prem's blog on .net, C#, and cool new utilities

2012-12-12T00:35:00.000+05:30

Good post on interviewing process should work in a software company. Would be interested in setting up such process within our company.

Article

Difference between framework and library

2012-09-26T10:56:00.003+05:30

Good quote to differentiate between framework and library, "framework calls your code but your code calls library".

Stay @ Ocean Spray, Pondicherry

2012-01-09T17:05:00.002+05:30

Had a nice little break from regular tasks by taking a small vacation @ Ocean Spray, Pondicherry. Went there during the last week of december 2011, when the rates are exorbitantly priced. Gone are the days when my kids were small enough that I can beat the peak season and get good deals on rooms, now i have joined the rat race that plans the vacation surrounding the school vacations.

Quick info for anybody looking to stay @ Ocean Spray : It's about 2 hours drive from chennai on ECR road towards pondicherry. This is not a sea side resort, so please avoid this if you are looking for a sea side resort. The sea would probably be a good 1-2 kms from the hotel and there is no proper walk way to the sea. We stayed in "Heavens Room" and we enjoyed the stay very much. It's a small room with a queen size bed and a sit out with Jacuzzi. The resort is build in a huge area with a big artificial man made lake covering a good size in the center. We found the food to be pretty good but little expensive. There is a huge swimming pool in the center of the resort and a outdoor kids play area. It is a good place to spend a weekend. It would be good resort for travelling with small kids. This might not be the place if you are someone looking at a place with tons of activities.

Artificial Intelligence class by Stanford Univ

2011-08-04T10:42:00.002+05:30

I have always loved to read about Artificial Intelligence and I just heard an awesome news, Stanford University is offering Artificial Intelligence fall class online conducted by couple of eminent folks in this field Sebestian Thurn and Peter Norvig. The course runs from Sept 26, 2011 to Dec 16, 2011. All you need is high speed internet connection and you could be listening to this class, get access to identical materials(typically offered to folks attending the course directly) and take exams associated with it and get graded.

For more details visit/signup in the website http://www.ai-class.com/

Learning jQuery

2011-07-18T14:52:00.004+05:30

Many people recommend jQuery in Action as the best book for learning jQuery, but I didn't like the style that was laid down in that book. I am not saying anything about the content of the book, it's a very good reference book for jQuery and offers plenty of details for many frequently used APIs, but I feel the layout of the book certainly doesn't offer step by step introduction to somebody new to jQuery.

Folks interested in learning jQuery would benefit greatly by visiting this video tutorial by appendTo folks, it offers jQuery fundamentals in a way very easy for anyone to grasp and also the materials are laid down 4-5 mins each per topic(like khan academy tutorials).

I would also suggest using jQuery in Action book as a reference material which it fits pretty well.

Khan Academy - Awesome site that you want your kids to spend time on

2011-07-01T12:45:00.003+05:30

I am continuously amazed by the wealth of information available in khan academy. Having started my career long back as a trainer in a software training institute, I have always loved sharing knowledge with colleagues/friends. Like any other profession you need passion to teach someone and the key is knowing how to break down complex things so people can easily understand. Sal khan has taken his part time job of teaching his cousins into this amazing wealth of information across multiple areas, I thoroughly enjoy watching his videos whenever I get time.

I want to get my kids involved with this site so they can start understanding complex topics broken down to nice smaller pieces. Kudos to sal khan for putting up a great job and doing it as a non-profit which makes it even more awesome.

Watch sal khan talk about his work in this ted video.

Nice Idea by McDonald

2011-06-06T21:40:00.001+05:30

Pretty interesting marketing stuff from McDonald -- a new ad campaign that invites pedestrians to play a game of Pong on a giant Mickey D's billboard, using only their smartphones. Last thirty seconds, though, and you'll get a free treat of your choice.

