try...catch...finally...bloggg....

Charts using logixml reporting tool

2005-10-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

As indicated in my previous blog entry I tried out the charts using the logixml tool and I was thoroughly convinced that this is a really really well thought thro tool. I could accomplish all my visual charts and reports in less time. Once you clearly identify how you want to display the charts and the report it hardly takes a few queries and if you are good at SQL the report generation is a couple of hours of work. We have officially migrated all our reports to logixml. Saves a lot of time and the stunning reports created with logixml really impressed the business leaders and gives them a way to analyse the data. Download logixml from www.logixml.com

CVS to SVN Conversion

2005-10-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Recently We wanted to have more flexibility in our release process and already facing problems with CVS while renaming files or moving files I decided it was time to convert to Subversion. So I did a quick evaluation and found that the change was compelling and would really help us. I am listing out some of the reasons for our change
1. Atomic commits.
2 CVS maintains the file level versioning whereas SVN maintains a project level versioning. We get the changeset of what files were changed in a particular commit without the hacks of same time commits as in CVS.
3 Braching and tagging are now a O(1) operation than O(n) as it was in CVS. For us we do a lot of releases and tagging and branching operations were quiet often and we used to wait for 10-15 mins for it to complete. Now it just zips fast.
4 File renaming and even directory level tracking. (This is one feature for which I would definitely change. We do a lot of refactoring and it was causing us loose history in cvs and now its like a breeze)
5 Better handling of the binary files. We maintain a lot of word doc and if some users forget the -kb switch we were really loking for a trouble in cvs.
6 Better network usage. Some of the operations like diff, revert, status can be done without the network so it makes your job easy to carry work home and work without the repository.
7 separation of update and status clears a lot of confusion and you can update the code only when you need it not to look at the changes made.
8 Properties handling is much cleaner way of storing associate information.
9. Undoing changes made in a single changeset is much easier than rolling back at each file level.

Ok I think we are convinced that SVN gives better facilities than CVS. Now coming to moving of the repository we would like to maintain the history of the repository. There are a couple of ways of doing it
1. To get the latest source code imported to SVN and maintain the CVS as a readonly repository for previous history.
2. Use cvs2svn or there are a couple of more scripts available to convert your cvs repository to SVN repository. They convert your branches, tags and group the changesets based on the time of commit. My version of CVSNT I had was 2.0.51d. I downloaded CVS2SVN 1.3 version and started my conversion.

CVS2SVN conversion program doesnt work on Windows environment. I downloaded the cygwin library and ran the python script from cygwin and boom the repository got converted. I had to do some tweaks like giving the --force-tag --use-cvs attributes. The error messages provided were pretty clear and it took about 30 minutes to convert my entire repository and I had a total of 4000 changesets.

We work on eclipse and so I got the subclipse client setup. Now i can take on rampant refactoring projects. Happy moving files around.

Server Application Unavailable Problem in ASP.NET

2005-10-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the "Refresh" button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note:
An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what cuased this error to occur.

APPLICATION EVENT LOG ENTRY:
Source: ASP.NET 1.1.4322.0
Category: None
Type: Error
Event ID: 1088
Computer: Shiva
Description: Failed to execute request because the App-Domain could not be created. Error 0x80070005 Access is denied.

Recently ran into this issue and the fix which helped me was to run check server extensions. Follow the below steps
Go to IIS Manager
Default web sites right click on it
Select Check Server Extensions

Quality management principles - ISO 9000

2005-10-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

We are trying to go for the ISO 9001:2000 certification by Jan 1 2007. I looked briefly at the ISO 9000 Generic quality management standard and cant appreciate the simple, efficient management principles which lot of us forget.

Principle 1 Customer focus

Principle 2 Leadership

Principle 3 Involvement of people

Principle 4 Process approach

Principle 5 System approach to management

Principle 6 Continual improvement

Principle 7 Factual approach to decision making

Principle 8 Mutually beneficial supplier relationships

The below URL has the complete description of each of the principles. I am sure this approach is generic and fundamental to any business. I cant find words to appreciate the standards.

