Tal's Blog

XTreamer gives "Unknown Device" when connected as USB

2010-01-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

Connecting the XTreamer (v2.01) to a computer by using the USB connector will result
in "Unknown Device" error. The XTreamer is detected by Windows XP as a USB Hub, however,
while trying to identify the exact hardware and its appropriate driver the process fails as the
XTreamer is being detected as "Unkown".

I had figured out that for some reason, while the XTreamer's USB wireless lan antenna is being connected, the WLan device is being detected by windows along with the USB mass-storage device, causing the whole process to fail!

The solution, simply disconnect any USB device attached to your XTreamer while you try
to connect it to your PC.

Get windows Temporary directory with C#

2009-11-13T16:15:00.001-08:00

Such an easy question often being asked… How can I easily obtain the temporary directory?

So the answer is fairly easy:

string tempPath = System.IO.Path.GetTempPath();

If you are looking for ways to obtain further information of the environment variables for example, you should read this.
It will give you a broad view on Temp, System and User Data folders by using:
Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable(FIELD));

80 Cores, who and why do we need it?

2009-10-05T15:20:00.001-07:00

Jerry Bautista of Intel has a great post trying to answer the question "Who needs a 80 cores machine?". That question rose after Intel had disclosed its "80 core disclosure" showing a demo of a 80 cores machine.

It is the endless debate on how much computer strength do we need, and I had learned that the answer is always "As much as we can get!", Jerry shows some simple examples of the capabilities and applications such computer may have.

Here is a nice demo of realistic water effect demonstration, It is all computer generated currently offline but consider have such capability in real-time, on-line!

Read Jerry's blog here.

TechED 2008

2009-10-05T15:19:00.001-07:00

We are about to attend Microsoft's TechED 2008 in Eilat. I believe that this TechED will be as exciting as the one I had attended just two years ago. Microsoft is renowned of its latest trend for overwhelming and increasing number of new technologies, and it just about to show off again with Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008, Silverlight, some already known technologies with a drill down and experience perspective and more and more!

I might have further news, but I keep it private for now. In the meanwhile I'll post here some links regarding this excellent event.

if you can attend make sure you save yourself a room.

Links:

- TechED 2008 official site (Hebrew)
- Tamir Khason's - XNA and WPF and more.

Is testing really sucks?

2009-04-05T16:12:00.000-07:00

I've just stumbled into an interesting approach described by James Whittaker, who has a nice solid opinion on testing. James distinguishes between strategy and tactics in software testing.

I could not agree more, read it here.

The first Multi-Touch laptop

2009-02-22T22:15:00.001-08:00

Just stumbled upon the new HP 12" laptop.

Their marketing guys are really creative – loved their work!

Click here If you can't see the embedded video.

Running MSTest without Visual Studio

2009-01-02T12:51:00.001-08:00

We were comparing Visual Studio MSTest versus NUnit. There is
a large number of websites and blogs that provides a good
comparison so I will not get further into this.
However, one of the issues that were discussed is the ability to
run a unit test on a target machine which will not have VS2008
installed. nUnit provides a nice GUI console for running unit tests
anywhere while MSTest lacks such capability and does not have
an out-of-the-box solution.

Searching the web for a solution I got into Gallio, this open source
freeware project allows you to run nUnit, mbUnit, MSTests and
more tests anywhere anytime. It also have a plug-in for resharper
which allows you to run MSTests from the code just like you did
with nUnit. Resharper adds a very nice feature to VS200x for
running Tests and debugging from within the code, with Gallio
you extend this feature to support MSTests as well.

Click here for further information on Resharper's unit testing.

Bottom line: It is a very useful tool for integration and deployments.

Unity version 1.1

2008-10-03T14:03:00.000-07:00

A great post about Unity (updated recently to reflect v1.1 as well) was given by
.NET HITMAN. This great post explains the background and the history of Unity as well as
the latest version status, capabilities and best practices.

I would recommend reading it here.

