become successful developer, read those.

As of job. Ask older peers what are opportunities in your location. Visit software companies near you, ask them if they have some learning courses, which skills are in demand for that company. I ensure you, this is not as much difficult as you might be expecting. Also here is my article about career plan for software engineer. Probably it is too early for you to think deeply about career before you actually started as developer, but at least make sure you know how your future job might look like.

So key things:

Always do some programming accordingly to trends and your mood
Continuously learn
Know local companies, trends and demands

Hope I have been of some help for you, Wes and Dear Reader.

Help me finish my book – need you for review

2011-12-04T22:24:00.001+02:00

I have skeleton of my book ready and flesh is also there, help me get some good looking skin for it.

I need volunteers to read my book or parts of it (in Ukrainian) and provide me with some valuable feedback.

Any feedback will be taken into consideration, until it doesn’t break the whole idea of book (short easy associative examples with code to each pattern).

Also I would need to have your word that you will not distribute book before I officially do this on my blog.

Any volunteer willing to help will be mentioned in book of course.

Cover of my book. If picture in the middle looks ugly to you, please know it is me who draw that over 10 years ago and no way you can copy it.

Any volunteers?

My talk at #kievaltnet about NHibernate internals

2011-12-04T19:12:00.001+02:00

Friday I’ve been in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. At the beginning of the day me with my wife visited couple of shops to buy some special things my wife makes. And than we went to have a good sit in small restaurant till 7 PM. I had to finish up my presentation…

Recently I’ve mentioned that I will be speaking at Kiev ALT.NET. So this post is about it.

Kiev ALT.NET

Kiev ALT.NET is great group of smart people willing to learn interesting things in .net but maybe from deeper standpoint than standard .net user groups do. I’ve been having good conversations in twitter with @chaliy and once we met at UnetaPlus in Kharkiv where he invited me as speaker to the @kievaltnet. Peliminary we agreed on something about NHibernate.

The topic

I knew that I have to prepare something interesting on NHibernate. But what? There are dozen of articles on it, there are many videos available. Topic just came itself. You might know that I’ve been working with NH for long time already and that I’ve written something similar to ORM so I decided that getting some insight into NHibernate’s guts would be really interesting.

Presentation delivery

So before 7 PM I got to the Ciklum office (building on the left). Landscapes from the 20th floor are astonishing, especially at night.

Not sure if I was enough prepared, but at least I felt that guys were listening to me very-very attentively. Some of them twitted simultaneously (@alexbeletsky, @skalinets, @korneliuk) and had good laugh. At least I invented term “swiss breakpoint” (aka. conditional breakpoint with cross).

More photos can be seen on facebook’s page here of the Kiev ALT.NET group.

Also I tried to joke much, but it didn’t go as well as I expected it to, guess because of sleepless night and general tiredness. Also I spoke with accent (as per them o_O. Never thought I have any kind of accent of my native language).

Presentation itself

View more presentations from Andriy Buday.

I would like to thank all guys, who came to listen to me and other presenters. Thanks for having me at Kiev ALT.NET. It had been great time and I would like to be there once again despite reason (to speak or to listen).

I have written another ORM: customorm.codeplex.com

2011-11-29T07:28:00.000+02:00

Yes, that’s truth. World now has yet another ORM system written in .NET. Again someone (me) reinvented the wheel. Why?

Before you started abusing me, let me provide you with some insight.

Of course there was need for this ORM to be born

I’ve been working with NHibernate for manner of couple of years. I would say team got used to it. Few months ago we’ve got challenge to integrate some of our code with legacy system. It is written in Delphi, but exposes some .NET stuff. Underlying data provider was legacy cache system (relational) covered with Delphi and bit exposed in .NET, also cache was capable of switching to SQLServer when in connected mode. When we decided to integrate our system with this legacy code we had to come up with solution that utilizes existing WCF (!) entities for mapping, solution that can call legacy code with correct select sql statements depending on connect mode and can handle update/insert/delete for the object graphs utilizing legacy interfaces.

Long story short, we ended very much with these three methods. Some other methods are also available, but I’m showing this for more rush:

object InsertUpdateRow(string tblName, IEnumerable fields, IEnumerable fldsValues, IEnumerable keyFlds);
void DeleteRow(string tblName, IEnumerable fieldsList, IEnumerable fieldsValues, IEnumerable keyFields);
DataTable SelectSQL(string selectSql);

This doesn’t look like exposing a lot of possibilities. We had option to go with naked SQL, than mapping from DataTables to entities reading data with DataReader. And all manual. Isn’t it boring and too-oo-oo much code?

It is fun to work on ORM, so why not take it further

For me it was really nice work to make that whole reflection and data access working smoothly. So I tried to have my code as much abstract as I can so it can be isolated somehow from that legacy and separated code for my personal project very early. Some of the features I had to recode at work, some at home. Instead of “IntegrationDataAccess” I wrote simple AdoDataAccess over mine IDataAccess and got it more or less completed.

I think it is part of my learning curve, to write this project. I’m learning what it means to start something open source, how to use yet another source control. Playing with hardcore reflection and other not-business logic code is real fun.

Another thing why I would like to make it open to the world and not mine home-hidden project is being exposed to more job opportunities. When you are at interview you often have no code to show, because all you’ve written is production and you signed papers forbidding you to show that code.

So… here it is – CustomORM

http://customorm.codeplex.com/

CustomORM is tiny ORM system written in .NET. CORM is slightly bigger than so-called micro-ORMs and much smaller than NHibernate. It has its uniqueness.

Features at glance:

POCO (real POCO without any “virtual” constraints or attributes)
Mapping much like FluentNH
Very light, thus faster
No syntaxes to learn (nothing like complex criteria or another version of sql)
Source code in your project you can debug, and change quickly

Now, let me show you some code

Sample fetch

Here is how select works:

           Criteria criteria = CreateCriteria(typeof(Customer), "c")
                .AddEntity(typeof(Order), "o")
                .AddEntity(typeof(Employee), "e")
                .AddSQL(
                        @"left join Orders o
                        on c.[Customer ID] = o.[Customer ID]
                        left join Employees e
                        on e.[Employee ID] = o.[Employee ID]
                        where c.[Customer ID] = @customerId")
                .AddParameter("@customerId", customerId);

            List<Customer> customers = ExecuteCriteria<Customer>(criteria);

As you can see you add type of entity to take part in join, assign alias to it and then write old known SQL. In the end you get nice collection of objects. No root transformations to be applied.

