Pradeep's WebLog

Database forward engineering using Visio

2012-01-29T22:57:00.001+05:30

Though I do not like Microsoft Visio for software designing, but unfortunately this is the only tool which is available to me. Recently I was making database model using Visio and at the back of my mind I had thought that Visio will let me generate database using some single button click.

However when that time came, there was not such button. In fact Visio does not have forward engineering for database. This was a big setback. But then there was a savior. Alberto Ferrari has developed a plug-in for Visio 2010 which can generate database script using your Visio database model. Download it and install and it works flawlessly. If you have problem installing the tool using it’s .exe setup, then rename the .exe setup to .zip and open the .msi installer within .exe setup. .msi installer works without any problem and once installed you will have database forward engineering capability in Visio 2010.

Steve Jobs, Superhero

2012-01-29T22:36:00.001+05:30

Steve Jobs, Superhero

Thinking about how most companies dole out feedback — if they do at all — it’s usually directed at the bottom quartile of performers versus the top. A typical manager at review time spends 80% of their time preparing detailed reviews on the bottom 25%. The top quartile gets lame, short reviews — the equivalent of “You’re doing great, keep up the good work!”

So true. How many times I have seen it happening when managers are so worried to give feedback to bottom 25%. They know that they will have to console the person who is at the bottom, they will have to explain the expectations from him and somehow motivate him. And after all this there is no guarantee that the person will stay with the organization. In most probability he will move on to some other place. Looks like Steve was right in giving more time to his top quartile. This is the quartile which anyway makes the difference to organization. Bottom quartile is anyway useless which according to organization management principles should be gotten rid of. Then why spend so much time with them?

Some lesser-known truths about programming

2012-01-12T17:15:00.001+05:30

This is so true. I am so tired of bad programmers. A programmer who is starting new is another thing. He is fresh out of school and we can teach him good things and make him productive. But if a developers has loads of experience and still fails to understand basics of the business and not productive enough, then he is just a burden.

Some lesser-known truths about programming

HTML 5 test

2012-01-03T09:49:00.001+05:30

What is Microsoft paying to their engineers? Seems like MS engineers are either not getting enough or getting too much that they don’t care about engineering excellence any more. Shame!

Facebook messenger windows desktop client

2012-01-01T19:48:00.001+05:30

Facebook messenger for Windows is here. Get more detail from Facebook messenger help page.

Real time client-server communication on the web

2011-12-11T23:47:00.001+05:30

If you are a software developer and keep your eyes open for what other people are developing, you must have seen Google Talk nicely sitting inside Gmail and you are able to chat using web interface. You also would have seen Twitter updating its recent tweets automagically without refreshing the page. Though it is not a new things, but this kind of applications are kind of new things to mainstream web development. This kind of applications used to be developed in state full programming environments and not in state less web environment.

Normal approach to implement these kind of scenarios would have been to poll the server frequently. Another option could be long polling or WebSockets. However now Microsoft’s ASP.Net team is developing a new library called SignalR. Being developed by Microsoft itself is one big enough buying point. Maarten Balliauw is introducing you to SignalR in detail.

So now if you need to build something related to real time communication on the web, you don’t need to pull your hair. SignalR is here.

Want to become a good developer

2011-11-17T15:29:00.001+05:30

QUALITY. How do you measure quality? Generally speaking quality is an intangible thing, however it is not invisible. Quality is the thing that makes Apple products different from rest of the world. Quality is the thing because of which some of Japanese and German brands enjoy premium over their counterparts.

The same quality can be applied when we work with any kind of software development. In today’s world where outsourcing is another word for software development, people are less concerned with quality and more involved in just head counting. At the end it impacts both customer and service provider.

So, how do you plan to bring quality to software development? By employing CMM, Agile, RUP etc. No, they are all ways to manage project delivery. By employing any one of them will not improve the quality of software. To improve the software quality we will have to first accept that it takes time to get it right. Here I will touch upon some basic things which if you understand and try to implement in your day to day working, you will see your code quality going upwards.

