improve.it

How to make Firefox and Cassini fall in love again

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:10:00 GMT

I’ve been using Firefox as my default browser of choice long before i started with .net development. Even with latest IE8 developer tools and debugging support i still find Firefox/Firebug most flexible combination in client-side web development.

But, one thing kept bothering me throughout whole time of my asp.net experience: whenever i hit Ctrl + F5 i waited a whole eternity until my page was fully loaded. Compared with any version of IE performing the same task, this was embarrassing fact.

I even blamed Microsoft to make me give up on Firefox just because of that. But i was wrong.

As i found out googling for for a solution to this issue, this issue can be reproduced on a machines which have IPv6 installed. While i was not able to find out where exactly lies the problem (Firefox or Cassini itself) i found out that there are two ways to solve this issue:

1. Disabling IPv6 support in Firefox

Most of the authors that i found out about suggest this approach as quickest and cleanest solution. What you need to do is basically to open configuration settings in Firefox (about:config) and to change network.dns.disableIPv6 setting to true. This is shown at the picture bellow:

2. Change localhost settings in your hosts file

This came to me as an idea to check where and how can i interfere in IPv6 settings on my machine. I saw one of the comments on above mentioned sources saying that one can get rid of the problem by simply replacing localhost with machine name in the url.

It didn’t took me long to check and see that disabling my IPv6 localhost lookup does the same thing as disabling IPv6 directly in Firefox.

What you need to do is basically to comment / delete this particular line in your hosts file:

#::1 localhost

Note: ::1 notation is IPv6 equivalent of the IPv4 127.0.0.1 lookup address.

I believe the second solution might be more suitable for users who do not want to disable IPv6 in general, and the first one for all others that still do not use IPv6 in their regular work.

Hope Firefox users will find this usable.

Code Camp 2009 follow-up

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:55:00 GMT

On June 13th, our .net user group has organized by far the biggest developer event in Macedonia – Code Camp 2009. It was a real pleasure to see so many developers (according to organizers around 130+ attendees) at one place, and all with strong reason – 5 out of 6 presenters were MVPs, some of them highly recognized and respected authorities in international .net community.

I want to share my view on some of the presentations that i found interesting.

Serge Luca had a really cool and warming up sessions about Sharepoint. I missed his talk at Microsoft Vizija, so this was like a revelation to me. Finally i heard someone to clearly explain what Sharepoint is and what is not. And as a second benefit – i found a meaningful usage of the Workflow Foundation (at least, amen!). After all, we are speaking about company’s most valuable and yet to be expanded platform to date. It looks to me that couple of years from now number of projects for sharepoint development will be equal to standard asp.net development. This is, indeed a great platform to build up on.

Boban Stojanovski gave us a great introductory talk about Parallel Computing – a new paradigm in software development (ok, may be not that new, but definitely in). If i was about to choose one particular presentation from the whole event – this one would surely be my favorite. Coming to a Code Camp was worth if you only attended this one! After giving a deep introduction to the software/hardware evolution (“No more free lunch” – i liked this one!), Boban presented TPL – an upcoming .net library (it’s part of .net framework 4.0) which addresses parallel programming issues in .net world. I learned a new thing that day.

Next, Martin Kulov gave us a nice overview of new distributed caching platform coming out from Microsoft – Velocity (i wonder where the name came from :) ). The talk was ok, but what strike me most out of whole speech was the intro. You heard me right, introduction. Martin talked about current best practices in improving asp.net application and mentioned some of “the must” settings for any high profile site. One of the settings was completely new to me:

<gcServer enabled=”true” />

Things like this are real treasure and for itself worth coming to events like this. Kudos to Martin for bringing the best of both old & new worlds.

On of the most interesting presentations came from Srdjan Bozovic. Deciding with the majority of the audience to held his talk on Serbian instead of English was a great success. Srdjan was more relaxed and spontaneous, and also the jokes he made by the way were much more meaningful in given language context (although i never heard him presenting in English – maybe i’m wrong about that?). Regardless of presenting technicalities, the content of the talk was quite interesting. I think this was the first time that DLR was presented in front of Macedonian .net community. I would like to hear more of that. Some in depth presentations of IronPyton or IronRuby will definitely be something worth to attend at.