Sample save

Here is code you might write for the save:

        public Customer SaveCustomer(Customer customer)
        {
            var transaction = BeginTransaction();

            Customer savedCustomer = null;
            try
            {
                savedCustomer = Save(customer);
                transaction.Commit();
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                transaction.Rollback();
            }
            
            return savedCustomer;
        }

Mappings

All this above will work after small setup and mappings for your objects.

    class CustomerMap : EntityToTableMapper<Customer>
    {
        public CustomerMap()
        {
            Table("Customers");
            Id(x => x.CustomerID, "Customer ID")
                .UseAssignedValue();
            Map(x => x.CompanyName, "Company Name");
            Map(x => x.ContactName, "Contact Name");
            Map(x => x.ContactTitle, "Contact Title");
            Map(x => x.City, "City");
            HasMany(x => x.Orders, "Customer ID");
        }
    }

Get started code

To get started all setup you need is basically two things: derive you own Repository class from RepositoryBase and add bootstrap code at start of your app similar to this:

// Let CORM know where your mappings live and that's mostly it
MagicMapper.ScanForMappers(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());

// Initialize AdoDataAccess or (advanced) implement your own IDataAcces 
var s = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["NorthwindConnectionString"];
var ceDataAccess = new AdoDataAccess(s.ConnectionString, s.ProviderName);

// You are ready to use you repository, it already has Fetch<T>, Save, Delete

var customerRepository = new CustomerRepository(ceDataAccess);

Hope it doesn’t look like much code.

What is at codeplex now and what’s next?

As for now I have CRUD operations tested on Northwind SqlCe database. I verified that fetching 91 customers (2000 db records) is 2-3 times faster than NHibernate.

Project still lacks very much in transactions/sessions/concurrency and completely doesn’t have caching (I don’t think it should ever have).

Project has bad code coverage and probably isn’t ready for community review until I polish it. But anyway sharing this with you because someone has to kick-me-off.

If you still would like to take a look at some code please start with CustomORM.Examples => Program for usage code and for engine code go to CustomORM where most of the heavy logic lives in RepositoryBase and EntityToTableMapper.

Depending on feedback and my mood I will decide if it worth investing more of mine time or not.

Mobile Professional Days in Kharkiv – it was fun time

2011-11-21T23:48:00.001+02:00

Passed weekend I’ve been at Mobile Professional Days conference in Kharkiv (again).

Shortly conference worth time I spent for it, but not that much because of the information I got there, but rather more because spending lot of time with my friends. We had to travel overall about 40 hours. We had two laptops (one air), two kindles two iPads, one iPhone and one HTC wp7 to play with. True geeks in occasionally-connected environment, called train, and then not so starry hotel as it should have been. Reading books while travelling and tweeting much during conference itself brought feeling of not wasting time. Ah, and of course tasty coffee-breaks were awesome.

Really nice and modern monument at the entrance of Kharkiv university hosting conference. Cool!

Some other photos from conference itself can be seen here.

My thoughts on each presentation

Now, let's be more serious. I will be critical in this post, so don’t share this with speakers :).

I will list only those presentations I’ve attended. (Also as conference was in Russian, I’m translating titles of presentations so sorry if I translated not as you like.)

1. Flexible methodologies for Mobile projects

Honestly it was completely not I wanted to hear here. It was simply well organized presentation about usual methodologies used in every day that can be applied to any project. Distributed teams, scrum, team work and people motivation are general topics not specific to Mobile. Only one thing I liked was about having phones for each developer.

2. iOS development, first steps

Ok, this one was about its topic and overall very interesting despite I didn’t know a lot of things about iOS.

3. Mobile games – development is just half of the deal

Great presentation and great presenter. Real game publisher talked around pitfalls and other stuff you have to overcome to make your game successful in your marketplace. There were some real examples, statistics. Was really very interesting to listen to this man.

4. Game “Stay alive in mobile”

Blonde (Olga, sorry) went though good and bad examples of design for applications. She let everyone know that you have to take into account dozen of variables to create really usable application. You should even think about length of users nails. I think this presentation was great and easy for consumption.

5. Best of the XCode 4.2 and iOS 5.0 from the developers view

I didn’t get this presentation. Definitely because I know nothing about iOS and XCode. Anyway, at least it is useful to feel myself a stupid idiot time to time.

6. How to make good and mobile in one bottle

Guy from JetBrains, discussed different design approaches for the iOS and Android phones. He touched many interesting aspects of designing good applications. I was bit disappointed that he didn’t say much about new metro style in wp7. I think it is great and not everyone caught it yet.

7. RESTfull iOS with RestKit

This sucked! No, really. I understand that another person had to substitute original presenter, but why wasn’t he ready and why slides had tons of code. Crap, not presentation. Message to presenter: don’t be disappointed by what I said, you had hard time so you know next time you have to perform 100 times better. I’ve been in similar situation and it sucked as well, but I had auditory 10-20 times smaller.

8. Evolution of mobile apps. Though Could and Social into Mobile 2.0

This presentation was as manna from the heaven after REST-laugh. I got a lot of interesting information on social integration. Auditory had some fun when on slide appeared app for gays.

9. Guidelines isn’t limitation

How getting slightly away from official UI guidelines can take you out of the crowd of the other apps. Presenter showed great examples when new awesome design was born because of this. Also he gave good feedback about metro design for wp7 and well-documented guidelines.

10. How to speed up and reduce the cost of developing mobile apps

Maybe the best presentation and delivery. It was smooth and easy to listening to. At this presentation I got some feeling of HTML 5 as the future for the mobile development.

Fun with tweets

Great that there was twitter board. It kept good mood even when it started to be boring. To help you feel general atmosphere during the #mpdays2011 below are my tweets chronologically (you have to be able to read Ukrainian):

At #mpdays2011 in Kharkiv. Hope it worth trip over 1000 km.

