Some would say “YES”. An argument to that could be my IM list of friend, filled with LHC related statuses.Of all, I found 2 very interesting ones.

The first on is a live video feed from the LHC, from Adi. Although it is supposed to be very serious, scientific-like, at one moment there was some guy picking his nose! Should I start to get scared?

The second is a picture, from Flaviu, available below ( direct link )

In a nutshell, the project is called ArhiNET, it is an integrated system for the development and processing of distributed, semantically enhanced archivistic e-content and was coordinated by Prof. Ioan Salomie and Assoc. Prof. Mihaela Dinsoreanu. If you are familiar with the Semantic Web vision and related fields, you probably realized that it was a large project, actually we’ve only started, and by “we” I mean a large staff of professors, research assistants and students. But as I said, more about this later…

Back to the presentation, I have to say that I was nervous that day as my last exam was back in February, this being the second time with verbal examination and I was worried of forgetting important aspects. But it went very well and the professors were quite interested in the analysis and development stages of the project. Additionally, the demo went even better and made a big impression.

Due to this fact, we were invited present the project (today) at the Faculty Student Symposium for Best Thesis Projects. From the orginal team consisting of Calina Zaharia, Flaviu Zapca, Ioana Iacob, Grigore Vlad, and myself, only the last 3 were able to present it, but we managed to cover pretty much everything. At the end, we were surprised to see that a large percentage of the audience (consisting of professors, students and engineers) was seriously interested in the project, more exactly in specific areas of implementation.

Finally, the most important aspect of which I’m proud of is the fact that I succesfully graduated the Computer Science Faculty at the Technical university of Cluj-Napoca, and now I’m  a licensed engineer.

The launch started in Bucharest, hosted by a team of MVPs and MS employees, shortly followed by the “student version” in Unibuc. I say “student version” because it was hosted for the students by the students, that is by fellow MSP colleagues. Of course, events like this soon took place in every major university in Romania, hosted by local members.

Along with Adi Muresan, Cornel Rat, Ioan Lazarciuc aka ‘Cretz’ and Mihai Hudea, I had the opportunity to be part of one of these teams. Actually we were more than lucky because we got to be present in 3 other major universities in Sibiu, Brasov and Tg-Mures, we were invited by the UBB team to do a joint operation at their CS faculty and also in our home university, UTCN.

Agenda

We had a lot of presentations and demos, more exactly:

Visual Studio 2008, Cornel Rat

LINQ, Cornel Rat

ASP 3.5, Adrian Muresan

IIS 7, Adrian Muresan

Silverlight, Ioan Lazarciuc (“Cretz”)

Popfly, Ioan Lazarciuc (“Cretz”)

Opensource on the Microsoft Platform, Tudor Vlad

SQL Server 2008, Tudor Vlad

Windows Server 2008, Mihai Hudea

Thoughts

Although the main focus of this article is the resource section, I want to presents my impressions.

First of all, it was a great experience! We got to visit Sibiu, Brasov and Tg. Mures, all with great istoric heritage, as you can see in the pictures below:

we got to interact with a lot of students and some professors, and had fun overall.

Also, as you may know, it’s not easy to speak in public, even more in front of a unfamiliar audience; well, this experience also helped us to improve our professional skills, i.e. presentation skills most importantly. Once again, we thank you for the feedback!

[View all AT4.5 photos here]

Resources [DRAFT - list in progress]

As promised, we uploaded our presentations on the registration site. However, we were asked by several students for more resources (books, articles, webcasts). Next, I will present a list of links I used to learn from or heard are very good.

One thing though: this list is still a draft, I will continue to update it as I find better resources. Hopefully, it will be a good start.

.NET Framework 3.5

1. .Net Framework 3.5 Whitepapers Published
2. VS2008 and .NET 3.5 Training & Demo Kit

Visual Studio 2008

1. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – Learning Portal
2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – Webcasts
3. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – Podcasts
4. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – Virtual Labs
5. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – Free E-Learning

C# 3.0

1. Overview of C# 3.0
2. Introducing Microsoft LINQ – free ebook
3. 101 LINQ Samples
4. LINQ to SQL – ScottGu
5. Extension Methods

ASP 3.5

1. Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX – free ebook

Silverlight

1. Introducing Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 – free ebook
2. Silverlight Links and Resources
3. Learn Silverlight
4. Silverlight Resources
5. Dan Wahlin’s Latest Silverlight Articles
6. Silverlight Screencasts
7. Silverlight2 Presentation, Resources, and Rehab…