First set of design principles is called S.O.L.I.D. principles. These are five different rules and if you follow them, you certainly will be a step ahead in code quality. I am reiterating them here so that even if you don’t follow the links, it somehow sticks to you.

SRP	The Single Responsibility Principle	A class should have one, and only one, reason to change.
OCP	The Open Closed Principle	You should be able to extend a classes behavior, without modifying it
LSP	The Liskov Substitution Principle	Derived classes must be substitutable for their base classes.
DIP	The Dependency Inversion Principle	Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.
ISP	The Interface Segregation Principle	Make fine grained interfaces that are client specific.

If you want to know more about SOLID, you can follow aforementioned links or LosTechies have drafted a very good book on S.O.L.I.D.

Recently I was reading another architecture related book that I thought every developer and budding architects should read. It is Microsoft’s Application Architecture Guide V2.

Another thing is that every developer should start familiarizing themselves with design patterns. Sooner or later they will realize that understanding design patterns makes them a better developer. I am not advocating that you need to be master of design patterns but you need to know few of them. Head First Design Pattern is good book to start with.

I believe every small step towards code quality is a big step towards customer satisfaction and meeting business goals. There are many more such practices which can make you a better developer and make your customer happy. I might discuss those things in future.

Fire the Sales Reps Who Are Holding Back Your Company

2011-10-07T12:48:00.000+05:30

Hunting for Big Sales with Tom Searcy | Fire the Sales Reps Who Are Holding Back Your Company:

10 things only bad managers say

2011-10-05T08:33:00.000+05:30

10 things only bad managers say

Game of Goal Setting

2011-10-01T23:17:00.001+05:30

Linked to my earlier post ditching traditional appraisal system. Have you ever experienced this kind of game of goal setting?

Ditching the traditional appraisal system

2011-10-01T23:12:00.001+05:30

This is that season of year when you need to do BS. I personally had bosses who had this writers block and believe me, in my around 9 years of career there was never a manager who sat with me and told his expectations and set goals for me. Height of all this happened when I went to one of my manager and asked his expectation from me, and he couldn’t come up with any expectations. Oh God, think about me, what would be my condition in that case. He did not know what I am supposed to do.

There is a famous appraisal system put together to appraise the employees of any organization. It is called Bell Curve system. Bell Curve system usually tells that any organization can have 10-20% top performing employees, rest of the employees are further divided into performing 70-80% group and then bottom 10% who are not able to perform. It goes something like this:

It also goes like this:

I have seen many organization which put so many mumbo jumbo around this bell curve system that they further divide these three groups in five or six groups and every year they waste 3-4 months of management bandwidth doing this drama.

I was thinking if I were to open my own company then how would I get rid of this system. This system does not sound like appraising the humans. It seems more like appraising cows or chickens based on their production. Even if we talk to some dairy owner or chicken farm owner, there are chances that even they might not have deployed this kind of system. In my company I am not going employ bell curve system. I am going to do away with all these systems and different groups.

What I am thinking of doing is that everyone gets a hike every year linked to market condition. Market conditions could be inflation, recession etc. If there is food inflation touching 20% in market then there is less sense giving my guys 10-12% hike. They will leave the company for a better pay cheque so that they maintain their lifestyle. Mind it, everybody getting same hike. Now comes the twist. How do I keep such employees motivated who walk extra mile, who are naturally high performers. For such employees I plan to design a SRA (special recognition award) program. Companies like Accenture and Shell already do it but in different ways. SRAs can be awarded for brilliance shown on the job. SRA might give that employee 3-8% of their CTC. This way they get rewarded for what they did on occasion. Remember, brilliance can not be like the way river flows. Brilliance is occasional and not daily routine. I highly regard the statement, “Consistent performance is better than occasional brilliance”. This way if one employee even manages to get one SRA in a year, s/he is around 8% ahead of everybody.

How about the guys who are not able to cope up with system? Who are not able to perform without constant supervision? I would say in this case their goal setting is not done properly. I would ask the manager of that employee to go and read One Minute Manager and do a proper goal setting. Oh, I forgot to mention that in my company managers won’t be there. With proper guidance technical people are capable of self organizing them. So who is going to do goal setting? See goal setting is not a rocket science. All you have to tell a person what he is expected to do in his office time. Any senior person in team can do so for a junior person. If s/he is still not coping, then we can send him to some boot camp kind of thing where he brushes up his skills (this should be provided by company).