#mpdays2011 Перекличка. Я #wp7! Хто ще?

#mpdays2011 Не хочу бути занудою але всі ці речі загальні для будь якого типу розробки. Де спицифіка розробки під мобільні платформи. #q
@caxarock #mpdays2011 Scrum це гнучка методологія. :)
#mpdays2011 О! Останній слайд із пляжем мені сподобався.
@UkrDaddy А не по кількості людей? Там цікаво про #wp7? #mpdays2011
Ситуація із кнопкою не того розміру або не там дуже знайома. #mpdays2011
За якоюсь історією мало бути 42 а не 7. #mpdays2011
А нашим клієнтам радять тримати телефон на зарядці в автомобілі поки вони виконують роботу. :) #mpdays2011
Таке враження що на #mpdays2011 одні студенти. А де бородаті дядіньки?
@eGoOki ти мене заплутав. Я #wp7 прийнов на #ios і був певен, що там цікавіше. #mpdays2011 хм...
Хочу побакланити презентацію по restkit. Що за слайди із тууучою коду? І що він там говорить... КАПУТ!#mpdays2011
#mpdays2011 Презентеру влаштували інтерв'ю. Таке враження, що ті хто запитують знають відповіді. Тупо фейл...
Музику врубали, щоб блондинка із першого ряду станцювала. Єуех... Давай! #mpdays2011
Про #cloud і #social цікаво. Принаймні Тарас доповідає впевнено! #mpdays2011
@Alokard #mpdays2011 Якщо доповідач толковий, то твітеряни це помічають. Не було б сміття в ленті.
At #mpdays#2011 I understood that the coolest platform is #wp7 not because of presentations, but because of using actual phone here!
Listening to #iOS UI guidelines. I think #metro in #wp7 is much better. #mpdays2011 (I know 'cause I'm using it & it rocks.)
Нас зомбують 25тим кадром із сіськами :) #mpdays2011
Man called C# a bubble! O_o Java isn't bubble than? #mpdays2011 Crap is it going to be HTML and JS?

Thanks for reading…

Speaking at Kiev ALT.NET

2011-11-18T11:28:00.000+02:00

I’m going to speak at Kiev ALT.NET preliminary at 2 of December.

I would like to share some of my knowledge and findings around NHibernate from its inner perspective.

NHibernate from inside

“I have been working with NHibernate for manner of couple of years and I never seriously thought about how it is built from inside, what is the architecture of NH, how much it depends on ADO.NET, how they made reflection to work fast, how high code quality is, which people worked on it and what was the history of it. The other day, I had chance to start mine own small ORM project and all of this questions raised for me. Thus I will do my best to share everything I discovered in NHibernate surgery.” – Andriy Buday

NHibernate зсередини

“Вже декілька років я працюю із NHibernate і ніколи серйозно не задумувався як він побудований зсередини, яка його архітектура, наскільки сильно він використовує ADO.NET, яким чином уся рефлекція працює швидко, на скільки якісним є код, які люди працювали над ним та яка була його історія. Надавно я мав шанс розпочати невеличкий ORM проект і всі ці питання згадані вище стали надзвичайно цікавими для мене.

Тому буду викладатися на максимум, щоб поділитися усіми відкриттями хірургії нутрощів NHibernate.” – Андрій Будай

Лінк на профіль такий: http://andriybuday.com

Leaving my first job – it was awesome time

2011-11-15T06:23:00.000+02:00

*** NOTE: I’m not mentioning surnames of people and any trademarks or company names directly, you have to guess or just know ***

Today is going to be my last day with my current employer. I worked for this company for more than 3.5 years. During this time I worked with many great people and I absorbed unique experience. In this post I would like to express some of my thoughts about these years and to thank to many people surrounding me during my journey.

Don’t read this paragraph! What do I feel about leaving SS? Nothing special, like if this is something usual. But it is not! For some reason cannot believe this is reality and honestly maybe I feel myself bit stupid at the moment, I just had a glass of whisky for kick-off and I continue to write to finish this up. I feel that I will manage this if I continue writing. Definitely! …or I will get drunk. No way! I have code to commit today!

I BEFORE

It all started one day at University, when I took part in programming competition. I often took part in such events, because I love programming, but that day was different, not because we had difficult or simple problems to solve and not because we won or lose, but because of banal reason – sponsor of that competition was SS. I even didn’t understand what the hack is software company. They only asked to fill-in simple form and me as “real” student filled it with all the “rules”, knowledge in C# 10 out of 10, VS 10 out of 10 and other stuff and I wouldn't even put 6 now.

Some time passed and I got e-mail in which I was kindly asked if I’m not interested in passing interview for developer position. I just said to myself like good American could have said “Why not?”.

I guess mine interviewer was in good mood that day or either, I was too much emotional talking about the applications I wrote in University about the “game of life” completely written in WinAPI, and especially about the database management system written in C#. Anyway somehow I intrigued him. He asked me what I like the most about programming. I don’t why but I said that databases are great thing (stupid me?).. anyway that answer decided where I spent next 3.5 years.

At that moment I was student and additional 350$ for me was a big sum to get each month (not to say that I had good scholarship, and during master’s year it was about 100$ and I managed to live for those 100$ easily). After I had some conversation with parents. They didn’t want me to work while I’m still student. They were worrying much about my future studying and asked me if I’m not willing to postpone this decision, but nevertheless I was mine decision and in the end it turned to be very and very good decision.

II THE BEGINNING

I was promised flexible time. During my first 3 months I got trainings on the product team was working on (I have to say this product is damn huge enterprise solution to set of complex problems). After 3 months nightmare started I had to work 8 hours a day and I did my best each minute, I was so worrying about completing everything in time. Everything was new to me – source control, team work, issue tracking, testing, and scary super-smart people everywhere. Honestly I was just very scared. I had girlfriend at that time, I’m now married on, very often she was called by me and often I said to her that I simply cannot solve something and I worry very much and that I probably worth nothing, and that it probably cannot be solved easily. I used to spend extra-time on solving something that now looks ridiculous for me.

First real tasks assigned to me were simple bugs and tiny enhancements to existing reports/assessments.