Srdjan’s talk was also interesting from another point – given the fact that we do not have such strong language barriers it is relatively easy to exchange presenters for our monthly gatherings. After all, exchanging experience is what this is all about.

Overall, i think the first Macedonian .net Code Camp was great event. Congrats to the organizer for perfect organization and making this idea happen. I would like to see events like this organize in a regular fashion.

Visual Studio : How to work with different tab settings per project

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:55:00 GMT

I started working on a new project which has a "slightly" different environment settings than the usual coding standards in my company. Namely, we use insert spaces as coding guideline, while the new project uses keep tabs as option for indenting. Tabs/Indent size is the same as default - 4 spaces.

Normally, in such case it would be very difficult (almost impossible) to work simultaneously on several projects and to keep up with specific settings across the projects. At some point of time i will mess up one of the projects with the settings from the other one - and i'll end up with strange diffs in my source code repository.

I thought that it would be nice if such settings could be carried across project/solution files and completely transparent for us, developers, but that's only wishful thinking.

The solution that i came up with is based on a Visual Studio ResetSettings switch for restoring of the settings. According to the MSDN documentation, it is possible to have an optional argument for this switch in the form of .vssettings file with your own custom VS settings. Bingo!

I exported the different settings for Tab handling into two files:

and created two shortcuts in my start menu:

with the following shortcut target values:

VS 2008 - Spaces : "path-to-your-vs\devenv.exe" /ResetSettings "d:\vs_spaces.vssettings"

VS 2008 - Tabs : "path-to-your-vs\devenv.exe" /ResetSettings "d:\vs_tabs.vssettings"

Now the only thing that i have to remember is which project works with which settings :)

Apart from that and the fact that i have to wait for additional 5-10 sec. upon each VS startup, i found this solution useful and workable.

Best of 2008

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:37:00 GMT

An interesting year came to an end. I'm usually not a fond of a "top N" or "best of best" and other sort of lists, but there are some interesting key events that marked the year 2008 in my eyes and i want to share that view with you.

So dear readers, here is my list of top 3 events that marked 2008:

1. Foundation of Macedonian .Net User Group

I started thinking about joining/founding of a .net user group somewhere in the Q3 of 2007, and exactly on March, 5th 2008 i got an email announcing the foundation of the first .net user group in Macedonia! Btw. couple of months earlier, the first Java user group in Macedonia was founded too - JUGMK, and i really, really appreciate this trend of breaking communication barriers between professional developers. Definitely the way to go!

2. ASP.Net MVC

For someone who has played with Ruby on Rails and liked it for its simplicity and conventions, ASP.Net MVC came as a true gift. Not that we didn't had something based on MVC before - Castle Project is at the moment still more mature and complete solution than MVC Framework. But the fact that Microsoft stands behind it, and that is open source at the same time - gives me a feeling that we finally got our dream toy to play with.

3. DevReach 2008

My first "real" .Net Conference. And i liked it!

That was it. I intentionally tried to keep the list short, cause i don't like long and boring list where i must put all events that i can think of just for the sake of it.

And now, for the best of the best winner of 2008:

Microsoft

Although i don't like maybe half of the products they make, nor the global company policy and "bad image" they have, i must admit:

- I was constantly thrilled by the moves and trends that especially developer department made this year. They braked the bad image of non listening autocratic company they had, and started to nourish completely different approach toward community.

IMHO, acquiring well established evangelists was the key move they maid and this helped a lot in opening of the Redmond's doors toward community.

I just wish that this trend continue and that we'll see more and more positive surprises from the excellent teams in Redmond.

There. I've said it.

I'm off for this year. See you in 2009.

Happy holidays!

DevReach 2008 - Two Thumbs Up!

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:48:00 GMT

I attended the conference for the first time this year - and I liked it!

