NullReferenceException

Mailing list filter – Outlook add in

Juan — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:57:31 -0300

I had a particular problem with my e-mails. I belong to multiple mailing lists at work, so when someone sends an e-mail to all of them, I get several copies, like the following picture illustrates

There was no way of fixing it with rules, as they are n different e-mails, not the same one.

After a little search, I couldn’t find anything to fix this, so I programmed a little add-in to deal with it (you can download both the binaries and the source at the end).

It works like this:

You provide a list of addresses by priority
If an e-mail is from one of those addresses (evaluated in order), and one recipient is in the list above the current one, the mail is deleted (as you have already received it with that previous address)

Easy! So easy, I may be missing something, if so, please let me know.

To install it, download the binaries and double-click the MailingListFilter.vsto file (you need to have the Visual Studio Tools for Office installed), if that doesn’t work, you can go to Tools –> Trust Center –> Add-ins –> Go…, there you can add it manually. Perhaps I’ll add an installer later.

To configure it, go to Tools –> Mailing List Filter…

Remember to specify them in priority order (it’s a good idea to add your personal address first).

The code is based on this example.
You are free to download and modify the code, if you publish a modification, a link here would be nice.

Known Issues

Despite the documentation claiming the event I use (NewMailEx) is guaranteed to fire, I found that this is not always true. There are certain cases of race conditions with Outlook rules, and if you have one set to move mails to subfolders, the event may not fire. So in order for this add in to work, you shouldn’t have rules to move the eligible mails to subfolders; it’s kind of annoying, so I’ll post a fix if I ever find one.

Downloads

Duct Tape Programmers

Juan — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:26:07 -0300

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Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a shit what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.

From Joel Spolsky’s blog

To delete or not to delete

Juan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:01:17 -0300

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According to this article, there is no question at all… the answer is not to delete. It could all also be summarize as “learn Domain Driven Design”, try not to always think technically and understand the business behind things.

As they say

I know it doesn’t show up as nicely on your resume as “3 years WXF”, but “saved the company $4 million in wasted inventory” does speak volumes.

Interesting read

I finally did it

Juan — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 20:19:51 -0300

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You may have noticed that this blog was very slow.

Well, it had a reason… I was working hard on graduating!

(If you are not from around here, don’t be alarmed, throwing crap all over people is a tradition here when you graduate… and oh my, did all that crap smell)

I almost can’t believe that 5 years went by, all that effort and investment finally paid off, as it was predicted a year and half ago :)

I’ll try to start blogging again now that I have more free time, although I’m about to start a new project with which I hope to become a millionaire (and have even more time to blog) as well as becoming a parent, which won’t be an easy task.

Write to you soon!

Replays Hoshimi 2009

Juan — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:08:00 -0300

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Perdón por la demora. Acá les dejo los replays y logs de la última competencia en la UP.

Los ganadores fueron

Apellido	Nombre	Equipo	Colegio	Puesto

Panzarasa	Nahuel	Monsters	nº32, San Martin; DE nº14	1ero
Scaramuccia	David Leonel		nº32, San Martin; DE nº14

Barbarroja	Emiliano	GyBSoft Team.	ET 37 Stella Maris	2do
Flores	Lucas

Lera Romero.	Gonzalo.	Lecosoft	ET 35	3ero

DE SOUSA;	JOAQUIN	NTS	ET 37 Stella Maris	4To
CHA,	PABLO		ET 37 Stella Maris

Egea	Dario	No Memory	Confederación Suiza	5to
Carrizo	David

Scherman	Ariel Kevin	"AriYLuky"	ORT	6to
Moscovicz	Lucas		ORT

GIORDANO,	LUCAS	SistorTeam	ET 37 Stella Maris	7mo
POBLETE,	FACUNDO

Felicitaciones a los ganadores, nos vemos en la próxima!

Thinking ahead

Juan — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:46:00 -0300

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Lately I’ve been reading an interesting blog about a girl that sees the world pretty much as I’d like to see it, and one excerpt from the latest post caught my attention

(…)

Even though there was an extremely slim chance of me and my place being in any danger, I packed up my stuff and evacuated. The way people are saved in huge disasters is through prompt and thorough reactions. If I had waited until I was in danger, I would have contributed to clogging the single freeway, lost more of my stuff, and put others in danger too. The proper response to an emergency is not denial, not panic, but rational, precautionary steps.

Emphasis mine.

That’s one piece of advise we could extrapolate to everything, I think, and I’d like to bring it to my field: Programming.