Windows 8 is going to be cool

2011-06-02T10:22:00.002+05:30

Came across a cool video in msnbc website in which microsoft gave first look of windows 8, I should say I was amazed of what they have done so far. I have always thought microsoft did not do anything different from the UI perspective from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 the start menu remains the same just that the size of start menu and the graphic of start menu has changed, I got tired of not seeing any drastic/cool UI improvements coming out of Microsoft. I certainly hope windows 8 doesn't become another windows incarnation with a different button for start menu and I was really amazed to see the first look of windows 8, microsoft are at last looking @ UI differently (should I say the Apple way ;) Take a look at the video

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cool tool of the day - SSMS Tools Pack

2011-05-23T18:07:00.003+05:30

When I am troubleshooting production issues, I always have problem with having multiple SQL Server windows open trying to do update/select across different regions (I am not saying that we do updates in production on a regular ad-hoc basis but there are times we have to do that).

Fortunately, I came across a cool tool today that would reduce the confusion of which sql window I am currently in, is it development/UAT/production. SSMS tools pack is an excellent set of tools and contains the windows connection coloring feature that you can use to set which color you want to display on top of the different sql windows, probably red for your production connections and green for your development environments.

Take a look at the tool for yourself, you will sure appreciate the value of it.

Tips and Advice for Students, Teachers, and Parents

2011-03-17T13:16:00.001+05:30

Really liked this post discussing about tips and advice for students, teachers and parents, posting it for future reference

Students

Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. Pull everything out of yourself. Work hard. Then work harder.

Success isn’t how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started.

Learn by trial and error, and don’t avoid the errors. Consider everything an experiment.

Learning doesn’t happen in class, it happens when you get home and look at the wall. Don’t forget to make time for looking at walls.

Be self-disciplined.

Be a self-advocate.

Learn from your mistakes. There is no win and no fail, there’s only honest effort.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. Worrying about work doesn’t get it done, it only makes getting started harder.

Get good at something other than school-related work (like skateboarding or cooking).

Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.Subscribe to many magazines, the more pictures the better. Don’t feel bad about not reading them cover to cover, just have them around and read what interests you, even if it’s just one article.

It’s the process, not the product that counts, because you can use it again and again and it transfers.

Don’t do school-related work under pressure. Allow lots of extra time for things that are hard, and for everything else, too.

Learning opportunities are everywhere, not just in academic settings. The more stuff you do, the more you learn. But, don’t overdo it and spread yourself too thin.

Read anything you can get your hands on. Comic books involve decoding just as great literature does.

Read billboards and road signs.

Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes.

Learn how to touch-type.

Write lots of letters.

Learn to read and use maps.

Learn to read and use indexes.

Learn to use a library.

Learn to cook and deal with food.

Watch movies, regularly.

Learn to ask questions without feeling stupid.

Travel whenever and wherever you can.

Save everything; it might come in handy later.

Give others some slack; it makes life easier.

Give yourself some slack; it makes life easier.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Teachers

Pull everything out of your students.

Extend yourself.

Be creative.

Don’t assess a student’s capabilities based on his or her I.Q. test scores. There’s more to people than test scores.

Don’t be scared to make a mess (mistakes) in front of students. If learning takes place through modeling, you must model the process of working things out, from scratch, mistakes and all. Few teachers do this, more should.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Parents

Be there, but don’t smother kids. Don’t be a “helicopter parent.” Not enough interest is neglect; too much involvement can smother and enable.

Keep the pressure low.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Learning how to read and write takes a lot of time and work. Make sure you give your kids enough time and space for them to learn.

Make sure kids practice reading and writing every day. Don’t let them miss a day for anything. Sit on them, but not too hard.

Make sure there’s a World Book Encyclopedia in the house. Any year is okay. Buy it used. Using an encyclopedia is very different from using the internet. Make sure you have both.

Learning takes place after the fact, while your kid is looking at the wall, not while he/she’s in a classroom at school. When they get home, give them the time and space to look at walls.

