Peter Bahaa's Blog

Open Data Protocol (OData)

2011-04-03T17:02:46+00:00

I have post a new bog at Integrant blog, you can see at http://integrant.com/2011/04/01/open-data-protocol/

Coding Standards and Best Practices : Dealing with strings Part (1)

2010-08-19T04:57:40+00:00

Week ago i started a series of blog posts about coding standards and best practices and i will be posting those post between my personal and Integrant blogs, as one of the most things i love about Integrant is that all the developers are concerned about using coding standards and best practices and approaches,

As best practices and coding standards works like a contract between the developers to ensure maintainability, readability, performance and usability, for example I’m writing a piece of code in a certain module and for whatever reason I will not be able to continue coding in that nodule, and another developer need to do some changes in the code due some changes in customer requests, do if this code being wrote with coding standards, the other developer will be easily able to read it, and using best practices for sure will help that developer to maintain this code easily, and even can reuse it in another module, Most of developers can write “Working Code” but not “Efficient Code”.

and this time a common issue i have faced working with Mid-Level and Junior developers is dealing with strings, like the following example

1 string userName = "Peter Bahaa";
2 string message = "Hi Mr. ( " + userName + ")";

The issue is that adding + operator after the “Hi Mr.” string initializing another object in the memory, Perhaps concatenating two string with plus format will not affect your application performance, but imaging that each time you want to concatenate two string together - for any purpose (special formatting , display a specific message) – by adding a plus will create another object in the memory , and simply by using String.Format that will enhance your application performance, so there are a great function called String.Format this function is simply doing formatting and decoration for your string, and also you can set the culture for this formatting so you can use it when in multi language application development. for example

1 string message = String.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "Hi {0} {1}; your birthday is: {2:MMMM dd yyyy} and you won {3:C3}", title, userName, birthdate, prize);

So using String.Format will ease the job and will grantee no more object creation in the memory For more info about String.Format see the following link http://blog.stevex.net/string-formatting-in-csharp/

One more thing about dealing with strings is when we just want to concatenate two or more string or a hug number of strings

for small number of strings you can use String.Concat and never use the + operator to concatenate strings

1 String.Concat("Peter", " ", "Bahaa")

and for large amount of strings always use StringBuilder Class

1 StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
2 builder.Append("Message \n\r");
3 builder.AppendFormat(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, "Hi {0} {1}; your birthday is: {2:MMMM dd yyyy} and you won {3:C3}", title, userName, birthdate, prize);
4 Console.Write(builder.ToString());

I hope this helps :) , Have a nice day every one.

Implementing Multithreaded Singleton Class

2010-08-17T09:46:47+00:00

You are building an application in C#. You need a class that has only one instance, and you need to provide a global point of access to the instance. You want to be sure that your solution is efficient and that it takes advantage of the Microsoft .NET common language runtime features. You may also want to make sure that your solution is thread safe.

Multithreaded Singleton

Static initialization is suitable for most situations. When your application must delay the instantiation, use a non-default constructor or perform other tasks before the instantiation, and work in a multithreaded environment, you need a different solution.

The following implementation allows only a single thread to enter the critical area, which the lock block identifies, when no instance of Singleton has yet been created:

 1 using System;
 2 
 3 public sealed class Singleton
 4 {
 5    private static volatile Singleton instance;
 6    private static object syncRoot = new Object();
 7 
 8    private Singleton() {}
 9 
10    public static Singleton Instance
11    {
12       get 
13       {
14          if (instance == null) 
15          {
16             lock (syncRoot) 
17             {
18                if (instance == null) 
19                   instance = new Singleton();
20             }
21          }
22 
23          return instance;
24       }
25    }
26 }

volatile to ensure that assignment to the instance variable completes before the instance variable can be accessed

The class is marked sealed to prevent derivation, which could add instances

Originally taken from http://privacy.microsoft.com/en-us/default.mspx

I hope this helps :)

Coding Standards and Best Practices : Avoid using strings in CODE PLEASE!

2010-08-05T08:08:55+00:00

I decided to start a series of posts about coding standards and best practices, the point is, why do we need to keep our eyes open on coding standards and best practices approaches, because simply coding is about maintainability, so following up this standers and practices will really add a real value to our code.

Year ago i was working DashSoft and our CEO Remon Zakaria and he told me one of the most major thing that makes you judge someone’s code is have strings inside the code, I’m talking about something like this

1 /// <summary>
2 /// Registers the controls tool tips.
3 /// </summary>
4 private void RegisterControlsToolTips()
5 {
6     this.uxControlsContainer.ToolTip = "All Page Controls container";
7     this.uxSaveCommand.ToolTip = "Save a new control to page";
8     this.uxCancelCommand.ToolTip = "Cancel all changes";
9 }

So that is totally wrong because simply if the customer asked to change some tooltips, controls names or whatever textual data, we will need to go change it in the code and then recompile the project, which means our software will need one more cycle of Regression testing rather than have acceptance testing, so that will consume more time of the project resources,

One more issue if the customer asked to have multiple languages application, no way we can save the strings statically in the code, that will make developers job harder to deliver this project.

So What we can do …… ?