I was given contact to clients at that moment and first person from clients I talked with was Johnathan. In our conversation I was stupid enough to mention that I’m still student, finishing university. But he was wise enough to understand and he said (sorry cannot remember that precisely) “You started a big journey and I’m one to help you”. At that moment I understood that my clients are my friends. Thank you, Johnathan, for this.

I worked hard on everything assigned to me. Not me one, I thought that everyone around is just insane about making everything the best he/she can. I was inspired.

Than New Year came (2009) and we had celebration in some restaurant. I got an award there – “Rookie of the year 2008”. Below you can see me (sorry for my blackness “he-he”) and my manager.

It was my first work award and I’m really proud of it, because at that moment I realized I worked hard for something more valuable than money, I worked for respect of other people and I worked for our clients and for myself.

III CONTINUATION

After that I continued to work for the same company and for the same clients. Sub-projects only slightly changed. I had a chance to work with great people, with people who inspired me even more, especially as software developer. Derik was another person I really appreciate. I learned a lot from him. He gave me many advices that were very helpful and completely new for me from the root. Those advices were, and are, tremendously terrific. Thank you.

I clearly remember Ant as wise and supporting product owner, I learned many things from you as well. Things were more personal and people-oriented not so “techi”, but I want to thank you for this.

I worked with different people during 2009 and 2010, some of them were very smart some not, some were extremely responsible and some not, some people didn’t know what they want from work and life and some knew. I just had been watching all that and learning and learning. I wanted to be like someone else and didn’t want to be like someone else.

During those two years I managed to be promoted twice up to senior developer, I started this blog at October of 2009, I showed myself as responsible, knowledgeable and reliable developer but my learning curve started to be more domain related than technology related. See below.

Black line corresponds to my domain knowledge which continuously grew and red line corresponds to what I learned from tech perspective (at the beginning I got trainings on application along development started and then I started to learn less from technology than from domain). Thus I decided to change something.

IV NEAR THE END

I went to the Mobile team. It still the same company and still the some client, but just another project – mobile solution for same set of problems. But I think this was the best period of me being in this company.

I think Mobile team is the best team I ever worked with. Almost everyone is self-organized, motivated and very responsible. I really see fire in eyes of each person working with me in the “war-room”. We cook the best meat for the end-users which is friendly usable and “sexy” mobile application.

Taras, another TL (not usual team that had two TLs of course), very emotional person who knows his point of view, but always manages his and teams work the best. I especially enjoyed working with you. We had more conversations I had with other guys at SS ever.

Andriy, Olena, Pavlo, Roman, Sasha, Volodya, Yuriy (hope alphabet works this night) you are great people. Each of you has something special, each different, but all of you spent part of your life for this project, each worried about the work you do/did and I hope everyone enjoyed great collaboration we had.

Diana, Iryna, Oksana, Taras, Zhanna and many others who covered the stuff developers created or still need to create. Thank you very much for the great work and contribution. We all can create something brilliant only together.

And of course many thanks to our clients. In reality everyone I worked with from clients side were just amazing people. I know stories from other developers from other companies and completely other teams, they often complain at their clients. I think that you can only dream about clients my “big team” has. They understand you and they try to work collaboratively to produce the best results. Sheryl and Mark Mobile team loves you!

I would also like to mention that I had very good management above me. They are people who think wide, clearly and who see far-far into the future. They are people who kept me motivated and oriented for achieving goals. Vitaliy, Sania and Alex, thank you very much.

Whole “big team” as I call my unit of company is great family. Many people work here for 5 and more years, some more than 10 years. I hope I was somewhat part of this family for these 3.5 years.

I MISS YOU ALL!

I’M PROUD I’M SS!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

V THE END

In Mobile team I simply continued to do my best just at another level of abstraction, doing some of the activities as technical leader, performing some bit more complex tasks, that I think could have been achieved by others. Sad, but as per me worst thing about this was this graph below. My red line didn’t grow up above black one.

I’m developer from my very inside. I’m not ready to shift my career to another direction and I cannot continue to learn domain I’m not ready to accept as my native. I want to continue as technical guy, but that is not the whole story.

Of course SS has opportunities for me. I bet they have opportunities to many of you. I wouldn't leave this company if someone proposes me bit more money or bit more interesting project, because all this I can get here. So…

VI THE FUTURE

I cannot say much about it, because I’m not completely confident in its direction. I can only say that I have opportunities in another country (Western Europe) and I will start there as intermediate developer. They looked for talented developer, and I hope I’m such developer. They ensured me that I will have much-much to learn and I’m extremely glad because of this and and also I’m glad that I will have opportunity to live in another country to learn something absolutely different from life perspective. Also if everything goes well I will learn one language more – German additionally.

I didn’t waste my past time. I’m excited and scared about the future, but I’m looking forward it!

Hackathon “WP7 Rocks!” - we won

2011-11-01T02:55:00.004+02:00

I would like to share some of my experience and impressions of taking part in “Windows Phone 7 Rocks!” Hackathon in Lviv.

An amazing event

First of all, many thanks to the organizers of this event and to the sponsors. Event was really great. Everyone got presents, food and joy of playing kinect at free time and of course tons of intensive coding. Hackathon started with helpful and resourceful presentations delivered by organizers. Two of them were about stuff I think wp7 developer must know – metro design and publishing to marketplace. And I would like to correct myself by replacing “developer” with “Ukrainian developer”, thing is, it is not easy for my country to be appreciated by Microsoft. Other two were about working with data in Mango and augmented reality. Ah.. and forgot to mention that everyone got styling wp7 t-shirt, finally I’ve got one! Awesome!

Hackathon is programming, team, fun and creativity

I hardly remember any other day when I had such intensive programming time. Not to say that I didn’t have sleepless all-night coding, but I was somewhat relaxed, making tea time to time surfing internet when realizing that copy-paste is no longer working. It was different, it was team play.

As you may know at the moment I work on enterprise WP7 project and my team has 8 developers. 6 of us took part in the Hackathon which formed 2 Hackathon teams. I cannot express well enough how much this night made us more closer to each other and how extreme team-building it was. But I strongly ensure you that it worth each minute we spent together coding two great ideas to be presented next day. During the night we did 125 commits to the source-control (4:59PM first commit and 11:22AM last commit). Can you imagine such productivity of the hired people? Never. Of course no one can work such intensive for long time.