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/iso9000-14000/understand/qmp.html

VSS anywhere - Dynamsoft

2005-10-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

I have been working with VSS and this tool from Dynamsoft has made accessing the VSS from remote servers like a charm. The professional client integrates well with the VS.NET IDE and gives you a feeling that you are connected to a VSS server on the local network. The standalone cross platform client supports all the VSS operations and its a good tool to have when working with global teams. Check out the tool at http://www.dynamsoft.com

SHIT Meetings

2005-10-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

Recently We have started the concept of SHIT (Say Honest Important Things) meetings with all the employees. These are the meetings where we open up and say honest things about the performance and expectations to our employees. I was really skeptical at the start of these and now I have to admit the sheer success and transparency these meetings have created amoung our employees. Virtually now everyone knows where they stand and what is expected out of them. Sticking to honest important things has also given us the edge and everybody a chance to look at their blind spots and work around or correct it. My Whole last year can be summarized in one lesson I learnt which is "Any system/process put in place without tying into the organizational goals/vision is bound to fail" I have been wondering why so many of my good initiatives were failing despite my pressure to stick to it. For eg I started a task tracker and asked all our employees to fill in the time they spent on different tasks so that they can see their progress over a time period. It sustained for a week before everyone dumped it. Now I tied it with the organization goal we started analyzing the time we spent on each project and we have setup a requirements tracker which would help us prioritize what we want to work. Now the task tracker is a must and should for us to make intelligent decisions on the delivery dates and now the system is working like a charm as people understood the significance of the role of the system and how it is important for the organization.

Reporting tool from logixml

2005-09-27T11:34:00.000-07:00

Recently one of my requirement was to create web based hierrarchical drill down reports. We wanted to create the no of registrations we were getting over the year, drill down to month and then days and finally to the participants who registered on the particular day. I found this impressive tool from www.logixml.com which helped me solve this problem in less than 3 hours. The installation was smooth the samples provided a clear idea about what can be expected in the reports and the no programming drag and drop approach gets you started without the steep learning curve. The liberator version is the free version which is available and works as a charm. I still havent played with the graphical charts it creates but the samples are impressive. I cant imagine someone trying to crank out a similar report with all the sorting and paging functionality with the drill down in atleast less than 2-3 weeks. Saves a lot of time and money.

Ajax by Microsoft in Whidbey

2005-06-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

I came across this blog entry by Nikhil Kothari. Async callbacks in server controls. Seems like MS will be joining the Ajax wave with their Whidbey release.

Assessing Oppurtunities

2005-06-08T02:15:00.000-07:00

I have been following the The Entrepreneurial Mind blog by Jeff Cornwall. This one clearly puts the right process using the right words. I had been floating with so many ideas without a structured thinking and this one nailed down perfectly the thought process I have to follow.

1. Is there a MARKET? Examine the size of the market to make certain that you only need a small portion of the market as customers to make your business work. Make sure that they are interested in, and more importantly want and need your product or service. You don't have time or money as an entrepreneur to educate them. Begin to get an idea of how much they will be willing to pay. Too many times this becomes a last minute guess by the entrepreneur.

2. Is there a MARGIN? Figure out the basic economics of the business. How much will the product or service sell for and how much will it cost to produce the product or offer the service? At this stage you should really look for opportunities that offer at least a 50% margin. Generally, when all is said and done this will typically result in actual profits of about 15-20% once the business plan is developed and all of the true costs are determined.

3. Is this for ME? There are many periods during the growth of the business when the entrepreneur needs a true passion to carry them through. This is not just a simple financial investment. It becomes much more personal and emotional than that. Many entrepreneurs tell us that the profit part of the business opportunity is only one of many reasons for launching their businesses. It also helps to build a business that takes advantage of your experiences, knowledge and skills.