Popfly

1. www.popfly.com

Opensource on the Microsoft platform

1. Codeplex
2. Open Source Software in C#
   

SQL Server 2008

1. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – Learning Portal
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – Free E-Learning
3. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 – Learning Resources
4. Overview (SQL Server 2008)
5. What’s new (SQL Server 2008)
6. LINQ to SQL support for SQL Server 2008
7. SQL Server 2008 Webcast Series
8. 24 hours of SQL Server 2008
9. [RO] SQL Server 2008 – Backup Compression
10. [RO] Integrarea Powershell cu SQL Server 2008
11. [RO] Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2008

Windows Server 2008

1. Windows Server 2008 – Webcasts
2. Windows Server 2008 – Virtual Labs
3. Windows Server 2008 – Podcasts
4. Windows Server 2008 – edge.technet.com

Miscellaneous

1. -

For the last 5-6 years, I’ve been a fan of Kaspersky Antivirus and I recommended it to everybody. Many friends replied that it uses to many resources and the PC runs slow, but the trick was to set the scanning to “performance” (low). That meant a faster system, with insignificantly less security due to the excellent algorithm. It also had some optimizations, like scanning only the modified files (not all) before running them.

But since the last revision, I noticed that it started to leave a heavier footprint on my system, especially on the web and mail scanning. It takes 30 seconds to 5-6 minutes to load a youtube video or the LinkedIn page. Even with the web scanning turned off, it still takes significantly more than with the program turned off.

Jeff Atwood, from CodingHorror.com realised this several months ahead and provides performance data from the quoted study:

	Percent slower
	Boot	CPU	Disk
Norton Internet Security 2006	46%	20%	2369%
McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8	7%	20%	2246%
Norton Internet Security 2007	45%	8%	1515%
Trend Micro PC-cillin AV 2006	2%	0%	1288%
ZoneAlarm ISS	16%	0%	992%
Norton Antivirus 2002	11%	8%	658%
Windows Live OneCare	11%	8%	512%
Webroot Spy Sweeper	6%	8%	369%
Nod32 v2.5	7%	8%	177%
avast! 4.7 Home	4%	8%	115%
Windows Defender	5%	8%	54%
Panda Antivirus 2007	20%	4%	15%
AVG 7.1 Free	15%	0%	19%

As you can clearly see, the performance decrease is significant, especially for all you Norton AV users. But this is not all!

As Jeff points out in a later post, antiviruses are becoming less and less effective. Just look at the detection rate of new viruses, in the study done by Andreas Clementi [av-comparatives.org]. It’s between 3% and 81%, with an average of less that 40%.

Looking at these numbers, the idea of dropping the AV security doesn’t sound that bad. But it is bad! Why? Well, because from what I’ve seen, most infections explode after the solution is available. I myself got infected this year (the only time I know I’ve been infected unintentionally) with a virus +6 months old. And it happened because I did not have an antivirus.

The question regarding performance vs. security in an antivirus still stands. I am seriously thinking of installing a “better” AV. I think I’ll browse the net for reviews and perform some tests on the candidates, but if you know something good, please tell me.

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer. Cancers take at least a decade to develop, invalidating official safety assurances based on earlier studies which included few, if any, people who had used the phones for that long. [...]

“It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking,” says Professor Khurana, who told the IoS his assessment is partly based on the fact that three billion people now use the phones worldwide, three times as many as smoke. [...]

After a quick search on the web, I managed to find the study on the Brain Surgery Research site . The key facts are:

• Mobile phones are convenient and frequently invaluable, yet exposure to their electromagnetic radiation is invisible. Therefore, any danger this exposure poses may be easily dismissed.
• Exposure is long-term and its effects on the body, particularly its electrical organ, the brain, are compounded by numerous other simultaneous long-term exposures including continuous waves from radio and TV transmitter towers, cordless phone base stations, power lines, and wireless/WiFi computing devices.
• A malignant brain tumour represents a life-ending diagnosis in the vast majority of those diagnosed. There is a significant and increasing body of evidence, to date at least 8 comprehensive clinical studies internationally and one long-term meta-analysis, for a link between mobile phone usage and certain brain tumours. [...]
• The “incubation time” or “latency” (i.e., the time from commencement of regular mobile phone usage to the diagnosis of a malignant solid brain tumour in a susceptible individual) may be in the order of 10-20 years. In the years 2008-2012, we will have reached the appropriate length of follow-up time to begin to definitively observe the impact of this global technology on brain tumour incidence rates. [...]
• It is anticipated that this danger has far broader public health ramifications than asbestos and smoking, and directly concerns all of us, particularly the younger generation, including very young children

You can read the entire study here [PDF] and related data following the links below:

• Power Watch – Brain Surgeon demonstrates clear brain tumor risk
• Ramble On – Mobile Phone = Brain Tumor

I have to say I’m pretty impressed. That was quite a kick! Robotics have evolved a lot during the last years!