The conference:

What impressed me the most was a noticeable shift toward Agile methodologies, in particular TDD. Although such intention was first promoted with VS 2005 Team System (MSF Agile Pack comes to my mind) this is the time where these paradigms are finally put on table and available to all developers in the .net world.

There were three presentations addressing TDD, several of them discussing application design and one or two even explaining what Agile methodology is and how to adopt it (The Daily Scrum ) .

What I liked the most were the two presentations by Steve Smith named "Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks (And Tools) (Part 1 & 2)". The reason for this: they came to me at the time when I was dwelling into the topic of optimization and performance improvement my self. From that perspective - those two presentations gave me the most valuable information. Steven held another presentation tightly related with the first two - "ASP.NET Performance and Scaling" but I didn't get to this one - it was at the same time with the most visited presentations of all: Fun with HTTP Handlers (and Security) by Miguel Castro who I think was the star of the conference.

What I missed watching was a Q&A Panel organized by .Net Rocks host Carl Franklin. The topic was How Will Web Development Be Done Next? , and according to the attendees it was great. I hope Carl with put it on site soon so I can listen to it.

The reason for missing one of my favorite podcasts (this is where I've heard about DevReach in the first place) is cause at the same time I attended a presentation on Castle Project - "The Castle Project - Open Source Kick-Ass MVC/ORM/IoC Framework" by Branimir Giurov.

I was very enthusiastic about the presentation, but it left me somehow disappointed. Why?

I think that the presenter somehow missed the momentum. In the period where ASP.NET MVC is gaining more and more interest I needed some points and reasons why should I choose Castle over MVC. Instead, we got an incomplete overview of Castle's features and frameworks (which has enough material for organizing conference on it's own). Anyway, kudos to Branimir for standing up and defending the Castle.

The organization:

It wasn't that easy to get to Sofia, but we made it! And hey - it was fun. You can see it for yourself :)

The conference was well organized, with lots of food, snacks and drinks. I liked the live streaming rooms where it was possible to virtually attend some of the presentations where all seats were taken or the space was simply too small to get everyone - great idea.

What I disliked - the official site. Although nicely designed and well organized - it lacked two (crucial) functions which are a must for such sites: search and update. It was not possible to search either for presenters or presentations or .. anything. And last, i would like to see such sites update their content regularly along with notifications for changes on scheduled presentations as well as for overall information about the conference and everything around it. Hope to see this better organized next year.

See you at DevReach 2009!

jQuery & Microsoft

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 12:29:00 GMT

I'm sure for most of you this is already old news - but for me this is The news of the day:

Microsoft is going to make jQuery part of the official dev platform. jQuery will come with Visual Studio in the long term, and in the short term it'll ship with ASP.NET MVC. We'll also ship a version includes Intellisense in Visual Studio.

For me, this is first time to see that Microsoft will include an Open Source project into their main development product, if not at any product level too.

This is definitely the way a would like to see Microsoft is heading. Embracing good tools is a pragmatic approach, as opposite to creating analogous tools that are half as good as the original ones. Credit to the asp.net team (for me the most pragmatic team in Redmond by far).

One other thing that I'm glad about is that we recently started to consider jQuery as our JavaScript framework of choice, based on a really good feedback from the community. And this news just proved our decision!

Registry read on 64 bit Vista

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:50:00 GMT

Couple of days ago i upgraded my desktop (actually changed it) from Vista Business 32 bit to 64 bit one. Except for the fact that it provides me more memory, i was happy to dive into the world of 64 bitness.

One thing that got me aware that I'm on a new platform was a simple registry read from my web app that I'm working on. The app itself reads an registry key on startup and gets the connection string from there. But somehow, the app was not able to take the key although the key was there.

After short research i find out that since Visual Studio process devenv.exe is 32 bit process and it runs under virtualization. This is how 64bit OS handles the compatibility with 32 bit applications. And to go one step further - it also virtualizes registry.

One good point about that was to separate the same registry values that can apply to 32 bit and 64 bit versions of the same app, which I respect and I think it makes sense.