TechED 2008

2008-02-17T14:13:00.001-08:00

I might have further news, but I keep it private for now. In the meanwhile I'll post here some links regarding this excellent event.

if you can attend make sure you save yourself a room.

Links:

- TechED 2008 official site (Hebrew)
- Tamir Khason's - XNA and WPF and more.

Add version control folder to Favorites

2008-01-06T12:21:00.001-08:00

Today, after using TFS and VS for team system for quite a while (almost two years) I had an Idea.

Getting to a specific folder in the source control is quite a pain in the neck, after all we are doomed to do it again and again on a daily basis and it isn't easy for the first time and it is not getting better after a while... but worth. It is even worth if you have a huge repository of code with nested sub-folders of 6 levels or more, getting to the current project you are working on is really painful.

So, as I said, I had an enlightenment yep, Microsoft should allow a user to add a specific folder to the favorites node available at the Team-Explorer. This way I will be able to place my current project's folder in the favorites and get back to it with less work.

I had scanned the web looking for a post or article that will deal with this, and the only post I got is this. The interesting thing about this post that Mario Rodrigez had stated:

"Currently there is no way to drag a version control folder there but we agree this will be as you put it *very* handy. We will give it a very strong look for our next release"

And so I wonder, will any one create a plug-in for VS2005?, Will VS 2008 team explorer will support and provide it?

iPhone - Is it just another phone?

2007-11-24T08:22:00.001-08:00

I had received an iPhone this week. I was asked to set its Hebrew back to normal status (Normal? there is no official Hebrew support yet) and to eliminate some of the problems the specific device was experiencing.

I had consulted a great friend of mine, Ohad Israeli, and asked him to lead me through the first steps of using iPhone and to solve these irritating problems.

After some resets, software installations etc. we finally got the iPhone to work. Hebrew is still strange, some works fine, some gets inverted but the overall experience is what I want to discuss here.

I believe that Apple through iPhone is showing a revolutionary user experience that will be imitated by other vendors. We are about to experience a movement from menu-based operation to touch-based operation. I believe that Apple had set a new standard for operating devices. If we think about it further, UMPC (Ultra Mobile PCs) are about to be influenced by this just as well.

What do you think?

del.icio.us Tags: iPhone, Hacks, Hebrew, User experience, UX, UI

Using Enterprise Library Exception & Logging application blocks caused an ExceptionHandlingException

2007-09-29T03:02:00.001-07:00

I'm developing a nice tool for asset tracking for my team leaders and builders. I had decided that I will use EntLib 3.0 for logging and Exception-Handling by policies.

I've seen some of my developers doing quite well with EntLib, and Ohad Israeli, an appreciated developer and architect, which is a great EntLib enthusiast quite easily convinced me to use EntLib instead of reinventing the wheel. So, without arguing I sat down and hooked a first class to the Exception-Handling Application Block.

Using it was quite easy, just as the QuickStart directs you (or any other resource you may find). I managed to declare a Policy quite easily and define few exception types and handlers. Everything just seemed to be working and Life could not be better...

Than I just decided to be brave and to use the Logging Application Block. I added a reference to the right assembly and used the Banal syntax of writing to the Log.

...
Logger.Write ("This a message to the Log");
...

Now this worked just fine, so I got myself even braver and confident and moved to the next phase... Connecting Exception-Handling with Logging! WOW!

Courage is not enough, I had to know exactly what to do, So I watched a Screen-Cast by Guy Burstein [Heb] and read the documentation and just thought that everything is as easy as 1-2-3... But NO!

I Just got this obscure message and tried to understand what I did wrong while setting the app.config file using EntLib's configuration tool.

When you get this weird Exception "ExceptionHandlingException was unhandled" you should look for your host application's (where the app.config file is placed) and look for the references. It seems that my only sin was that I had no reference to Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Logging. I had a reference to the ExceptionHandling, I had a reference to the Logging, But I had no idea that I need a reference to this "combined" assembly. Now I DO!