Don’t romanticize your past too much, kids resent it and it probably wasn’t as good as you think it was.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Attended Martin fowler's event in Chennai

2010-12-17T11:00:00.002+05:30

Lucky to attend event organised by thoughtworks featuring Martin fowler in chennai. I never thought in my life I might get a chance to attend a event having Martin Fowler as a speaker. He gave a talk similar to suiteoftalks that he has been following of late. The areas he covered in his talks include Continuous Integration/Delivery, Strategic and Utility projects and Domain Specific languages, none of this is new if you have been following his blog closely. I was just happy to hear him talk probably this was the first time I am meeting someone in person who has made great contribution to the software community. After the talk I got a chance to have a personal chat with him and raised question about my dilema of whether to move forward to DVCS (git, mercurial) rather than the current source control (Borland StarTeam) that we have, his direct answer was "Depends on the maturity of the team, if the team is mature, DVCS is the way to go".

Hope I get a chance to meet more people like him in the future (Anders Hejlsberg ranks high on that list).

Explaining things effectively

2010-12-17T10:52:00.004+05:30

I have always been fascinated how people come up with good visual ways of explaining complex things, this video is one such appreciative work on explanation of quicksort algorithm (link got from blog of my friend Santhosh Ahuja). Being in the software field and involved heavily in recruitment of people at various levels, what I have learnt is it's easier to find people with sound knowledge but difficult to see them possess the art of explaining things effectively (which unfortunately is a key trait needed in a personnel not only in the software field but in other fields as well).

Quicksort Explanation Video

Attended Jean Paul Boodhoo's NBDN Remote program

2010-10-25T19:31:00.004+05:30

Couple of weeks (October 11th - October 15th) ago I had the opportunity to attend JP Boodhoo's Nothing But Dot Net remote course. I was very interested to learn more about TDD and getting myself comfortable with some of the advanced concepts in C#.

I wouldn't classify this course as advanced course in C#, rather it was advanced basics in C#. The first day JP gave us a simple task of filtering/sorting sample, JP had created test cases for each of the filtering/sorting scenario and we were writing code to make the test case pass. We went from creating a simple for loop to all the way of creating generic delegates to handle most of the collection related activities, we learnt how we could use delegates and generics effectively.

The next couple of days we created a the fictitious web application that has a shopping catalog and JP taught us about using FrontController architecture for building the application.

The final day JP discussed about the Inversion of Control Container and showed us how to create a container from scratch. I always understood the concept of dependency injection but didn't have a good idea of containers, after this session I was not only able to clearly understand the need of containers but understand the inner workings of container since we created one from scratch.

JP's style of teaching is awesome, he starts by giving us a simple code piece and takes the code of the team that completes the task first and starts refactoring the code from there. His inspirational talks all along the course was an added bonus.

A cool added knowledge I got from the course was the knowledge of DVCS (usage of git and github) for coding purpose, I understand how effective DVCS is over the traditional source control repository and how to use it effectively in the current projects where we do quite a lot of branching.

I would seriously recommend this course to anybody who has been doing OOPS development (not necessarily c#) for atleast 5-6 years to take this course and understand what the real OOPS development is all about. I don't think anybody would walk out of the course and say that they are an TDD expert or anything of that sort (and JP doesn't expect you to say that as well), the course makes you understand where you stand and gives pointers on where to go from here and how to achieve your goals. I certainly think the course would have profound impact in my professional as well as personnel life. Since I was from India and JP has never been to India for taking NBDN courses, I had no choice but to take NBDN remote course, given a choice I would advice people to take NBDN direct course rather than remote course since you would be interacting with JP and your fellow developers directly which would be even more awesome. JP has promised to come down to India some time soon and I am looking forward to attending the NBDN direct course once again.

The only difficult part for me was I was attending the course from Chennai, India the course timing for my time zone was from 9 PM to 9 AM India time. I tried to get as much sleep possible during my day time, but it was not possible to get good amount of sleep and I was mentally exhausted by the end of the week.

Even though I paid for the course myself, it was money well spent. Now I am off to read through the books suggested by JP. I have successfully completed my first objective of reading through "Refactor with Wetware" by Andy Hunt. Now comes the difficult part, applying it in real life :)

Cool SQL tool - SQL Heartbeat

2010-02-19T19:10:00.003+05:30

I have lived many a days watching performance of SQL queries using SQL Profiler (Claims Inquiry??? - for people who knew about it) . Finding ways to improve the time taken and optimizing the same was a fun exercise; I always hate the idea of using SQL profiler, I always thought it was probably one of the worse Microsoft tools without good user interaction, I agreee that it was one of the powerful tools available to monitor SQL Server but not the best tool in terms of user interaction.