So, for all the 32 bit application, the registry key that I was looking for was not:

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\MyRegKey"

but instead of that, they were in a new node that separates 32 bit virtualized registry from native 64 bit one:

"HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\MyRegKey"

Simple as that!

Maintenance problems - svn to the rescue

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:42:49 GMT

The case: Maintaining web project that is in production for over a year.

The problem: Blocking bug on production server

The solution: Checkout of the latest release revision, bug fix, test and deploy.

Problem solved!

This looks like a really simple approach to solving maintenance problems. However, in order to accomplish this you have to meet one important prerequisite: Version Control System (VCS).

I had a luck to start working with VCS at the same time of starting software development, so this became something natural for me. Maybe that is why I'm so surprised to hear from time to time that some developers are even not familiar with the concept of versioning of their code base. I got used to this concept in my daily life, and I almost never start or do any development without it, even if it is a single person project (especially single person projects - this is where you'll want this after a while).

I intend to address this topic in more details in some future posts, cause I must stress out the importance of it.

Now, back to the case. The web project that I mentioned above has been in both maintenance and development mode at the same time, and I assume that this is the case with significant amount of web projects. It is in production for over a year and it is continuously developed and improved with new features.

Since the same development team is doing both new development and maintenance it was sort of logical to have one code base for both usages. In the beginning we used Visual Source Safe. It was nicely integrated with VS, we had no significant problems using it, but once the given scenario appeared (when we rolled out our first version tin production) things started to look more and more messy. At this point i began to understand why is this system so unpopular in the community. We needed a solution that can be flexible enough and to allow different developers to work on different versions of the software without getting at each other's way. After one unsuccessful tryout with branching under VSS it was time for us to search for better solution.

Our choice at that time was to use Subversion. It also became a standard VCS in our company, and the integration with Visual Studio wasn't that bad. Given the fact that most of the open source projects (particularly .net projects) were developed and hosted under svn, I felt strong about this choice and we migrated to it soon after that.

Now back to the problem. Having svn as new VCS, we immediately started using it's potential - branching. Our branching strategy at first was to branch only in cases of huge Change Requests and to implement small changes as well as bug fixes in the trunk. It wasn't too long after that when we faced the problem: blocking bug in production that demanded an immediate fix and release. Now, since we had other smaller changes in our trunk version and since those changes were not planned to be released before some planned date - it was difficult for us to see at that point how to avoid this problem. So we released those changes and we wanted to think that this is something like a mini-release or added feature. Sometimes it was good to have those other fixes earlier, and sometimes was bad - mostly due to unfinished testing of the latest changes.

The solution came to me spontaneously, after some time of usage and familiarization with subversion and it's possibilities. It was just that simple to checkout the revision of the code that was released in production and to fix the bug. With this approach, we end up with the exact code base + bug fixed = no other changes to test and worry about.

In fact, I was able to now choose if I want to make added value to the fix by including other fixes (for which I was 100% sure that are safe to deploy). This was the moment of revelation for me and I felt good about the choice of migrating to svn. It added more quality and less maintenance issues to our work, along with other nice features that I plan to blog about in some other occasion.

Lesson learned: After few consultations with experienced developers from my company, we decided to reorganize our branching strategy a bit: we kept our rule for branching in case of big (or still not well defined) CRs and we introduced so called - maintenance branch. This branch was created (branched from trunk) once we got new release, so it lives with that release in particular. Any problems or immediate changes that need to be deployed beside planned ones are done in that branch, tested, deployed, and after that, those changes are merged back to trunk. Once we have a new release, the previous maintenance branch is decommissioned (i.e. not used) and we create new one which follows current base. This way no one from the team get's blocked, and everyone can focus on their work.

I hope this put some light on version control and it's usage in our everyday life. If you still working without it and messing around with folders and copies i would suggest that you adopt it as soon as possible - no serious work can be done without - at least no experienced developer can take you seriously if you don't know how to use it.