How many projects have you worked on, where it’s very smooth and quiet at the beginning, just to plunge into chaos towards the end? I know I have worked on many. Don’t you think it would be better to take that approach? Not falling in denial and panic, but taking steps to guarantee the success, or at least minimize loses. There are some books on that topic that are very interesting.

What about if you are in a job you don’t like? Are you going to wait until it’s unbearable and you have to go job hunting in a hurry because you can’t take it anymore? No. Rational, precautionary steps. Start slow, start searching when you have the time to search well, research, compare, decide with facts.

What about any other aspect of life?

Levels of Programmers

Juan — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:01:00 -0300

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Here’s an interesting article about the different levels of programmers.

I found the question on level 5 quite interesting

You have a successful career as a software developer. Your skills are always in demand and you never have to look very long or hard to find a great job. Your peers respect you. Every company you work with is improved and enriched in some way by your presence.

But where do you go from there?

Where do you go from here? I think that’s a question everyone ask themselves, at least I know I do… and quite often.

I might be close to answering it though…

Disclaimer: I’m not placing myself at level 5.

Hacked!

Juan — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:33:00 -0300

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HACKED!

Hi Master (: Your System pwned By Turkish Hackers

BlueLine pwns you!

WhiteCode, LiZZard, with me in here

WE WERE HERE

Hacked by DarKLord ;)

LazyLoading and Serialization

Juan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 22:55:00 -0300

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The other day I run into a little problem, which I thought worth of mentioning. It’s really kinda obvious when you think about it, but I didn’t, until I run into it.

First, a little background for those that don’t know what LazyLoading or Serialization are.

Lazy loading is a design pattern commonly used in computer programming to defer initialization of an object until the point at which it is needed. It can contribute to efficiency in the program's operation if properly and appropriately used

So basically, you implement your properties (of complex objects) in such a way that they get instantiated only when the property get is called; something like this

In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be stored on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward.

The “not straightforward” part, is often solved getting the object referenced in the property, and serializing it also.

So, could you spot the problem?

Whenever an object that implements LazyLoading gets serialized, all its properties are called, which breaks the whole LazyLoding concept.

My specific problem appeared because I used an entity both to display a list of objects with a listview, that used the code and description properties, and when you clicked on one it would redirect you to an edit page, where the full object would be loaded so it could be edited.

I “fixed” it with a tiny little flag; since I have a Service class that calls a DataMapper to load the entities, I knew from where I was calling it, so I added a parameter to pass whether LazyLoading should be cancelled; in the above example, additionally to checking if the private field was null, I also checked this flag, and loaded it only if it was false. This greatly reduced rendering times.

I know it’s not a really good fix, so I though of leaving an open question to everyone… how would you solve this?

Other options I thought were:

Having two different entities, one lightweight for the list, and one for the full edit page. This would double the Service and DataMapper classes, and it was a lot of work.
Having two different entities and use inheritance to reduce that Data Access layer duplication. It seemed it wouldn’t be that clear, and still it seemed like a lot of work.
There was another option that I cannot recall right now.

Anyway, it’s an interesting problem, isn’t it?

What would you have done?

Share extension for BlogEngine.NET

Juan — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:37:00 -0300

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Share is a new extension for BlogEngine.NET. What it does is pretty simple, it adds a “Share on Facebook” link on top of every post, so you can share them on facebook as a link.

After you install this extension (instructions below), you will see the link as follows

The extension uses a custom page for its configuration, where you can select the text of the link, and the link type, as explained on facebook’s help page.

And, as advertised, when you click the share link, you get the pop up window to post the link to your facebook profile

Optionally, you can add a link to the head section of the site.master of your theme, to have facebook pull that image as a thumbnail, you do that like this

Where <your_url>, is the url of the image you want to display.

To install this extension, simple unzip the following files on your BlogEngine.Web root directory

Important Note: This code is an extension for BlogEngine.net version 1.4.5.15 and up. It was tested on this version, because it has a bug fix that made extensions don't work. The bug is present in 1.4.5, I don't really know exactly in which subversion it was fixed, you can check it yourself.

The problem was in the method DataStoreExtension in App_Code\ExtensionManager\Manager.cs, the line

Stream stm = (FileStream)xs.GetSettings();

has to be

Stream stm = (FileStream)o;

That's it! You can download the files below, and you can try it on this very post, just click "Share on Facebook" there on the top

Darwin

Juan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:31:00 -0300

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El 12 de febrero de 1809 nació Chales Darwin, quien postulo en el famoso libro “el origen de las especies” que todos descendemos de un antepasado en común, y que los que sobreviven de cada especie son los más aptos, teniendo los individuos débiles menos probabilidad de reproducirse, y transmitir sus genes a generaciones posteriores.