So here we are:

6 most closest people. Sorry for two of them not looking at you and for me also – I’m busy.

On Monday our scrum master sent congratulation to us and here is how it looks like:

Hold on for a second. Winners? Yeap! But wait for a second. First things first.

Applications developed

At the moment there are no presentations available in the internet or video, so I cannot say much about other teams. Hopefully I will update this blog post soon. But I can remember many great applications developed by others, such as handy cartoon-creator, quest generator and player, travel places logger, guitar tuner, ball game, and many other nice applications. 3 of us created “real-problem” solving application – “WC Emergency”, which by it’s idea exploded auditory: when you really have “need”, you start app and answer 2 basic questions “How long can you wait?” and “How fast can you run?” after which you get the most reachable WC. Some other team even managed to create 3D game, to the last moment I thought they will take first place. For the complexity they probably deserve first place, but…

Winners!

We managed to create something more exciting. We invented pure FUN. So other 3 of us created mini-game “Face 2 Face”. Splashscreen below:

After which you get selection for the single player or multiplayer mode:

For the single player you can play with blue-red balls or can load images instead of blue or read ones. Here single player simple mode:

Idea is simple – you keep friends on the battle-field and throw enemies out of it. Physics for two-kinds is different, I will keep it in secret.

But joy begins whey you selected multiplayer, took pictures for your team (faces cropped) here:

Found other guy willing to play with you. He takes pictures for his team on his phone (!). Game starts and you both have all pictures. You throw his guys and keep yours, he does the same for his team.

That angry bomb also has something to do with the game, but it is secret.

I think me and Taras managed to impress people when we started taking photos of them and playing with those in front of the auditory. Great that we had server-side coverage by Roman.

I bet this gave us new emotions and inspiration for the future. We also got HTC Mozart phone as present.

Thanks

Everyone was really pleased and despite those sleepless-red-eye-faces it was clearly seen that no one was disappointed of spending 24h non-stop coding.

WP7 Mango and NUnit from console

2011-10-22T08:14:00.001+03:00

If you are building Windows Phone application you probably have faced… well… not rich support for unit testing. But of course there is one rescuing thing – WP7 is almost the same Silverlight application. Thus you have wider area to search for solution. Awesome… but I wouldn't write this blog post if everything is that easy. Right?

Support for NUnit and command line

Microsoft for some reason doesn’t care about huge community of those who use NUnit for their projects, and believe me not for small projects. So there of course is mstest project template that allows you to run tests inside of the appropriate CLR. There is good Silverlight Unit Tests Framework and here is information on how you can cheat in order to get it working for the phone. Problem with these two frameworks is obvious – they are not supporting console – they run in native for Silverlight environment – either on phone or in web. See pictures (phone and web respectively):

I know that there are ways to make it happen from console under (msbuild for example this temporary wp7ci project on codeplex). Hold on… one second. Again something very specific to Microsoft – msbuild. But what if I’m using nAnt?

Of course there is port of the NUnit for the Silverlight (here is how), also you can change tests provider in the “Silverlight Unit Tests Framework” (further SUTF).

Nevertheless summary is simple – no support for running nunit tests for the WP7 from command line.

Support for command line – solution

I came up with odd solution to force nunit-console to run unit tests in command line. After I observed it crashing with error TargetFrameworkAttribute I reflected mscorlib and googled a bit to discover this attribute exists in mscorlib of 2.0.5.0 version, but nunit actually targets 2.0.0.0 one (.net 2.0). Thus I decided to download sources of NUnit and recompiled those against .net framework 4.0 (mscorlib 2.0.5.0). Reason for this error is that Silverlight also uses higher version of mscorlib.

Awaiting for NUnit 3.0 which is promising to have support for Silverlight.

Support for Mango – problem

Before upgrading to Mango our tests for WP7 were created by testDriven (to be honest – it is what they use inside of their SUTF). We didn’t have support for command line and tests were running only because they are so Silverlight compatible.

With updating to Mango everything just died. Tests projects simply didn’t get loaded into solution. With this message:

“Not a big deal” you say. Actually a big deal, because you can get rid of this message by editing project files to have target framework profile set to WP71 and to reference only WP71 assemblies. But in this case you lose all of you compatibility with Silverlight and when you run your tests you start to get weirdest exceptions in the world like this one below:

System.DivideByZeroException : Attempted to divide by zero.
at System.Collections.ObjectModel.ObservableCollection`1..ctor()

At least this brings some more sense:

System.InvalidProgramException : Common Language Runtime detected an invalid program.

Support for Mango – solution

Solution I came up with is not 100% right, but at least it works. I just had to pretend that I’m still completely compatible with Silverlight. So I created copy of my project. One is considered to be used from command line and other for usage from VS.

Project 1 is used under VS has correct references directly to WP71 assemblies, like below:

<Reference Include="System.Windows">
<HintPath>..\Library\Silverlight\WP71\References\System.Windows.dll</HintPath>
</Reference>

This ensure that VS loads your projects without errors, also you make it think it is WP7 by these:

<TargetFrameworkProfile>WindowsPhone71</TargetFrameworkProfile>

and this:

Project 2 is used for console and is pretended to be pure Silverlight, so it has:

Which in reality copies (because of <Private>) wrong assemblies – from Silverlight, not from phone.

You would need to play a lot with which assemblies you want to get in folder where you run tests. I do have some confidence that Silverlight and WP7 are much compatible thanks to this brilliant explanation of what is WP7 from developer’s view.

Results

At #1186 I finally got build working and running tests. At #1193 I invented this Silverlight pretending trick. And finally till build number #1196 I ignored couple of incompatible tests and fixed some really failing tests.

Hope this helps someone. At least it is going to help my team.

Why am I angry at developers? Is it factory? Is it testable?