The future of .net

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:48:00 GMT

Couple of days ago i listened to one of the more interesting and funnier podcast from .NET Rocks!- Future of .NET Panel at DevTeach Toronto.

The tile is intriguing enough, the speakers are know to me from various sources and i feel nothing but respect for all of them. Highly recommended.

The shows speaks about DSL, about lack of development constraints in the .net development world, there is also few words from Ted Neward about comparison of java and c#. A huge accent is given on poor API support for testability in most of the microsoft development products...

Speaking of which, more than a year ago i discovered podcasting.

Getting to hear and learn proven developers thoughts on certain topics was a great revelation for me. Beside that, i was able to get tips, advices, to know what tooling are they using, to hear about the latest trends and hypes in .net developer community - in other words, i felt that i'm catching up with the current .net flows in our broad community.

The whole idea with podcasting and commuting was a great news for me. However, having a commute time of less than 4 minutes from my home to work (i'm riding a bike regullary) was not quite suitable for listening to podcasts. I mostly listen to them while traveling. But what is also handsome with the podcasts, at least the ones that i'm listening to, are the pdf transcripts of the shows that i often use to print out.

One other good podcast that i gladly recommend is hanselminutes. The host is Scot Hanselman, and the themes he speaks about can be described as everyday issues in a developer's life. He tend to host various and interesting guest which are in some way specialists in their area of work, so one can realy learn a lot from them.

Another interesting phenomena related to podcasting is screencasting (podcasting on steroids). With increased bandwidths and improved web technologies, taking a video screening instead of audio recording was a natural way to go. I would like to talk about that in more details on some of my future posts.

So stay tuned and happy listening!

Jazoon '08 impressions

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:13:00 GMT

Update: You can see the keynotes for yourself now thanks to parleys. Just search for jazoon08 tag.

Two weeks ago i attended Jazoon - Java conference in Zurich, Switzerland.

Although the conference was all about Java and Java-related technologies it was really useful for me as a .net developer to be part of it. The point is that if you step back and de-focus of the platform/technology presented, you'll be able to see the model, architecture or design of the presented solutions which i can freely say - is platform independent.

After all, stepping out of the regular .net development and reviving my knowledge of my previous platform of choice (yes, i'm coming from java camp) was a pleasure. It is always nice to see how the whole community around Java is constantly evolving and you can tell by events like this about the current hypes and shifts in the technology focus in the software industry in general.

The conference it self was very well organized and there were plenty of presentations and topics to choose upon (there were 5 parallel track for technical talks). This can sometimes be tricky, as two talks of interest can be held at the same time, so you must choose one (or change rooms constantly which will only make you tired).

(Please visit the site to view this media)

The main focus on such events are definitely the Keynotes. This year we were able to see plenty of speakers which are well recognized in the software industry:

Martin Odersky opened this year Jazoon with an interesting talk about scalable languages. He mostly talked about Scala, functional and truly OOP language based na Java that he invented. The paradigm of functional languages is gaining it's momentum for sure.

Ted Neward - Neward & Associates is well known specialist when comes to software architecture in both java and .net camps. He's talk was the most inspiring of them all. The main point he gave is that we, as developers are responsible for architecture design choices, and that we need to rethink that process a lot. What we do is that by inertion, we always tend to reuse the same technology we work with from project to project, regardless of project's requirements and technology applicability in that area. What we know is that we feel comfortable in that domain and this is, in most cases, path to disaster. So, the main point of this talk was: Stop. Think. Rethink. Be sure that tools you use will be the ones most suitable for the problem you're trying to resolve.

Roy T. Fielding is one of the authors of HTTP and the creator of REST Architecture.He's working as Chief Scientist at Day Software, company that had 6 presenters on this year Jazoon. His talk on Open Architectures was focusing on openness of the architecture in terms of extensibility and scalability. One of the key points presented was that open source is not the prerequisite for success of the software - it is the open architecture that counts. As an examples, he mentioned couple of such architectures, like: Mozilla Firefox, Emacs, Eclipse Platform etc.