Actually there are two approaches depend on application architecture

Store those strings in Database
Using resources

and for multi-language applications you will need to define the culture for each string so you easily switch from language to another.

Scrum 1.0 Visual Studio Process Template

2010-08-05T06:45:00+00:00

MS announced the release of Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, a new process template for Team Foundation Server 2010. The template can be downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery or through the Visual Studio Extension Manager. This new template is the first new process template introduced by Microsoft since the MSF Agile and MSF CMMI templates first shipped with Team Foundation Server 2005.

Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 defines the following artifacts for new team projects created from it:

Work Items

Sprint
Product Backlog Item
Bug
Task
Impediment
Test Case
Shared Steps

Reports

Release Burndown
Sprint Burndown (pictured below)
Velocity
Build Success Over Time
Build Summary
Test Case Readiness
Test Plan Progress

Taken from (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2010/07/20/visual-studio-scrum-1-0.aspx)

New ASP.net Ribbon Control

2010-07-22T06:13:57+00:00

Hey guys my friend mina just finished implementing new ASP.net Ribbon Control , its really amazing and cool, and it make the life so easy,

Really Can’t wait to see the final release, I have to admit that is a very great effort :)

Get it from here http://ribbonasp.codeplex.com/

enjoy !

Best way to send multiple values in one parameter to database

2010-07-20T05:20:18+00:00

Many time i stucked with business requirements which says we need to send multiple parameters to database, so the first thing came to my head is to send a comma separated parameter and send this parameter to a t-sql tabler function and query on the values that come out from this function which was tooooooooooooo slowwwwwwwww

while ago i had this conversation with one of my colleges and he proposed X-Path which i tried it, and it was more slow and very pad performance, and another one suggested using OPENXML (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa276847(SQL.80).aspx)

OPENXML provides a rowset view over an XML document. Because OPENXML is a rowset provider, OPENXML can be used in Transact-SQL statements in which rowset providers such as a table, view, or the OPENROWSET function can appear.

DECLARE @idoc int
DECLARE @doc varchar(1000)
SET @doc ='
<ROOT>
<Customer CustomerID="VINET" ContactName="Paul Henriot">
   <Order CustomerID="VINET" EmployeeID="5" OrderDate="1996-07-04T00:00:00">
      <OrderDetail OrderID="10248" ProductID="11" Quantity="12"/>
      <OrderDetail OrderID="10248" ProductID="42" Quantity="10"/>
   </Order>
</Customer>
<Customer CustomerID="LILAS" ContactName="Carlos Gonzlez">
   <Order CustomerID="LILAS" EmployeeID="3" OrderDate="1996-08-16T00:00:00">
      <OrderDetail OrderID="10283" ProductID="72" Quantity="3"/>
   </Order>
</Customer>
</ROOT>'
--Create an internal representation of the XML document.
EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @idoc OUTPUT, @doc
-- Execute a SELECT statement that uses the OPENXML rowset provider.
SELECT    *
FROM       OPENXML (@idoc, '/ROOT/Customer',1)
            WITH (CustomerID  varchar(10),
                  ContactName varchar(20))

Here is the result set:

CustomerID ContactName          
---------- -------------------- 
VINET      Paul Henriot
LILAS      Carlos Gonzlez

If the same SELECT statement is executed with flags set to 2, indicating element-centric mapping, the

values of CustomerID and ContactName for both of the customers in the XML document are returned as NULL, because the <Customers> elements do not have any subelements.

Here is the result set:

CustomerID ContactName
---------- -----------
NULL       NULL
NULL       NULL

Moving to Integrant Inc, first day in Jordan

2010-05-17T05:58:00+00:00

I officially joined Integrant Inc 16^th of May, and I was so excited to the extend they asked me to travel to Jordan Office J it was nice the people here are so kind, cooperative and very professional, I started making friends by playing tennis table with one of the mates he was good and beat my ass but I will train hard to beat his J.

Really so excited with the new work, and hopefully I can add a value to them,

Telerik OpenAccess DSW 1st official release

2010-04-08T05:58:52+00:00

Telerik first official release of the Data Services Wizard, but with more many new features,

After Telerik release of OpenAccess ORM Q1 2010 , there were many issues come out with DSW, due great changes to the core of the ORM, having a new feature of Domain Model, and changes in the assembly names made it impossible to work with DSW of the new version of OpenAccess,

So Telerik OpenAccess DSW team, fixed this add the proper enhancement and enable the wizard to work with the new Domain Model as well.

BUT the new main feature is the auto-generation of a Sliverlight application that consumes the generated service, so imagine that all what you need is to build your database and in less than a minute you will have a working SL application that has CRUD operations for each entity in your database.

and this not everything, they provide a Quick Access method to be used with the new domain model, and all what you need is to right-click on the *.rling file and choose from many options to generate the service or generate the service with a SL application

You can download the new released version of Telerik OpenAccess DSW from product page.

Using Telerik Data Services Wizard Beta1 to build a WCF Endpoint

2010-02-06T16:47:14+00:00

This video simply demonstrates how to use Telerik OpenAccess Data Services wizard to generate WCF endpoints WCF service

Telerik Data Services Wizard Beta1-WCF from Stephen Forte on Vimeo.