According to Bizjournals.com, BigDog is a project developed in collaboration with Darpa (10 million $ award). More exactly:

Boston Dynamics engineers were contracted to develop a robot with the ability to run, maneuver and jump to avoid obstacles. The robot would measure 1 meter tall and 2 meters wide, according to the U.S. Department of Defense. The goal of the project, which was slotted to last 15 months, is to produce a robot with animal-like strength, speed and mobility, according to defense officials.

Check out the Boston Dynamics site to find out more about BigDog, LittleDog and others. Also, check the related videos.

Because I have an MSDN Premium Subscription through the Microsoft Academic Program, I started downloading the Team System edition. After some unexpected interrupts from the ISP and my PC going Standby, I had my ISO.

Instalation

Before I started the setup, I remembered that I read about some issues on Windows Vista. A quick search on the Web and I found the following posts about the problem:

• How to avoid OS reboot prompt when installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows Vista [via RONUA]
• WORKAROUND: Visual Studio 2008 Fails To Install

But after I read the first post and understood the problem, I just disabled the Windows Update Service, through the Computer Management window and enabled it after the installation was done.

What’s new in VS2008

Well, a lot of the novelties come actually with the .NET Framework 3.5, like the C# language, which is now version 3.0, LINQ, and other features. But all this wouldn’t be that much fun to work with, without a serious IDE. And this IDE is now even better, offering new features like:

• multi-target support [ Scott Guthrie explains here ]
• multi-threaded debugging [ John Robbins explains here ]
• Java-script debugging and IntelliSense
• .Net Framework debugging

You can read more on .NET fw 3.5 and VS2008 features on ScottGu’s Blog excellent post , on MSDN Blogs, on this CodeProject article or directly the Product Guide here and here.

First impressions

It’s fast! Really fast! From the moment you open it, load/create a project up to build, it moves excellent. It takes advantage of multi-core processing, as I compiled this solution (which contains many projects) instantly (less than 2 secs).

Of course this is on a fresh installation, on a multi core machine, with a couple of gigs of RAM. I look forward to see how it handles on more complex projects, in time.

As I played with the solution mentioned above, I found that multi-threaded debugging is a wonderful feature. Although I just scratched the surface, I think it will be a great thing for most devs, as all applications are becoming multi-threaded. Also, I found about the Treads window, which was available even in VS2005, but had less functionality.

A strange thing for me was the fact that it ships with SQL Server 2005 Express. I would have expected the 2008 version, but even though, it would have been nice to have Management Studio Express installed by default.

More resources

I found the following articles interesting:

• Soma, Carol Grojean, Jeff Beehler: Visual Studio 2008 RTM!!!
• VS2008 Demo and Training kit available
• Visual Studio 2008 Training Kit Videos on LINQ

Also, if you like LINQ and you’re interested, you can read on PLINQ (Parallel LINQ), on this MSDN Magazine article and on the dedicated website [via Alex Ghiondea ]

UPDATE: if you live in Cluj-Napoca, we invite you at the Academic Tour 4.0 where we will discuss about LINQ, Silverlight, AJAX, ASP.NET 3.5, Project Astoria. If you are a student at the Automation and Computer Science Faculty, we’ll give you a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Just register for the event here, so we’ll know how many copies to bring!

During this summer, some of my Microsoft Student Partners colleagues were selected for internships in Redmond, at Microsoft’s headquarters. Among them were my 2 good friends, Bogdan and Razvan Hobeanu, who worked in two separate teams, in the Windows division. They had a pretty nice adventure there, along with some other friends like Andrei Csibi and Alex Ghiondea, but you can learn more from them, here [Romanian].

We even got to talk on the phone from time to time, and on one of the occasions I asked them to purchase for some things for me and my father.

Well, today my package arrived, delivered by Andrei, who was in a short trip in Cluj-Napoca. My father was very happy he received his spare parts for an electric appliance and I was for receiving the Logitech G7 gaming mouse. Pretty nice of the Hobeanu brothers.

But that’s not all! The package contained another “heavier” item. It was a copy of one of the most recommended books on the MS Campus: The C# Programming Language, Second Edition by Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Wiltamuth and Peter Golde. I was really surprised, as this was a very nice of them.

But that’s not all! The copy was signed by Anders Hejlsberg a.k.a The Father of C# and Scott Wiltamuth, Visual Studio and C# Program Manager. Now that is awesome!