Simon Phipps is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems. His talk about open source in the enterprise business was really inspiring. Actually, the fact that Sun's core business model is focused around open source solutions and providing of service & support was really interesting. He convinced the audience that open source can p(l)ay well in the enterprise business. More on his Adoption-led theory can be found on his blog.

Last day of the conference was reserved for Joshua Bloch. He is a Principal Engineer at Google and author of "Effective Java" - the book, and also one of the contributors to Java platform (Java Collections, java.math.). He had three talks on Jazoon, and each one of them was interesting in his own way. When he talked about the famous closures what got me was the energy he put in in order to defend his believes. Whit such carrying community, you don't have to worry about the future of the platform.

Beside the above speakers and talks, there were plenty of other interesting presentations which also deserve attention. More details can be found on Jazoon official site: jazoon.com.

Overall, i suggest that if you have chance to attend similar event, do not hesitate to do so. Even if you're not part of the target audience. Sometimes, seeing things from a different perspective can bring additional value and new points reveals that cannot be seen otherwise. Also, communication with other developers, your colleagues is very important for your personal growth as a developer - is all about communication!

One of those [Dev]Days

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:18:00 GMT

Four days since the first developer days e.g. DevDays 2008 event happened, and i still don't see any reaction in our (small but growing) .net community. No blog post, forum opinion, nothing. One can get impression that event like this never happened.

And i am, on the other hand, still under strong impressions. I'm very enthusiastic about the whole .net user group/community organization. Gatherings, discussions, presentations, workshops, with one word - communication, (ok, 4 words) exchange of ideas, is something that push the whole industry forward. And i will always support this type of activities.

If i need to express my oppinion on this event with one word only, i would choose this one: Surprise!

Yes, i was surprised, and not just once, but throughout the whole process. Let me explain this a little bit:

1. Announcement
   I check for news and activities at mkdot.net site quite often. And i was pleasantly surprised when i discovered DevDays 2008!. I registered immediately, without any hesitation. The fact that microsoft was the organizer of the event along with the eminent presenters from Croatia got me even more thrilled.
All in all - A very pleasant surprise!

2. The Event
   After the quick and simple check in, short and fine key note, the real event started.
The first presenter was Tomislav Bronzin, vice president of ineta europe, and regional microsoft director for South Eastern Europe. Beside those two, he had a lot of other titles, MVP as the most appealing one.
   And when he started his presentation about WPF, VS 2008 Blend and other related tools and technologies - i was again surprised. I felt that his presentation wasn't aimed to us developers, but for little children instead. To discuss about buttons and properties, to repeat that focus is not on the scenario - but on tools, to give us tips and tricks on how restarting VS can help your build process... I don't know. This is where i got confused. A lot!
   From one side, i expected a lot more. I expected focus on technology it self. What problems does it solves, what are the benefits, foresights and downsides of it. Why those new technologies aren't used as much as they should (the whole workflow group was released more than two years ago).
   Instead, we got presentations with rotating text boxes and pointless discussions about inconsistencies between Blend and VS 2008!
   So it was natural to ask my self weather my expectations were too high, or am i way too serious about .net and stuff which are - see for yourself - soo simple and... simple. If you have any issues - just restart your VS. Everything will be solved with a blink of an eye.
   And what was all that about pointing fingers on various bugs and glitches in the VS 2008/Blend. Does that have to do something with the application design and technology usage? Big deal if i cannot double click on a button in order to create wired code behind event handler. Is this one of the greatest achievements of .net developers? To forget about simple editing of files and coding by hand... only if intelisense is available, of course. Whithouth intelisense, technology which is used has no meaning to us. It's useless.

But look ma - i got intelisense for JavaScript! Now i can introduce the great return of the JavaScript in web based technologies. Cause i got intelisense!!! Or split view! Wow - that was a direct hit. Now we can have split view as dreamveawer user have. Disappointing.

The next presenter was Dobrisa Adamec - ineta country leader for Croatia. His Silverlight introduction somehow lost the point when he tried to import XAML file previously created by Tomislav in his WPF example. He started replacing some of the incompatible tags and... decided that this is bad idea and opened another project with already prepared look alike example! So much for Silverlight.