Xhtml & Css styling

2005-06-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I was really not happy with my standard blog template I chose. I wanted it to be even simpler and without images. I wanted to have a 3 column layout and have google ads incorporated into the new column. I was looking for a css based layout and got it from http://glish.com/css/7.asp. This site has quite some css based layouts.

The site which redefined my view towards css was http://www.csszengarden.com/. This site turned me to a whole new world of css positioning and UI design. I was thoroughly impressed at the number of designs applied on a single data page to get different look and feel. One other site which impresses me time to time with CSS is www.macromedia.com. I constantly find some new css trick from these guys. If you want to know how many sites have started following the XHTML + CSS standards Eric Meyer is tracking down them in his separate redesign watch blog. Who are still closing their eyes to these standards this article is one of my favourite eye opener.Why tables for layout is stupid

Other css based useful resources I collected are
http://www.positioniseverything.net/
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/css/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/index.htm

Please leave your comments with other good resources you have come across on CSS!

Ajax - A disruptive web programming approach

2005-05-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

Eventhough the notion of XMLHttp and using Javascript asynchronous call backs has been there for quiet a while no one has fully put efforts to fully utilize the power of these in the real world applications. That was past after seeing some of the applications release by Google over the year( Google suggest, Google maps, GMail ...), I have been wondering how this is going to transform the web programming world. Now customers are going to expect the same from every other company. Its not going to be the same web programming world. The revolution has already began and Google has pioneered/propelled it and you follow it or you will be wiped off.

I came across this library which can be used in .NET. for implementing similar architecture of google.
below are the releavant links to know more.
http://weblogs.asp.net/mschwarz/
http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

Testing and QA related articles

2005-05-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

Satisfice.com operated by James Bach has a good collection of articles in testing and software quality assurance. I am trying to get a balance between the development team and the quality assurance team. This week I have decided to go over and do some R&D related with QA & testing. Stay tuned for more links and comments about the articles I am going over.

Codesmith for code generation.

2005-05-18T05:18:00.000-07:00

I have been searching for a good template based code generator and recently zeroed in on codesmith. The similarity of codesmith to asp.net style coding is one of the key decision to go with it. Its been a pretty easy process. It has really helped us eliminate the repetetive code. The starting set of templates provided with the codesmith provides you with a solid examples and pretty much our changes were very minimum. Recently the codesmith 3.0 version has been released

Download CodeSmith 3.0 now
CodeSmith 3.0 free 30 day trial.

Learn more about CodeSmith 3.0
Visit www.codesmithtools.com

Conditional Compilation to Help

2005-04-21T00:23:00.000-07:00

I have been using this technique for quiet some time wanted to make this available to everyone who may be facing the problem. We used Canoo webtest for doing the functional and regression testing. I would say its pretty easy to write reusable testcases in the Canoo webtest as its based on XML. The tag set used is also relatively small and easy to get testcases written. Its one of the free tools which will get you started on the budget and is relatively stable than most other tools I evaluated. One of the problem I faced using Canoo webtest was it didnt support the link buttons which we were using in the site. I decided to go this way making all the site buttons to be got from a common base class which when compiled with the BUTTON as true will yield normal buttons which were supported in Canoo webtest and when compiled with BUTTON as false will yield the link buttons which was looking good in our site. Below is the code I use to acheive this.

1 using System;
2 using System.Web.UI;
3 using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
4 using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;
5 using PeterBlum.VAM;
6
7 namespace KenPeople.JobBoard.Controls
8 {
9 /// <summary>
10 /// This is the button class used through out the project.
11 /// Since canoo webtest doesnt support link buttons we are
12 /// using this technique to test the application. When
13 /// compiled with the BUTTON value defined as true regular
14 /// buttons are rendered in the site. When deployment to
15 /// production after QA is completed compile without setting
16 /// the BUTTON variable so that link buttons are displayed.
17 /// </summary>
18 #if (BUTTON)
19 public class JobBoardButton : System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button {
20 #else
21 public class JobBoardButton : PeterBlum.VAM.LinkButton {
22 #end if
23 }
24 }