2011-10-17T19:41:00.001+03:00

Please take a look at this code snippet. What would you say about it?

    public class TreatmentDataProviderFactory
    {
        private IDataAccess _dataAccess;
        private TreatmentDataProvider _treatmentDataProviderHost;
        private TreatmentDataProviderField _treatmentDataProviderField;

        public TreatmentDataProviderFactory(IDataAccess dataAccess)
        {
            _dataAccess = dataAccess;
        }

        public ITreatmentDataProvider Provider
        {
            get
            {
                if (SomeInteractionSingleton.PluginHost.GetWorkMode() == WorkMode.ConnectedMode)
                {
                    if (_treatmentDataProviderHost == null)
                    {
                        _treatmentDataProviderHost = new TreatmentDataProvider(_dataAccess);
                    }
                    return _treatmentDataProviderHost;
                }
                else
                {
                    if (_treatmentDataProviderField == null)
                    {
                        _treatmentDataProviderField = new TreatmentDataProviderField(_dataAccess);
                    }
                    return _treatmentDataProviderField;
                }
            }
        }
    }

Doesn’t it smell bad a lot?

1) Let’s start with obvious: properties in C# are not intended to be 10-20 lines long and having complex logic. Anyway I won’t wrote post if this was a problem.

2) Now the worst mistake here: how am I supposed to test this code if it uses SomeInteractionSingleton in the if condition. Why should this code be so coupled to SomeInteractionSingleton? I wrote this post because developer didn’t run tests. If he ran the tests, he would see they fail.

3) Now second bad mistake: this code keeps two instances of data providers. We can suppose that this is storage for two providers or something? :) I think GC is designed for something and lifecycle of objects shouldn’t be treated as this. I thought IoC is invented for something like this. At least developers should not keep code that much coupled and deliver creation logic.

4) Another mistake: Is this a Factory Method design pattern? – Almost. At least it has such name and looks like it (a bit). But it doesn’t meet either its original definition or either Parameterized Factory Method definition.

I redesigned this class. See:

    public class TreatmentDataProvider
    {
        protected TreatmentDataProviderHost TreatmentDataProviderHost { get; private set; }
        protected TreatmentDataProviderField TreatmentDataProviderField { get; private set; }
        protected IPluginHost PluginHost { get; private set; }

        public TreatmentDataProvider(IPluginHost pluginHost, TreatmentDataProviderHost treatmentDataProviderHost, TreatmentDataProviderField treatmentDataProviderField)
        {
            PluginHost = pluginHost;
            TreatmentDataProviderHost = treatmentDataProviderHost;
            TreatmentDataProviderField = treatmentDataProviderField;
        }

        public ITreatmentDataProvider Provider
        {
            get
            {
                if (PluginHost.GetWorkMode() == WorkMode.ConnectedMode)
                {
                    return TreatmentDataProviderHost;
                }
                else
                {
                    return TreatmentDataProviderField;
                }
            }
        }
    }

Code above does the same logic, but it delivered control of creation of instances to other parties (IoC), also it now doesn’t have dependency on static methods, so code is less coupled. I didn’t remove this class as we have to keep verification for WorkMode at runtime. I know you might complain about these protected properties, but I like to have it that way for more flexibility when testing.

What are your thoughts? [Sentence removed 10/18/2011]

[Added 10/18/2011]

5) Yet another big mistake: Code reviewer. Guess who he was. When I’ve been reviewing this code by request of developer I just thought “it works, then it should be ok”. Why didn’t I ask about unit tests and why didn’t I took reviewing more scrupulously. I have to be more accurate when reviewing others code. Bad code reviewer.

6) Yet another mistake: writing this blog post. I understand that my criticism might be taken to close, especially if this was read. I also don’t like criticism. No one likes. Man, if you reading this you have to know I didn’t mean to abuse you or something, I just was upset at night about failing tests.

Help me select UML for book: hand-drawn or tool-prepared

2011-10-15T01:05:00.001+03:00

As you may know I’m working on Design Patterns book in Ukrainian and as most of the posts I had on patterns have UML-s, I’m considering having UML diagrams in book as well to be consistent. Thus I can either prepare them in some UML tool or just draw. See yourself.

Drawn by me

Also drawn by me, but in advanced tool

And here how it looks like when on paper

Why I like hand-drawn option

I would like to use hand-drawn variant because it will make the book look cheery and will make the difference. It might bring some interest like “So what’s is really on that diagram?”. Also I still don’t position book as an “official” book, so I would like to have some bits of unofficially. Especially taking into account that auditory is mostly young starting developers.

Why I don’t like it

I’m of course hesitating, as this variant in its origin is inaccurate (of course I can try harder). Also maintaining such diagrams is bit more difficult, but I don’t see any problem with this.

Please help me choose!

[Added later (wasn’t in original post)]

After I posted this friend suggested me to use this online uml generation tool. And it would be great another option to consider, but it generates not really what I want:

But it was extremely nice, that to generate picture above I just used this code:

# Abstract Factory
[Cat]^[WoodenCat], [Cat]^[TeddyCat]
[Bear]^[WoodenBear], [Bear]^[TeddyBear]
[IToyFactory]^[WoodenToysFactory], [IToyFactory]^[TeddyToysFactory]
[TeddyToysFactory]uses-.->[TeddyBear]
[TeddyToysFactory]uses-.->[TeddyCat]
[Client]->[IToyFactory]
[Client]->[Cat]
[Client]->[Bear]
[WoodenToysFactory]uses-.->[WoodenCat]
[WoodenToysFactory]uses-.->[WoodenBear]

Nice tool, indeed, but for extremely simple diagrams.

[Added later (15 Oct, after comments)]

After comment by Satomi Joba I tried community edition of another tool, called Astah. Below is what I was able to draw by it. Two things about it: 1) Drawing in this tool is just fabulous, smooth and easy. For me it was more quick and intuitive drawing than in such matured tools as Enterprise Architect for example. 2) Although I’m not sure I like this bold borders and I wasn’t able to quickly change styling of diagram (maybe because of edition I used?).

Anyway question is still the same: do I use hand-drawing or do I use tool?

Uneta Plus

2011-10-08T23:25:00.001+03:00

Week ago I had a chance to be at one of the best Ukrainian conferences for the recent time. Awesome conference, awesome presenters, awesome people, awesome uneta plus.