Yes, there are outstanding questions in this approach. There are so many aspects which need tweaking, but this is how I would like to start in my company because this is how I would wish to be treated in any other company (treat the person the way you wish to be treated).

Flash is a Menace

2011-10-01T22:15:00.001+05:30

Flash is a Menace. It keeps crashing now and then. Flash has power to slow down even i5 or i7 machines. My android devices are capable of running Flash but who on earth wants a hog. I don’t.

Death of Silverlight

2011-10-01T19:47:00.000+05:30

Lately there has been a stir about the future of Silverlight. Developer community is worried about the future development model. I am least concerned about how things will turn out. All I am concerned about is the ROI of Silverlight. Why should I as an Architect zero on Silverlight? These days I have seen the trend of pushing Silverlight for LOB (Line of Business)/intranet applications where it makes least sense to use it. LOB applications are not usually public facing applications and mostly they run within the intranet of organizations.

There are some reasons people say when they push Silverlight for LOB applications:

Silverlight gets you rid of cross browser compatibility.

Well that seems to be the only reason why people are using Silverlight even on intranet applications. This reason alone is not sufficient to use Silverlight because in intranet scenario I can instruct my users to use only one browser (IE or any other better browser). So where is the cross browser compatibility? There is another reason Silverlight is not the best for intranet applications because of lack of good Silverlight developers. Whole point of developing an application in Silverlight is to have better look and feel. But believe me all those regular .net skills that Microsoft uses to push Silverlight are not designer type guys. They are same drag n drop guys and they can’t think of sophisticated UX. On top of this intranet/LOB applications are hardly focused on UX, they are more about getting the business done.

This was about intranet/LOB applications. Talking about public web applications, you any way cannot think about Silverlight or any such thing. iOS (includes both iPhone, iPad and probably iPod touch) is not going to let you use any plugin in near future. Though Android now supports Flash but Silverlight is still a distant dream. I am talking about iOS and Android here because desktop is disappearing slowly. More and more people are using their smartphones for regular browsing. There was some hope from Microsoft’s own platforms but that is also gone with the details disclosed by Windows 8. Yes, you can switch IE 10 to legacy mode and plugins are supported there but I have real doubt whether this option will be there on slates or not. I won’t count WP7/7.5 here until it gathers 25-30% market share (not happening in near future). Until then it is waste of time talking about that platform.

Doing all this reasoning on my own and talking to couple of my colleagues, I don’t feel like selling Silverlight based applications to my clients anymore. Yes, Silverlight has its own niche offering (DRM etc.) and it makes sense to use Silverlight in such scenarios. But for normal intranet/LOB applications I will be better off with ASP.Net or ASP.Net MVC.

Hiding Certain Facebook Updates

2011-10-01T19:46:00.001+05:30

Tired of getting unwanted updates being posted by applications that your friends are using. Well, I am tired of that. I want people to see only what I had been sharing and what my friends are personally sharing. I don’t want to know what childish applications they are using. One option is to click on “top right” corner of that “story” and then say “Hide story”. This works well if you get spammed occasionally. But what if you have hundreds of friends and all of them are using these kind of applications? If you permanently want to get rid of updates from certain kind of applications then you click on “top right corner” of story and towards the bottom you will find “Hide all by XYZ”. Select that option and you will never get spammed from that app again. Following is the screen shot of how to hide such updates.

After doing this, your news feed settings should look like below:

And to reach this “Edit News Feed Settings” you need to scroll to the bottom of your FB page. Usually when you scroll FB keeps bringing your older feeds and you may never reach the bottom of this page. So you can try CTRL+END. That should do the job. Following is the screen shot of bottom of the FB wall. Select “Edit Options” and above screen should open. Above screen is useful in case you want lift the ban on certain app.