Delphi: I wish I could store my project state in TFS... Now I Can

2007-07-03T13:43:00.001-07:00

Ever wished you could store a Delphi project state in TFS so that whenever you'll have to download the project from TFS to a development workstation it will be as easy as "Get Latest version"?

Well, We are almost there. My team had Identified a tool that may help us on doing so. More about it... Soon!

ReSharper in 31 days

2007-07-01T12:53:00.001-07:00

I just ran into a nice blog post of ReSharper. It is a nice introduction to ReSharper spanning over 31 days of posts.

If you wish to try ReSharper take this tutorial as guide, it is well written; clear, direct and delves just enough for you to understand.

Links:

- Joe White's Blog

- Blog Event: The 31 Days of ReSharper

- ReSharper

Easier UI Thread safe methods

2007-06-11T15:08:00.001-07:00

Roy Osherove posted few weeks ago a nice post of an elegant solution for synchronization between a thread and a Form/Winform control.

His solution is built upon the Castle framework, allowing you to determine how a method is treated, wether the method will be called directly* or through Synchronized Invocation.

As some other readers mentioned, the direct method call is not as direct as one may imagine. Each time a method marked with an attributed (derived from [AOPAttributeBaseAttribute]) is being called a set of InvokeBefore and InvokeAfter methods are being called. If synchronization is required, the ancestor's InvokeBefore method is being called and is using invoke operation to perform the synchronization. This may result in degraded performance due to some overhead, But as Roy had answered one of his critics: UI can handle some few milliseconds delay, The user will not notice and the number we currently have is good enough.

Personally I really like the Idea of synchronizing thread to UI by simply marking the method with an Attribute. I find it easy, standard and simple enough to maintain.

Note that one can extend the solution for synchonization between two threads.

Open question? - Since it requires that each and every object to be synchronized should be created by using the Factory (AOPFactory), how does that fit with an already made framework we are about to use? - For example - CAB.

Links:
- Roy Osherove's blog
- Castle

.NET/Java Interop is/not a reason for Web-Services

2007-06-02T14:30:00.000-07:00

If you follow Arnon's and Udi Dahan's blogs carefully you may find interesting debates and disagrees between the two. Usually Udi is more academic while Arnon is more pragmatic.

So this time they agree that using webservices for .NET-Java interop is not SOA, however they disagree whether doing so is all evil or not.

Udi points that if you need Java/.NET interop, don't use webservices instead he is directing us to use some interop/bridging products instead of using webservices ("The only problem is that in order for things to work right, they really must have a chatty interface, and flow transaction context between these “services”, and all the other things I describe as anti-patterns.")

While Arnon agrees that using webservices for this purpose does not meet SOA and may actually meet some ugly anti-patterns, however, it is not so bad idea to wrap a Java software by webservice in order to be used by .NET application. ("However, using Web-services does not automatically mean that you are doing an SOA. If you don't think about moving to SOA you can still opt to use web-services as a remoting or RPC technology to connect two systems.")

My humble opinion is that wrapping a Java (or whatever) based application with a webservice just to allow a .NET application with the capabilities the Java application poses is no evil. I distinguish between SOA, Architecture and Technologies or techniques. I see this as a technique and not as architectural decision. However, if someone feel that by using webservice he is designing his system as Service Oriented system he is all wrong.

If you follow Udi's blog and presentation you can understand why he is so strict and stiff about this. Udi have a strong opinion and knowledge of SOA and I can understand why he may come to a point where he takes a pure technology matter and paint with Architecture colors while establishing a set of do's and don'ts for that technology; using technology in a wrong way is far easier to fix than architecture abuse.

So next time you consider using webservices as a solution for interop, do not turn it down just think it over and try to see how does this affect your overall design and architecture.

Links:
Arnon's Post
Udi's Post

Tom Hollander on Feb. CTP of GAT

2007-04-27T11:50:00.001-07:00

I Will not elaborate further than directing you to Tom's blog, However if you are interesting in Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) whether you plan on authoring future toolkits or just using some already made factories (list below), Tom's post is for you.