So guys, this was a very nice and unexpected surprise! Thank you! I really appreciate it! Alex and Andrei, thanks for making this happen.

And Mr Hejlsberg and Mr Wiltamuth, thank you also!

As time passes by, I personally find it more and more difficult to find quality products. Actually I mean quality products at an affordable price. There are a lot of products on the market, each one with extraordinary features at a very good price, accompanied by various awards.

But the fact is that I find it that most of these flashy products are nothing else that variations of some reference (and more expensive) product, made of inferior parts and manufacturing. And the awards… well, if you want to know, you should read Andy Brice’s article on software awards.

Besides this, the salesperson would always help you find the “best” products, better then the ones you originally wanted, that are not available.

This post is about a personal experience involving the employees of a company that sells computer parts and my quest to buy a computer, more specifically the case.

Monday I selected all the components I wanted. Because I couldn’t find them all at a single company, I decided to buy the separately. Because I don’t have experience installing CPUs and motherboards, I decided to start with the computer case, and after that to ask the service department from the other firm to install the 2 more sensitive parts.

Tuesday I excused my self earlier from work, in order to arrive in time at the local shop with the case. Although I had tried several times during the day to call to have a case stored for me, I only received busy tone. So of course that when I arrived there, the case was unavailable, although their website said differently. The first sales-person offered to order one for me, for the second day. I asked if it will be surely delivered the next day and if I can refuse it if I don’t like it (I wanted to be ergonomic inside). A second person was called to answer my last question, and then another. This last person said that wasn’t the way orders work, but it’ll be ok. So I accepted.

Wednesday, at the specified time, I arrived after the case. However, the case was not there. The last person from the day before was the one I was talking to. He told me that it did not arrive because the order was made only that morning, and I was wrongly informed by the new colleague that it would arrive before 18;30. After a closer look, I saw that the order was actually made some time after 11:00. Talk about the definition of morning! After some discussions about this, he told me that it would arrive at 18;30 or the next morning. I told him that morning was absolutely not ok, and left convinced that it would arrive that day, and leaf the phone numer so I could be announced.

But to be sure, at 18;30 I was at the store. The salesman, giggling, asked me what was I doing there, because I should have expected his call. I told him that I came for the case. He replied that it would only arrive the next morning. To that I started to get mad, especially when he told me that he knew the next day wasn’t what I wanted, when I specifically mentioned that it was absolutely not ok . I called them unprofessionals and left really mad, but still waiting for the case.

Thursday, at about noon, I called them and i got the same salesman. I asked if my case had arrived, at which he replied negative, and it will not be there during the day. At that point I got mad and asked him, less politely (familiar addressing, not academic), what was going on. He replied that I should talk to him politely, because he spoke politely. Guess what: from day 1 I spoke politely, and he familiar with me. I told him that, called him unprofessional and jerk, and then looked for another case, somewhere else.

This experience practically blew me away. Basically I was told 2 times that I did not remember well. The nerve of those people was incredible!

I would have appreciated if I would have been correctly informed at the beginning, so I would not loose so much time.

But at least I learned 2 important things:

• always have backup
• always walk away from a bad deal

</rant>

As Wikipedia explains, a constructor is a special method that is used to initialize member data. This member data can be object’s data, i.e. for each individually object (instance of a class) these fields are initialized with specific values, or class’s data known as static data, available to all instance objects as 1 global resource.

We all know object constructors, but are there any other constructors? Well, YES: static constructors!

Static constructors are used like “normal” constructors, but are prefixed with the keyword “static” and are used to initialize static members. This initialization occurs when the class is used for the first time.

Here is a simple example:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

namespace StaticConstructorExample

{

class SimpleStaticExample

{

public static int staticValue;

public int instanceValue;

static SimpleStaticExample()

{

staticValue = 15;

}

public SimpleStaticExample(int param)

{

this.instanceValue = param – staticValue;

}

}

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Console.WriteLine(“Preparing to create some SimpleStaticExample objects”);

SimpleStaticExample object1 = new SimpleStaticExample(100);

SimpleStaticExample object2 = new SimpleStaticExample(200);

SimpleStaticExample object3 = new SimpleStaticExample(300);

Console.WriteLine(“Objects created”);

Console.ReadLine();

}

}

}

In this class there is 1 static member – staticValue -, an instance member – instanceValue – , and 2 constructors: an instance and a static constructor. Basically what the static constructor does is to initialize the static value, based on the code inside it. Here it initializes the staticValue field to 15.