PPhoto by Mike Chaliy

Conference was far from my home in faraway city Kharkiv. I’ve been there once, when delivering MEF talk last year at ITJam2010. Even location kept the same:

Now more on conference itself. It started with keynote from two maybe most known ms guys in Ukraine – Dmitriy Nikonov and Serhiy Baidachni.

I cannot say that keynote was structured and well organized speech, it was more improvising, but having those two guys rescued it. They definitely are not new in field of presenting something, so auditory listened with attention, and all get acquainted with what’s next. Especially I really enjoyed stuff now available in TFS. It is getting matured over time.

Following presentation I attended was about Silverlight and XNA and how they live together in WP7 Mango. It wasn’t deep dive into things in Silverlight or XNA, but I enjoyed observing small UFO flying thought the auditory (background was transmitted from phone camera).

“Every game consists with 3-4 parts at each level. They are load and unload. Between those is while loop that has two calls – update game world and render game world.” – said Alex Golesh*. Now in WP 7.5 we can render both Silverlight and XNA in same application. I found this msdn page well informative.

Sharepoint for internet sites gives good business solution. I was able to see Sharepoint in action. Marat showed how we can start with file->new project and proceed to completed site, designed in sharepoint designer. Also some bits about authorization and authentication in sharepoint, and I felt like I’m guru in sharepoint… NO! I still think it is complex and not clear, but Microsoft actively pushes this product. Personally I think, that even if it is great product, it is not something that you would want to listen at programmers conference.

Lunch. Oh yeah, I really appreciate guys, who organized this event, as I could eat tasty (no really!) food without leaving conference. I guess money I paid for conference has something to do with taste of food, but believe me – it worth to pay more and get normal food.

I also attended presentation on entity framework, which consisted with two parts and was delivered in English by Diego Vega. Man, if you are reading this, you have to know – you rocked! I found this presentation to be best structured and most fulfilled with information on its topic.

Also I’m bit disappointed that I didn’t saw that amazing luster of Dmitriy Kostylev. Everyone who was in section 2 listening to him were literally excited. Ah… sad I missed that hardcore SQL optimization wisdom.

Another thing made this event different - so called “round table”. All of the speakers were gathered at the scene answering questions from auditory. I enjoyed this part as well, but left before the end, as I had train back to home.

Organizers of even asked few times about feedback. They want to hear more about what can be improved in this event, what was great and what wasn’t that much great. Here are few of my subjective thoughts:

Lower price a bit. I think more people will attend if price would be something more moderate, but who knows… you tried to balance between number of attendees and price, not me. I was frustrated about showroom not being full.
How about more sections, so I can choose if I get overview of sharepoint, tfs, or if I get flood of hardcore wp7 stuff. I just want more clear vision on what I can grasp from one or other presentation, because in some topics I feel myself confident and need advanced level, respectively in some I need introductory level.
Personally I would like to see more foreigners, like Diego. I don’t know if it is hard to have them on event, but if you bring someone like Hanselman, I bet I will visit you even I have to pay more and travel longer.
I’m not sure it worth complaining but why not Kyiv?

Despite of what I listed above uneta plus really was different sort of event of those I visited ever before because of extremely awesome presenters and great organization. Well done!

* This is how I remembered his words. I don’t promise I didn’t misinterpret something.

LvivIT #0 – it was awesome!

2011-09-18T01:13:00.001+03:00

Yet another time, I’m on .net community conference in Lviv again. This time LvivIT. You know what makes me happy about this? It is understanding that such events are happening more and more often and they become more mature in my native city. Presenters are more and more known guys. This also makes me think that we start witnessing something that is more common to big cities in USA, cities that have few or more technology user groups. At least now I know that we are moving in the right direction. Cool.

This event welcomed presenters from other cities of Ukraine. Below I’m going to list some of my and only my thoughts on all of presentations, without mentioning names of presenters.

1. This man simply rocks, he had absolutely another style of presenting. He doesn’t follow any kind of agenda and even doesn’t have presentation. He simply started with throwing two iPads into auditory with his app started on it. Application is game, that scored first place in marketplace for some period of time, thus man simply has up to 20K per day, and he is delivering his story of success to us. Main thing I got from this presentation is that if you want to succeed, you have to work on things you like and don’t compromise with different bulshit surrounding you. He ended presentation with no special attention to the audience, but started finishing soup he brought instead of lunch (in between of what? or doesn’t he have enough time to eat normally?). Everyone expressed much interest in this person and his game. I saw how much he is proud of it, when he had words with interested guys after presentation. This really inspires.

2. Second presentation was about html4 and html5 & further future of HTML and web technologies, so called web 3.0. During this presentation I got what it means when there is person in audience that takes all words of speaker into criticism and then simply gives hard time to presenter. They almost yelled at each other.

3. Believe me or not, but there was presentation on Agile, when guy said nothing about Agile itself, but gave everyone know that it really works. “AGILE! Yes!” He showed example of SorceForge implementing agile and succeeding. Another portion of presentation were results of surveys on if agile really works. From this presentation I’ve learned about another way of presenting material.

4. I’ve also learned, that presenters have to be ready before the presentation, and not show that they are not up to speed with stuff. Even when you joke about preparing some slide hour ago, you have to cover it with your deep knowledge… Or at least it is my personal thought. Ok, maybe that is because I’m experienced in material of topic presented on fourth presentation.

5. “Silverlight is not dead” first words given from him, latest presenter. He talked about features that will be added to Silverlight 5, like multicolumn text, multi-click, XAML extensions, ancestor, elevated trust, and in-browser elevated trust, graphics improvements, multicore usage, vector printing, 3D with XNA. Also presenter showed known slide on future of SL and Windows 8 with green and blue divisions of world :). Personally I liked this presentation because it clearly and honestly listed things coming in SL. I even think that one of the features can be utilized in project I’m working on now.

To summarize, I want to say that this event really was awesome! I enjoyed it very much! Well done, guys, especially Dima and sponsor and of course presenters!

Delivering presentation w/o eye-contact sucks

2011-08-29T20:26:00.001+03:00

On Thursday 18 August I delivered presentation on Software Estimation. Mainly I went thought the agenda that more-or-less matches contents of the book “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art”, as I found it covering most of the main aspects of the estimation. I prepared a lot of interesting stories and analogies to explain stuff and presented that with great dedication… but… my audience was connected on the phone (except of two in room with me) and we did not have web cam (our IT dep. failure)… so… it really sucked.