If you wish to read about GAT or learn further, some links are added below.

Links:
Tom's Blog

What is GAT anyway?
Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit

GuidanceAutomation.NET

Some good factories based on GAT:
Web Client Software Factory

Smart Client Software Factory

Web Service Software Factory

Downloads:
Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance
Automation Toolkit Download

The Developer's ToolBox

2007-04-13T16:20:00.001-07:00

Do you find yourself, from time to time, wondering what is the best tool to use for a given mission? Now, how about a nice source to look and find the available tools for the task?

For years Delphi Magazine (Called DelphiZine.com) had an yearly poll for the best tools, where the magazine's readers had to answer a survey and the results were published by the magazine. It was very useful since you had a complete list of tools ranked by popularity.

Ohad Israeli had posted his presentation for the Orcale .NET Forum where he presented an extensive list of tools for the .NET architects and developers.

Ohad's Developer's ToolBox presentation

You can also check Roy Osherove's blog where he had also a nice post about developer tool, however, his post is quite old and probably did not go under any updates lately. What you should do is try to filter his blog with the "Cool Tools" Tag, you will find some interesting stuff there.

Links:
Ohad's Developer's ToolBox presentation
Roy Osherove's blog
Chris's Free Developer Tools
MSDN: Ten Must-Have Tools Every
Developer Should Download Now
Scott Hanselman's 2006 Ultimate Developer
and Power Users Tool List for Windows [Thanks to Adi]

Connecting Team Foundation Server from Borland's Delphi

2007-04-07T03:08:00.000-07:00

How do you like Team Foundation Server? I like it a lot.
How about Borland (CodeGear) Delphi? I am using Delphi for the past 10 years now, and since I could not see a near end to this I had to connect these two development environments together.

How do we do that?
This is made quite easy if you posses two tools. The first comes free while the other is just $50 away.

The first tool you need to install is Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider.The second tool is Delphi's integration to Source Control called, SourceConnexion, developed by Epocalipse.

Installation is easy; there is nothing much to do and you get a perfect match between Microsoft… and Borland.

I use Delphi on Daily basis, Checking-In and Out source, Commenting, Synchronizing, Attaching and updating workitems (WIs) with a job I just finished. Using SourceConnexion makes it much easier and productive. There aren't any issues of reliability, it is working as good as doing it manually directly on Team Explorer.

Read Eyal's posts on MSSCCI v1.0, it is a bit out of date but will clarify some issues on Delphi and TFS.

Links:
MSSCCI Provider
SourceConnexion
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

Martin Woodward on TFS MSSCCI update
bHarry's Update on TFS MSSCCI Provider

Finally I managed to uninstall TFS Power Toys v1.1 off my Vista

2007-04-04T09:20:00.001-07:00

Have you seen the new release of Team Foundation Power Toys 1.2? I even tried to install it, really! Guess what!

I couldn't since I had version 1.1 already installed and had to uninstall it first, that make some sense, doesn't it?

Here is where sense stops and hard work gets in… I tried to uninstall version 1.1 of TFPT I had installed only about 3 weeks ago on my brand new Vista installation.
First time I tried to uninstall it I got an internal error "Internal Error 2738" message.

I browsed the net and understood that the vbscript.dll was not registered. So I was trying my luck and registered it using the regsvr32.exe. Keep in mind that you must run it as an Administrator, I've done it by opening a Command-Line console as an administrator (right click on the link and choose to run it as an administrator).

And all went well, until I tried to uninstall again, Now...

I got the following message:
"Error 1722. There is a problem with this windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your..."