Anybody who feels the same way should try (free) tool SQL Heartbeat, it gives the information of your database in a visual way so it makes it easy to grasp the data.
Processes grow larger as they use more resources. Red balloons appear when locking occurs. Download it from: sqlsolutions

Interesting Video on "What stops population growth"

2010-01-21T03:39:00.003+05:30

While reading bill gates new website The Gates Notes stumbled upon a good link for a presentation by Hans Rosling on What stops Population Growth, it gives a totally different thinking on population growth in world. I liked the way Rosling uses very little time and excellent charts/graphs to convey the points effectively across to the audience.

While in the gapminder website, take a look at the various statistics they have to compare countries and how they stack up against the world. Excellent usage of charts and graphs to compare countries !!

Performance Issues

2009-12-15T11:39:00.002+05:30

I have been part of software projects where we constantly have to tune the code (C#/SQL) for performance improvements. The question you have to ask yourself before doing any code change for performance is "Does this code really warrant changes for performance issues"? Most of the time someone would say changing the code to use LINQ instead of for each loop would make it faster.. Most of the time such recommendations tend to be wrong. Write code that is readable/maintainable before thinking too much about the performance issues.

Always, Always measure your performance problems before and after making code changes to conclude that you have impacted code in a positive way. Even though this principal applies for both code that is in active development and production, it is critical in case of code that has already been deployed to production.

One of my favorite c# blogger John Skeet wrote an excellent article on this topic. He sums it up real nice in one line "Performance is important - too important to be guessed about instead of measured."

Funny Take on LinkedIn

2009-11-23T03:58:00.002+05:30

This was a real funny take on the Jod oriented social networking site LinkedIn.

Anybody who knows what a linked in is should see this :)

Cool new technology

2009-09-16T10:31:00.003+05:30

Wanted to blog about this new product/application/company that made waves in the techcrunch top 50 of 2009.. IMO is an application that would turn your iphone to a joystick kind of device for your PC games.. I think this is a nice idea, sure it's not going to beat wii in terms of gameplay, but I am impressed with the idea of controlling your PC games using your iphone or ipod touch.

I was really surprised to see that this company is run by bunch of guys from Gurgoen, India.. nice to see an indian company making waves in innovation rather than doing the mundane software development/maintenance

SQL Server Optimization tips

2009-06-15T15:25:00.003+05:30

Nice article on SQL Server Optimization tips and performance consideration for selecting SQL Server data types.

Most of the content of this article would have been greek and latin to me had I not been working in Lumenos.

I still remember those days when I used to write "Extravaganza Report" in one single stored procedure spanning 2000 lines. I have moved more toward ORM based architecture these days in my current company, but I still think a report as complex (it really was) as extravaganza needs stored procedure for the kind of SLA that was expected out it..

Scenarios when you can use struct

2009-06-11T22:03:00.002+05:30

Nice article by Chris Eargle on when we should use structs:

He mentions the following criteria for creating struct

1. Does it represent a single value?
2. Will the instance size be under 16 bytes?
3. Should it be immutable (modifications actually make a new copy in memory, forcing you to pass by ref to methods)?
4. Will this rarely need to be boxed (cast to an object)?
5. Will it usually be short-lived?
6. Will it mostly be embedded in other objects?

Click here to read the full article

Improving Process in Software Company

2009-03-30T11:52:00.004+05:30

I know I am not updating this blog as frequently as I would expect, but would like to put in extra effort to make it a place worth visiting/RSS(ing) !!! This is my 100th blog post, I am happy to reach a personal milestone.

It has been busy period for me trying to setup process in my current company. For those of you interested in knowing things that I have standardized

-> Usage of Cruisecontrol.Net for Continuous Integration
Initially i found configuring this tool really difficult but once I completed setting up couple of projects using it, I am very comfortable with it nowadays. I might not be a continuous integration guru but certainly I could fix any cc.net issue without hiring an external consultant.