JMeter for Load, functional and regression testing

2005-04-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

I am using JMeter to do all the Load, functional and regression testing in my .NET website. For people who might be familiar with the ACT (Application center test) or the previous WAST I would say its pretty easy to do all the same functionality with JMeter. The tool is pretty robust and after you get thro the initial glitches and gotchas of handling the ASP.NET pages using JMeter everything is pretty breezy. Before using JMeter we were extensively using Canoo Webtest for doing the functional & regression testing. Finally when we found JMeter and its ability to perform the same stuff as Canoo Webtest We switched to JMeter. For people who are using JMeter there is a tool called BadBoy to automatically generated JMeter test cases but I prefer it as only a guideline and we end up handcoding most of the testcases.

Logging Changes Logging Application Block to Log4NET

2005-04-20T06:59:00.000-07:00

I am using Logging Application block (LAB) to do all the exception logging in my site presently. I wanted to add more info and debug statements to better help in debugging the application and to give a control flow idea to the new project members. I tried adding DEBUG level messages when entering and leaving a method. I added INFO level messages to print any parameter passed in to help in debugging. This really slowed things down considerably. I have since then evaluated log4net and I am planning to convert from LAB to Log4Net. I have some customization I did to LAB to log all the sql parameters passed to it. Now I am extending Log4Net for the same purpose. I am using version 1.2.9 and ThreadContext class provides a cool Properties map and a stack to store the additional info needed. I have additionally implemented a wrapper on the Log4Net logger class to conditionally compile out the DEBUG and INFO level messages from production release to keep the logging overhead to NIL. I am using at present the RollingFileAppender and the SMTP appender to log messages.

Finding the name of the page after a server.transfer

2005-04-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

I have a reset button control which resets all the form elements by sending a new request to the same page as which the button is placed. I was initially getting the filename using the Request.PathInfo variable. Everything was working fine untill one fine morning we were changing the Response.Redirects to Server.Transfer. Apparently after the Server.Transfer the Request.PathInfo was returning the previous page info and my reset was redirecting to it. Now I use Request.CurrentExecutionFilePath and the reset works proper.

Code highlighter

2005-04-14T00:38:00.000-07:00

My effort to find a good code highlighter to use in my blogs ends today.I found this great freeware source code highlighter from ActiPro. The languages currently supported are

C#
VB.NET
HTML
CSS
JScript
VBscript
XML
SQL
Python

Please click Actipro CodeHighlighter to try this control. They have some really cool .NET controls to try out. Below is a gist of their products available. Please visit www.actiprosofware.com for details.

Actipro Software has developed components in C# made especially for other .NET framework developers to use in their applications. These components may be used in any .NET-compatible programming language including C#, VB.NET, and more.

SyntaxEditor provides an extremely powerful syntax-highlighting editor control, just like the one in the Visual Studio .NET IDE.
UIStudio is a suite of controls that includes docking tool and document window functionality, a TabStrip, and a NavigationBar
Wizard adds wizards that comply with the Wizard97 standard to your applications.
CodeHighlighter provides flexible syntax-highlighting for code samples in ASP.NET web pages.

The located assembly's manifest definition with name xxx.dll does not match the assembly reference

2005-04-12T03:18:00.000-07:00

This error got me solve one of my build problems. Sounds wierd. :-). I have recently adopted log4net for the logging in my webapplication. While doing the testing I used the debug version of the log4net.dll and since it is not strongly named my compiled version of dll had its reference. finally I was satisfied with the logging process and changed the log4net.dll to the release version. I compile the project and I end up with this error message. I do some googling and come across with this nice blog Junfeng Zhang's .Net Framework Notes. I look into the issue and find that my clean build had stopped working (due to my previous nant changes) as I didn't delete the dll from my bin folder. I fix the build process and the whole thing works smooth again. In this process I learnt a major lesson about the dependencies and how things are resolved. While upgrading any of your 3rd party components make sure you just dont do an xcopy deployment hoping the changes will not break anything. Make sure to setup runtime binding redirects. Sample redirects for the nunit framework is attached below