Next we saw a short presentation about testing which seemed more interesting, especially the load testing primer. The presenter didn't left the impression that he's familiar with the unit testing concept well, but i might be wrong, didn't payed too much attention cause i was too sleepy. Why, cause it was damn boring.

And last and final presentation was about Team Foundation System. I wanted to ask the presenter weather they used some other PM system before TFS - but felt like i will be damned by the 80% of the audience if i prolong this event even for a second. Anyway, it is good to see that microsoft is working in the area of CI and other software life cycle aspects, but developers must not forget that there are dozen of other useful and excellent tools which are widely accepted and used.

3. Organization

I have only one big remark on organization. Lack of Wi-Fi access. Although there were couple of wireless networks available, the organizer was not able to provide us with stable connection. Even the presenters were using GPRSmodules for access on their notebooks. I was assuming that Wi-Fi is something very common and natural to expect, especially on such events.

I cannot think of any good conclusion that can finish this post. I can only hope that next events will be more productive and motivating than this one. After all, the first ones are thrown into the river - aren't they?

Read it

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:39:00 GMT

There are tons and tons of software development books out there, and each year this number is rapidly growing. It is clear that ordinary developer can hardly cope with such an excessive offer. With this in mind, the question is simple:

"What should i read? Which title will give me the most comprehensive and accurate information?"

This is a hard question. And as it's always the case with hard questions - there is no an simple answer.

At first, the huge variety of choices, compelling titles (like how you'll learn everything you need for xx hours, sometimes even minutes :) ), might push you away, you might think that most of that pile is crap (which is not far from the truth), but this is a bad excuse!

Bottom line is that this shouldn't be the reason for not reading books!

Someone who wants to read, and better yet - knows how to read, can benefit even from the bad titles (sometimes you have to learn how not to do things, and sometimes you can simply write a bad review about it). It is the job of community to read and recommend the good ones and read and tell others to avoid bad titles.

How many times have you decided to buy certain book only on good recommendations that you've read before. Or got it from a friend or colleague. Even further, how many times have you heard about new books only by reading other peoples reviews and recommendations? I do it on a daily basis.

I like to read. A lot. Sometimes i got the feeling that i do nothing else but reading. I read blogs, sites, articles, magazines, books, podcast transcripts - you name it. And even with all that amount of data around us, all the digital knowledge that is at our hands, reading (hard copy) books is somehow a unique feeling. I like that feeling.

It is true that with todays way of life (on a fast line) and with amount of work we have to do on a daily basis there is hardly a free time when you can escape from the everyday reality and start a private session with the author(s). If the author is an authority in the field, you can consider yourself privileged to have the opportunity to see how and about what this person is thinking...

Having this in mind, and the question from the begining, my advice to you is - read it!

If you have the desire (key factor for success) and motivation, if you can find time for this useful habit, you are on the right path. And you will not even notice when the best books will start filling you shelves and your appetite for knowledge.

Bon Appétit!

Blog concept

Ljubomir Zivanovic — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 01:39:00 GMT

So i got me a blog. Nice. I was planning to do so for some time now, and the whole "avalanche" with .net user group helped this idea to come to its realization.

Now that i'm here, i'm asking myself:

What should i write about?

Best practices (from my daily work)
In our day to day work we're constantly faced with solving various types of problems. Posting about solutions and experience from my daily work is what should come here.
Areas of interests
Im interested in overall professional growth. I want to be better in all fields: coding, planning, designing, communicating, leading, following... No strict scope, but one mutual key factor - desire for improvement.
Tools
We all have our own arsenal of tools that we use in our daily work. Some of them can make you smile, while others can piss you off sometimes.
It is important to nourish and improve your tool shed as it is normal to do so in any other profession.
Learning
Did i mention this one before? It's all about learning... and unlearning something when it gets in your way.

I hope this blog will be a small but valuable contribution to our community.

Let's role...