Todo esto suena muy lógico.

Si Darwin estuviera vivo hoy, tendría que reescribir su libro, ya que siempre hay excepciones a las reglas. Yo soy la excepción en este caso.

La siguiente ecuación aclara un poco más a que me refiero.

Les dejo a vuestra imaginación lo que realmente significa ese corazón, puede haber lectores menores de edad.

Si, lo logré… Darwin debe estar revolcándose en su tumba. Supervivencia del más apto… Ja!

Running ASP.NET MVC on IIS6

Juan — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 10:07:19 -0300

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I wanted to try out ASP.NET MVC in order to decide whether or not I could use it for a small project I’m starting, I’ve read nothing than good things about the Framework, but I hadn’t had the chance to try it on a real web site.

The first step though, is making it work. My hosting provider runs the windows server on IIS6, and does not allow custom configuration unless you buy a dedicated server, which I didn’t want to do, for now at least.

There are quite a few blog posts that explain how to run ASP.NET MVC on IIS6, but in all I read you need to have access to the web server configuration, to do one of two things:

Setup a wildcard mapping
Add an ISAPI mapping and have an extension (ie: .mvc) use the asp.net runtime.

This options were no good for me.

The solution was quite simple (well, it became simple after a little bit of research): Add a custom route, and map .aspx files to a controller.

You need to add this to the Global.asax file:

 routes.MapRoute("Main", "{controller}/{action}.aspx",

     new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" });

 routes.MapRoute("Default", "",

     new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" });

The only drawback is that you don’t get the “pretty” url you can get if you use IIS7 or have access to IIS6 configuration, but it works.

(Instead of having a url like this: http://yourserver/Home/Index, you get http://yourserver/Home/Index.aspx)

If the framework (MVC) is not installed on the server, you also need to copy the dlls to the bin directory, which they don’t get copied by default, you need to check the “Copy Local” property in the project references.

A great example to follow

Juan — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:38:00 -0300

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Some time ago I came across Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky; and a lot of my posts were about Jeff or stackoverflow in the past, but now I want to focus on Joel, and his view about software companies.

Check this excerpt from his about page, where he talks about his founding of Fog Creek Software:

We didn't start with a particular product in mind: our goal was simply to build the kind of software company where we would want to work, one in which programmers and software developers are the stars and everything else serves only to make them productive and happy. The theory, which has proven itself over and over again, is that this kind of thinking would allow us to attract the super-talented software developers who would do great things and make us successful.

Isn’t that simple concept just great? Why is it that not all companies have that philosophy?

It’s so simple it can be summarized in this image (also from Joel’s homepage):

Do you you work or have worked somewhere that’s just great, and fun, and focused on working conditions, a place that takes care of the most important asset, the people?

He also stays true to his beliefs, if you don’t believe me, check their new office out.

What would you love to have that you don’t?

What would you do if you owned the company you work for? Or what would you do if you founded your own?

These are interesting questions to ask yourself once in a while; I know I do from time to time…

ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate

Juan — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:35:00 -0300

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Just dropping by (after a long period of inactivity) to let you know that the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate is out (and the final 1.0 version is expected in a month).

So check it out if you haven’t tried the Betas, you won’t regret it.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx

You gotta love it!

Juan — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:54:00 -0300

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I was just reading one of my favorite blogs, and stumbled across its last post, where it talks about the software industry.

I thought I’d share it, as it explains quite perfectly exactly how I feel too.

Take a look at this response from Joel to someone who’s thinking about leaving the industry

Although the tech industry is not immune, programming jobs are not really being impacted. Yes, there are fewer openings, but there are still openings (see my job board for evidence). I still haven't met a great programmer who doesn't have a job. I still can't fill all the openings at my company.

Our pay is great. There's no other career except Wall Street that regularly pays kids $75,000 right out of school, and where so many people make six figures salaries for long careers with just a bachelors degree. There's no other career where you come to work every day and get to invent, design, and engineer the way the future will work.

Despite the occasional idiot bosses and workplaces that forbid you from putting up Dilbert cartoons on your cubicle walls, there's no other industry where workers are treated so well. Jesus you're spoiled, people. Do you know how many people in America go to jobs where you need permission to go to the bathroom?

Stop the whining, already. Programming is a fantastic career. Most programmers would love to do it even if they didn't get paid. How many people get to do what they love and get paid for it? 2%? 5%?

It’s true that he’s talking about the US, but the same applies here in Argentina… you gotta love building software!