1 <runtime>
2 <assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
3 <dependentAssembly>
4 <assemblyIdentity name="nunit.framework"
5 publicKeyToken="96d09a1eb7f44a77" culture="Neutral" />
6 <bindingRedirect oldVersion="2.0.6.0" newVersion="2.2.0.0" />
7 <bindingRedirect oldVersion="2.1.4.0" newVersion="2.2.0.0" />
8 </dependentAssembly>
9 </assemblyBinding>
10 </runtime>

using Log4net in ASP.NET application

2005-04-11T02:33:00.000-07:00

I tried setting up the logging for our webapplication using Log4net. I looked thro the examples and read some blogs on how difficult it is to setup the whole logging because of the lack of documentation. Read thro these blogs to see the info posted by different people

http://tom.gilki.org/programming/net/120604/
Ryans work blog
http://geekswithblogs.net/flanakin/archive/2004/08/30/10418.aspx

These are the steps which helped me get the logging setup
1.[assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(ConfigFileExtension="log4net", Watch=true] this line must be added to the global.asax.cs file

1 // Load the configuration from the 'JobBoard.UI.dll.log4net' file
2 [assembly: log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator(ConfigFileExtension="log4net",
3 Watch=true)]
4 namespace xxxxxx
5 {

2. The name of the configuration file should be the name of the dll into which the global.asax.cs file is getting compiled with an extension of log4net. For eg if your dll generated is foo.dll then your configuration goes into foo.dll.log4net.
3. The configuration file should be located in the application root folder not in the bin folder.
4. Check the permissions on the folder you are logging the aspnet user account should have write permissions.

below is the sample configuration file I used for appending to the File and to Trace.

1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
2 <log4net debug="false">
3 <appender name="LogFileAppender"
4 type="log4net.Appender.FileAppender" >
5 <file value="c:\\temp\\webapp-log.txt" />
6 <appendToFile value="true" />
7 <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
8 <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger
9 [%ndc] - %message%newline" />
10 </layout>
11 </appender>
12 <appender name="HttpTraceAppender"
13 type="log4net.Appender.AspNetTraceAppender" >
14 <layout type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">
15 <conversionPattern value="%date [%thread] %-5level %logger
16 [%ndc] - %message%newline" />
17 </layout>
18 </appender>
19 <root>
20 <level value="DEBUG" />
21 <appender-ref ref="LogFileAppender" />
22 <appender-ref ref="HttpTraceAppender" />
23 </root>
24 </log4net>
25

Some classic mistakes in testing

2005-03-30T06:38:00.000-08:00

My focus in on Quality Assurance and Testing. I need to get the process setup and spend more time with my QA team to gear them up to face the challenge. I think this is a great article (Classic mistakes in testing) to start on this direction. Brian Marick really gets the message clear and covered every aspect (some which I had in mind and some really giving the 'Aha' thats right feeling...). I am reproducing the summary of the paper please look at the link provided above for the complete one.

Some Classic Testing Mistakes

The role of testing

Thinking the testing team is responsible for assuring quality.

Thinking that the purpose of testing is to find bugs.

Not finding the important bugs.

Not reporting usability problems.

No focus on an estimate of quality (and on the quality of that estimate).

Reporting bug data without putting it into context.

Starting testing too late (bug detection, not bug reduction)

Planning the complete testing effort

A testing effort biased toward functional testing.
Underemphasizing configuration testing.

Putting stress and load testing off to the last minute.

Not testing the documentation
Not testing installation procedures.

An overreliance on beta testing.

Finishing one testing task before moving on to the next.

Failing to correctly identify risky areas.

Sticking stubbornly to the test plan.

Personnel issues

Using testing as a transitional job for new programmers.

Recruiting testers from the ranks of failed programmers.

Testers are not domain experts.

Not seeking candidates from the customer service staff or technical writing staff.