We are currently using CruiseControl.Net for migration across to our QA environments as well. This has made the deployment of code a breeze.

-> NDepend for Static analysis
Ndepend is certainly one of the best tools you could purchase to have better control of the quality of code your team is putting out. The parameters I am currently auditing include number of lines in method, cyclometric complexity and comment percentage.

-> Schemaspy for generating automatic Entity Relationship Diagrams
This is a great tool for creating ER diagrams from your database automatically and provides web based output that your team could use as a reference.

I always prefer to automate as much as possible and monitor it periodically to ensure things work as smooth as possible. You would do yourself a great favour by setting up Continuous Integration, One click Code migration and report generation using a tool like nDepend on code quality.

Having worked on improving process in the current company, I want to evaluate where we stand now in "Joel Test"

1. Do you use source control? Yes, we use Borland StarTeam
2. Can you make a build in one step? Yes
3. Do you make daily builds? Yes, we use CruiseControl.Net
4. Do you have a bug database? No
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Yes
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? No
7. Do you have a spec? No
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Yes
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? Yes
10. Do you have testers? Yes
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? No
12. Do you do hallway usability testing? No

Current score for my team is 7/12 on Joel Test, not good, but I certainly think we have come a long way from where we were... Hope to see this improve...

Difference between C# delegates vs Events

2009-02-20T11:12:00.002+05:30

Nice post by Julien Couvreur's on the difference between delegates vs events.

In a nutshell, the article summarizes the main differences between delegates vs events.

1. Events can be used inside an interface while a delegate cannot be.
2. Event can be invoked only from within the class in which it has been declared, while a delegate can be invoked even from the class that is creating the object.
3. Event has a pair of customizable accessors (add and remove)
4. Event signature can only be type foo(object source, EventArgs e)

Running SchemaSpy for database tables in SQL Server 2005

2008-11-25T18:15:00.001+05:30

I was looking for a tool to generate the schema diagram from my SQL Server 2005 development database. After some research I found the open source tool SchemaSpy which meet my needs, it also had decent reviews in few blogs. But I had problem running the tool to generate the Html documents for my schema.

After playing around with the option parameters, I was finally able to get it to generate the documentation needed. Couple of things to ensure before running schemaspy to generate documentation for SQL Server 2005 schema.

Download Microsoft JDBC driver for SQL Server 2005
Download Graphviz

Make sure the Graphviz installation is added to your system PATH variable. Run the following command

java -jar schemaSpy.jar -t mssql05 -db <name of the database> -host <Ip address/hostname> -s dbo -port 1433 -u <username of the database> -p <Password for the userId> -o library

Difference between Static and Singleton Pattern

2008-11-01T09:56:00.001+05:30

I wanted to blog about this for a while, b'cos I found many folks not being able to answer this question during the interview process. Few differences worth mentioning are

Singletons can implement interfaces and inherit from other classes (while static classes cannot).
Singletons can be extended (used as a subclass) while static classes cannot.
There is only one instance in case of Singletons but there is none in case of Static classes.
Singletons can be passed around as a parameter to function calls but you can't do that with a Static class.

Stella's Restaurant in Alexandria Closed?

2008-10-18T01:04:00.001+05:30

While chatting with my good friend Nick, I came to know that Stella's (a nice restaurant in Duke Street, Alexandria) has been closed for more than couple of years now. It is a nice, cosy restaurant that we used to go for lunch when we were working in Lumenos. I certainly have quite a lot of sweet memories there especially going for chipotle chicken on thursdays and happy hour(even though i don't drink.... just to have my root BEER/Diet Coke !!!).. The outdoor dining area in Stella's is a real nice place to have lunch/dinner.

It would have been a great trip down the memory lane if I could have had a chiptole chicken with some good old friends when I do go to USA for a business trip.. Probably have to be happy eating my foot long roasted chicken in Hearty Italian made fresh in the Subway across the Road !!