Multi Tenancy in Your Application

2011-09-26T12:49:00.000+05:30

A year back I was working on one of my project and I was developing it as a multi tenant application. At that time I had not done enough research in the field of multi tenancy and using my common sense I had a multi tenant system with “shared database and shared schema” approach. I learnt many things while working on this pet project but then I closed it because of laziness.

Recently I tried to put more thoughts on multi tenancy. One reason behind this is that recently I came across of several miss-selling cases of Sharepoint 2010. Sharepoint 2010 was pushed down the throat of customers just because of it was a multi tenant system and if you need multi tenancy in your application, just build your application as a Sharepoint 2010 application. Why? Why on earth would I employ a Sharepoint just for a simple multi tenant application? You can say simple multi tenant application is oxymoron but I won’t argue on that.

Multi Tenant Data Architecture is a good read on the topic of achieving multi tenancy at the level of database. Then there are some blog posts by some mature software architects. Multi Tenancy – Approaches and Applicability is a nice collect of several blog post by Ayende Rahien. He talks about Physical Data Model and Extensible Data Model. My view of extensible data model is that you need to make your data model extensible only if you have some serious plans for your application. Even if you don’t start with extensible data model in mind but have opted either separate database or separate schema approach, then you should be able to achieve it at a later date as well. Shared schema approach is what will prohibit you to go for extending data model for each tenant. Ayende also talks about Extensible Behaviors, Development Structure and keeping all this really simple. By looking at all this IoC comes as a critical component that you need to employ in order to build a multi tenant application. Ayende also takes a dig at the article I suggested on multi tenant data architecture.

This is it for now on multi tenant application and I am strictly against using Sharepoint to achieve multi tenancy. I would better roll out my own implementation instead of employing Sharepoint 2010 in this particular case.

GUIDs and their mystery

2011-08-01T00:27:00.000+05:30

I learnt in my college that GUIDs are almost unique. You can be quite sure that they are unique. I had the information that GUIDs have component which is mapped to MAC address or say Network Interface Card (NIC). Well if you also had same information then it is no more valid in today’s fast changing world. While we were happily generating GUIDs and using it all over the place, the algorithm to generate it has gone through several revisions. If you are interested to know which version is in use currently, then it is v4.0 and it does not use NIC/MAC address. More details on GUID generation is here.

MVC Mini Profiler

2011-07-05T00:55:00.001+05:30

There seems to be an interesting profiler to profile your Asp.Net MVC based applications. This is the profiler used by StackOverflow guys. That’s a good enough reason for me to start using it in any of my Asp.Net MVC based application. To top it up it also provides capabilities to profile database. Database profiling is supporting any kind of DbConnection. That means that this profiler is virtually supporting any database providers under the Sun. Worth trying it in next project.

Kamath; New Chairman of Infosys

2011-05-01T10:04:00.001+05:30

As Kamath is appointed new chairman of Infy (as we know it affectionately), many people are wondering about the future Infy is heading towards. Mr. Kamath’s appointment as a chairman did not surprise me as that possibility was doing rounds in the media for quite some time. I am surprised that Infy could not find any young blood to drive it further. The point I am thinking is how this old horse is supposed to drive this behemoth named Infosys any further. By changing its name?

Who are watching Royal Wedding

2011-05-01T09:11:00.001+05:30

Well, this is the graph showing who all are watching YouTube video of Royal Wedding. According to my expectation entire world should have been marked in dark green. But then there are hard realities. South Americans and African countries and something more important to do then watching wedding videos on YouTube. But the I think countries highlighted above are considered to be developed countries. What are they doing? I can understand of Japan (poor souls are busy trying to get their life to normal) and China as usual is putting its great wall (firewall) to work. But then what about Russia? What is their problem, all snowed under?

Royal Wedding 2011

2011-05-01T09:04:00.001+05:30

Wow, The Royal Couple look great. May God bless them.

LightSwitch Beta 2 Extensibility Cookbook

2011-04-28T08:32:00.001+05:30

According to me VS LightSwitch could be holy grail of LOB application development, however 80-20 rule still applies to it. According to this rule most of business scenarios could be achieved OOB (Out of the Box) but then as an Architect you don’t want to be in position where other 20% scenarios, which business is ready to die for are not possible.