Insisting that testers be able to program.

A testing team that lacks diversity.

A physical separation between developers and testers.

Believing that programmers cant test their own code.

Programmers are neither trained nor motivated to test.

The tester at work

Paying more attention to running tests than to designing them.

Unreviewed test designs.

Being too specific about test inputs and procedures.

Not noticing and exploring irrelevant oddities.

Checking that the product does what its supposed to do, but not that it doesnt do
what it isnt supposed to do.

Test suites that are understandable only by their owners.

Testing only through the user-visible interface.

Poor bug reporting.

Adding only regression tests when bugs are found.

Failing to take notes for the next testing effort.

Test automation

Attempting to automate all tests.

Expecting to rerun manual tests.

Using GUI capture/replay tools to reduce test creation cost.

Expecting regression tests to find a high proportion of new bugs.

Code coverage

Embracing code coverage with the devotion that only simple numbers can inspire.

Removing tests from a regression test suite just because they dont add coverage.

Using coverage as a performance goal for testers.

Abandoning coverage entirely.

Brian Marick has a website at www.testing.com Don't be scared by the welcome message he has really good articles and watch out for his weblog

Failed to execute request because the App-Domain could not be created. Error: 0x80070005 Access is denied

2005-03-30T00:36:00.000-08:00

I am doing production releases to my website for quite sometime. We have a proper QA and Release process in place to do incremental releases. This error perplexed me yesterday when we were doing xcopy deployment to the .NET website. All I could see was the above error message getting logged in the Event log. I gave the same exact search in google and there were a whole bunch of suggestions but no cutthroat solution.

Solutions I found talked about reinstalling .NET, Cleaning up the global assembly cache, some suggesting to change the username under processModel of the machine.config file to a high privilege user account of SYSTEM than the default low privilege machine account. I was never convinced that these were related to the problem in hand.

Finally I nailed the problem down to not having read & execute permission on the production virtual directory folders. I gave the IUSR_machine name and IWAM_machine name the read and execute permissions on all the project folders and it started working again. I am still investigating on the sorcerous disappearance of these permissions. I am sure the other solutions in google may be applicable in some scenarios but take a look at the permissions before diving deep into these solutions..

.NET based CMS evaluation

2005-03-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

Recently I came across this comprehensive one stop site for the C# open source tools csharp-source.net.

Got a list of open source CMS to do my evaluation to find the right one for our online jobboards project. On the first look I have selected the rainbow portal and the ndcms for my further evaluation. Below are the URL's for these two open source CMS.

ndCMS

Rainbow portal

Useful great free tools

2005-03-28T09:48:00.000-08:00

I have been looking for a calendar control which was working on the client side using Javascript and was cross-browser compatible. I found this calendar control in sourceforge.net with the project status as Mature. I haven't really integrated this into my website yet. But tested it on different browsers and this works magic. Please visit the URL to learn more about this impeccable control Dynarch Calendar Control The other open source product they have is a HTMLArea the web-based editor. Dynarch also deals with some commerical controls and their menu & navigation bars are really good.

I am going to evaluate the HTML Rich text editor along with the other Cross browser HTML editor i found today when I was doing some research related with the CMS products in ASP.NET.
Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor . This control is the winner of Planet source code Superior Coding Contest so its going to be a tough evaluation. After the evaluation I will post the results in a couple of days.

Typecasting using the 'as' keyword in C#

2005-03-25T03:57:00.000-08:00

Recently read about what's the difference in using 'as' keyword to do the type conversion.

expression as type

is equivalent to:

expression is type ? (type)expression : (type)null

except that expression is evaluated only once.

Note that the as operator only performs reference conversions and boxing conversions. The as operator cannot perform other conversions, such as user-defined conversions, which should instead be performed using cast expressions.

So for people who use the regular type casting and the as operator interchangably beware... if you expect some type and you are guaranteed to get the same use the regular type casing. Stay away from 'as' as long as your requirement strongly needs it.