Additional info from the event log says: "Action DevEnvSetup" command "...\IDE\\devenv /setup"

So I browsed the net again, and I even left a message on Brian Harry's blog waiting for an answer. At the same time I bumped with Ozzie's blog about "Manually Forcing an uninstall of the Team System Power Toys" and tried my luck with it, I downloaded the Msiinv.exe utility (Since the output is quite long I had to direct the output to a file: msiienv.exe > InstalledPackages.txt)

I looked for TFPT.MSI in the InstalledPackages.txt and found the Product Code than I Took Ozzie's advice and executed the following command:
msiexec.exe /x {Product Code}

Again you should have Administrator rights and therefore I had to run it inside the command console while running it as an Administrator.
Note that with conventional means: having full administrative rights on my computer and regular uninstall didn't help, whenever I tried to uninstall, Vista halted until I approved to use my administrative rights to uninstall, I approved and still got the 1722 error message.

Nothing helped but manually uninstalling the package.

Links:
TFS Power Toys
Brian Harry
Ozzie Rules Blogging

Recommended Books

2007-03-31T12:31:00.000-07:00

I just added to the blog a list of books that I recommend.
You can see it as the first list on the right.

Enjoy.

Creating .NET Classes out of XML schema

2007-03-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

For now I will post here just a brief list of posts and
articles concerning this issue. Later on, I will try each
method and judge using my best judgement techniques...
and list the top 5. If you have a method of converting
XSD to .NET Class which I did not list here, please feel
free to drop me a comment suggesting your method.

Using Microsoft's SDK tool - XSD.EXE - Read this / Read this
Using a tool suggested by "The Code Project" - Read this
Using a Guidance Package - Read this

Documenting your code

2007-03-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

Right after I had finished Chapter 12 of the fine book Professional
Visual Studio 2005 dealing with XML Comments I set down and
enhanced some of my code with additional comments and examples.

It is all nice and beauty, but how about converting it to real
documentation, just like the fine documentation provided by
MSDN? I know that the answer for most of you is too obvious, however
I hit some walls I believe you don't want to hit yourself.

I tried nDoc 1.3.1 from SourceForge but it didn't work on my Visual
Studio 2005 running on a brand new installation of Vista without
Framework 1.1 installed.

I browsed the web looking for a simple solution for that problem
and got two answers for this:
Jonas Lagerblad is offering nDoc 1.3.1 with a set of fixes for Visual
Studio 2005 and .NET framework 2.0. You can get it here.

Sudheer Kumar have an excellent post about code documentation,
He is directing us to use nDoc 2005. However, Use the source code
and not the binary since the binary will fail because of a
documented bug regarding directories. At first I could not
download the binaries (A problem with sourceForge) but by the
time I wrote these lines I got a fresh copy of the source code.

Comparing Jonas' nDoc 1.3.1 and nDoc 2005 I see no problem with 1.3.1.
Well It is up to you.

Links:
SourceForge
Jonas Lagerblad
Sudheer Kumar

An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B)

2007-03-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Justin (Justin-Josef Angel) had reported a bug in .NET Generics where using a constraint for a Generic type of type 'class'.

As He mentioned, when declaring the following, one will get a serious exception with hardly no way to Debug (BadImageFormatException).

public class SpecificClass: BaseClass: where T : class { }

Justin claims that Microsoft, through MSDN, is directing software developers to use the class constraint. I'm trying to understand his problem; Is the problem is with having a constraint as general as 'class'.

Reading the MSDN article he relies on (MSDN) I can see that developers are directed to use constraints on some occasions, however we are not directed to use the 'class' constraint in particular.
I agree that there is no warning on this specific usage of the constraint, but I am not sure
why should we use such a General constraint at all.

Links:
Justin Post
MSDN

New version of ILMerge

2007-03-06T14:41:00.000-08:00

The new version (2.0.7.228) is available since Feb. 28th. The following changes were made for the latest version:
- Fixes problem where merged assemblies ran as a 32-bit process even on a 64-bit machine.
- ILMerge is now a strongly-named assembly.
- Fixes a problem with adjusting the accessibility of a type when a subtype has a more restricted accessibility.
- Makes sure there are no duplicate assembly names in the list of input assemblies.
- Various generics fixes.On an error, the stack trace is now written to the log.

A nice GUI wrapper is available at the code project, and there is a nice article by John Mueller discussing the reason this ILMerge is required at first place: DevSource