In this case you need capabilities where you can extend LightSwitch and get something which was not exactly possible with OOB product. So grab your copy of LightSwitch Beta 2 extensibility cook book and see if you can develop all of your business cases or not.

Silverlight 5 is here

2011-04-28T08:17:00.001+05:30

Oh boy, I am not done yet with Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 here. Sigh!

RIM Co-CEO Pulls Plug on BBC Interview

2011-04-13T23:23:00.001+05:30

While puzzled over on going tussle between Indian Govt. and BlackBerry, in his infinite wisdom BB’s Co-CEO decides to abruptly end the interview. Now I understand that their could be something which are really hurtful and you lose your senses like Zinedine Zidan did.

But then the questions comes that what was it that a co-CEO had to abruptly end an interview. You can see the video here. All the BBC correspondent asked was “what does he feel about all that?”. And the “so called” co-CEO loses his cool. I had the feeling that CEOs are quite good when it comes to putting the thoughts in words. I thought that CEOs are excellent salesmen who can sell anything and can save you from any bad situation. Shouldn’t he have just ignored the question or better than this it was an exciting opportunity for him to explain the stand of BlackBerry to everybody. But he failed! Probably he flunked in his business administration classes where it is taught that “Most successful men have not achieved their distinction by having some new talent or opportunity presented to them. They have developed the opportunity that was at hand”.

Wait a minute, do I see an opportunity here? Like the torn jeans of Akhshay Kumar become fashion, it could be that this abruptly ending interview becomes fashion for techies. After all he is CO-CEO of BB. He must “have” “had” talent to reach there. Probably next time if I am asked some question in an interview/meeting, I can also walk out of interview/meeting saying “This interview/meeting is over”.

Overview of Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™

2011-03-25T14:22:00.000+05:30

If you have been introduced to Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch then you might be having one question, “What is LightSwitch really building under the covers?” Is it mere two tier application wrapped in some fancy UI or anything more? This question is very valid and answer is that LightSwitch applications are built on a standard three tier architecture where each tier runs independent of each other and performs the role within its boundaries.

The presentation tier is responsible for human interaction with the application. Its primary concern is data visualization and editing. The logic tier processes requests from a client to fetch data, update data, or to perform other operations. This tier’s primary role is to shield direct access to the data from unwanted or invalid reads and updates. This helps to ensure the long-term integrity and security of the data. The data storage tier is responsible for durable storage of the application data.

Following is the architectural representation of a standard three tier application:

Following is a more concrete representation of three tier architecture in context of Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch application.

If you carefully look into all these three tiers you will have enough reasons to be excited. On presentation tier you are getting Silverlight 4.0 based UI. Office automation will let you export you data directly to Excel. Logic tier or application tier or middle tier is built on a set of technologies. There is ADO.NET Entity Framework for access to SQL Server and SQL Azure. There is WCF Data Services for access to SharePoint 2010 via the OData protocol. And if this was not enough there is a shim to talk to an in-memory WCF RIA DomainService for extensibility. Then on the storage front you have SQL Server, SQL Azure and as I mentioned above, using WCF Data Services you can also consume SharePoint based data.

Is it not something more than what you had wished for? I am placing my bet on LightSwitch. Are you?

Introducing Microsoft® Visual Studio® LightSwitch™

2011-03-24T17:33:00.000+05:30

Here comes another development tool from Microsoft. Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is an extension of Microsoft Visual Studio product line and it is squarely aimed to cut down development time drastically. I am sure you would have worked on many applications where there were just some tables and all you had to develop was CRUD functionality. For this kind of applications you don’t need to split your applications in tiers and layers and you don’t need to apply many other architectural principles.

Business value will be better realized if you can turn around such application with minimum of lines and yet with elegant user interface and ability to choose kind of deployment scenarios (web/desktop or cloud). Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch is aimed to fill such gap and it will immensely help LOB application development. I believe Jason Zanders did better job Introducing you to Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch then I could have done. Go through the Jason’s post and get awestruck! Once you are out of that awe download LightSwitch and start a brand new journey.