I simply cannot know if they accept words and jokes I produce, thus I cannot understand if I have do adjust my speech. Also it is not possible to know if audience gets information easily or it goes hard. Asking audience different questions and getting response from them is also hard. Much more conversation was going between me and two people in meeting room. Long story short, when there is no visual feedback presenting information makes me, as presenter, frustrated. Of course it is not secret that it is important to have eye-contact with audience, I just wanted to complain a bit.

Ok, as we live in bureaucracy and connected world, there was feedback – filled survey. And you know what? It s***ed again – I got only 3 records in survey, even they are very positive (except complains on work of IT) it means only one thing – my audience didn’t admire the presentation. I won’t be surprised if 2 of 3 responses are from guys listening to me in the meeting room.

Just upgraded to AutoMapper 1.1 RTM

2011-08-24T12:51:00.001+03:00

Just upgraded AutoMapper to 1.1 version. What is really funny about this update is that we used pre-release version of this tool in production. And it worked well, even there were some bugs, so I’m having some doubts if we relied on some of those bugs : ).

Here are Release notes we should benefit from:

For the 1.0 RTM: http://automapper.codeplex.com/releases/view/39791 For the 1.1 RTM: http://automapper.codeplex.com/releases/view/44802

Honestly I did not find some major changes and there were no obvious (compile error) breaking changes, even we used many of AutoMapper features. There are slight performance improvements and added features that we probably don’t need or maybe need. Thus I would like to complain about AutoMapper a bit – it is lacking documentation. Sometimes it is much easier to read about some feature and realize “aha, great, now we can utilize this capability!”.

There is only one hint to upgrading process I would like to add. When upgrading version I guess you would usually replace path to assembly in all *.csproj, but don’t be lazy and do full search in other files, as you might have different build/deploy scripts that push 3rdParty components to appropriate folders.

Upgrading to higher version of NHibernate w/ FluentNH

2011-08-23T17:43:00.002+03:00

“How much would it take?” – Yeah, it is interesting question, which we gave to ourselves being maybe 3rd year of developing projects based on NHibernate. We took quick look and from top of the head it looks like it would take a lot of time, because FluentNhibernate has changed syntaxes, because there might be something not working after changes, etc.

You know what? I was able to change version of NHibernate and make it working for us within 25 minutes.

It just proves known statement about giving estimates: “Judge as last resort!” Better compute and much better count if applicable.

So what is needed to be changed when you are upgrading to higher version of NHibernate w/ FluentNHiberante (from 2.0.0.4000 to 3.1.0.4000):

Download compatible versions of NH and FNH. Usually FNH is step behind. (see release notes)
Update references of your projects if you have folders for versions of 3rdParties.
Update fluent initialization of NH with adding proxyfactory, like below:

var configuration = new Configuration();
var properties = new Dictionary<string, string>();
properties.Add("proxyfactory.factory_class", "NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.ProxyFactoryFactory, NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle");

4. Also you would need to reference NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle in your starting project.

5. Update fluent mapping with removing different noise code like below (if you are below 1.0 version):

We had about 250 mapping files so “Ctrl+H” had to be used a lot.
6. Run your application and see if you don’t have any issues.

So, long story short, updating to higher version of NH is not painful. It is still not clear if it has big impact or not, especially for big project.

If we decide to upgrade I will let you know if testing shows big impact.

My 200th blog post. Sometimes it is hard to blog.

2011-08-22T16:07:00.001+03:00

Hello. Officially this is my 200th blog post.

In my “100th blog post” I wrote that blogging pays off and indeed it brought me many cool things, like knowledge, opportunities, also I became noticeable by others in my company.

In that hundred posts I finished my series on design patters. I prepared for being senior developer and became him. I delivered many presentations, including one big it-jam. I wrote few popular posts on career plan and interviews. I had many other not less interesting posts.

It took me 9 months to have those first 100 posts and now I see that next portion took me over year. Interesting… when will I get my 300th post. Would it take year, less, or more? I cannot answer, but I know that blogging started to be hard for me. Not because I don’t have things to blog about, but because I don’t stop myself for few moments to write about something. Almost each day I have some challenges at work, I can blog about. I read many interesting stuff, which I can try out and blog about. But I don’t.

I know, I know real blogger shouldn’t write such posts. And I wouldn’t even try to convince anyone that I’ve been very busy or something… I had lot of routine stuff that many people have all their life. I had nothing unusual but for some reason lost feeling of the road I’ve decided to take. Why did I?

I have disease – I often think that I will do the stuff later, maybe in the evening or tomorrow. And when I think so I do nothing next day. It is damn stupid habit. For the dozen of weeks I thought that I will post latest 2 design patterns, but I did not. Some time passed and I had them on my blog, but it was too hard.

Why do I think that I will do all the stuff tomorrow? It is not possible. There are guys at work that never think that way. They are so much responsible, they fill that cannot left working place until some good portion of their job is done. WTF? Why I don’t have such skill?

I probably didn’t read my blog for some long time! I need to! Here is something that gives me some advices on how I should proceed.

Where have I been? Nothing is going to be tomorrow if I do nothing today!

I DO NOT LEAVE THINGS FOR TOMORROW!!!

Book Review: “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art”

2011-08-17T22:12:00.001+03:00

Finally I have another post on read book (after so long time not ~~reading~~ posting). This time book is on software estimation called “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art”.

This is first book that I read about estimation end-to-end, and I have to say that it is extremely good and I think it covers most of the topics needed to be able to see how estimation works.

It consists with three parts, each gives you good set of knowledge, first one on core concepts, second on fundamental techniques and third one on challenges you might dive in when estimating.

Honestly I started to read this book, because I knew that I will have presentation/training to deliver. I heard about most of the concepts mentioned in book, but (!) book gave great insight into them and from different perspectives so I started to wish that I had reconsidered all of the many estimates I gave in the past.

I would really recommend you to read this book as it helps you to think deeper when working on estimates.