Using the debugger with a breakpoint on the line with the staticValue declaration and another breakpoint in the Main() method (inside a different class), walking line by line with F10, we can see exactly how this works:

• object1 is attempted to be created in main() (this is the first time class StaticConstructorExample is used)
• the static constructor is invoked, initializing staticValue
• the normal constructor is invoked and object1 is created
• object2 is attempted to be created in Main()
• the normal constructor is invoked and object2 is created
• object3 is attempted to be created in Main()
• the normal constructor is invoked and object3 is created

Debugger print-screens:

So basically what I did so far is obtain a functionality equivalent to:

public static int staticValue = 15;

Not that impressive! You may probably ask why someone would use static constructors rather than normal initialization, especially if I tell you that it has some performance penalties.

Populating static collections

The fact is that some types cannot be initialized, or better yet, populated using constructors. This would be the case of classes from the System.Collections.Generic namespace. Just try to use pre-populated Dictionary<K,V> or a Queue<T>.

So what static constructor is useful for is to initialize static fields that cannot be “fully” initialized just by using new.

Here is an example of pre-populating a static Dictionary:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

namespace StaticConstructorExample

{

class CollectionStaticExample

{

static Dictionary<int, string> dict = new Dictionary<int,string>();

int field1;

static CollectionStaticExample()

{

dict.Add(1, “1st element”);

dict.Add(2, “2nd element”);

dict.Add(3, “3rd element”);

}

public CollectionStaticExample(int i)

{

this.field1 = i;

}

}

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

CollectionStaticExample p1 = new CollectionStaticExample(1);

CollectionStaticExample p2 = new CollectionStaticExample(2);

CollectionStaticExample p3 = new CollectionStaticExample(3);

}

}

}

Resources

MSDN Library gives static constructors‘ properties, in a programming guideline:

• A static constructor does not take access modifiers or have parameters.
• A static constructor is called automatically to initialize the class before the first instance is created or any static members are referenced.
• A static constructor cannot be called directly.
• The user has no control on when the static constructor is executed in the program.
• A typical use of static constructors is when the class is using a log file and the constructor is used to write entries to this file.
• Static constructors are also useful when creating wrapper classes for unmanaged code, when the constructor can call the LoadLibrary method.

And here are some additional articles:

• C# – Static Members
• Perf penalty Static Constructor
• Static Constructors Demystified
• C# and beforefieldinit

After the .NET training I’ve participated to this spring, organized by ISDC, I felt interested in seeing the practical side of SD (Software Development ) , i.e. how real software is made.I know form other people that the best solution is to focus on classes during Faculty semesters and find a good internship over summer.That was my plan, too. Unfortunately the offers aren’t that many in Cluj (at least not in winter- spring 2007).

After the training, I applied for a job as a .NET Software Dev and I got it. August 1st was my first day as a Junior Developer. Although I’m still in training, I work on a pretty interesting project involving Web Services, ORM, Custom Controls and other.

The reason I did this is because ISDC is one of the top software companies in Cluj. It has a lot of experienced people and a nice career plan, which makes it a good place to start and steadily build one’s career. I expect to learn a lot, work on interesting projects and build quality software. Of course without leaving school aside

Now some pictures!

Although now, unlike 3-4 years ago, the web is full of tutorials, free books, webcasts, etc. (maybe too full), it’s becoming harder to find the good and really good resources. By “good resource” I understand a resource that starts with basic stuff and gradually takes the reader/viewer more in-depth, in a sustained way.

I had a list of my own containing good books, but it was getting old, so I decided to ask my MSP colleagues what books they recommend. With help from Vlad Riscutia, Mircea Cimpoi, Razvan & Bogdan Hobeanu, Alexandru Ghiondea and Mihai Tataran, I updated my list to this:

1) Beginner Level

	Deitel – Visual C# 2005 How to Program, 2nd Edition Author: Harvey & Paul Deitel & Associates Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2005 ISBN-10: 0131525239 ISBN-13: 978-0131525238
	Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Step by Step Author: John Sharp Publisher: Microsoft Press, 2005 ISBN-10: 0735621292 ISBN-13: 978-0735621299

2) Intermediate Level

	Professional C# 2005 Author: Christian Nagel, Bill Evjen, Jay Glynn, Karli Watson, Morgan Skinner, Allen Jones Publisher: Wrox, 2005 ISBN-10: 0764575341 ISBN-13: 978-0764575341
	MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation Author: Tony Northrup, Shawn Wildermuth, Bill Ryan Publisher: Microsoft Press, 2006 ISBN-10: 0735622779 ISBN-13: 978-0735622777

3) Advanced Level

	CLR via C#, 2nd Edition Author: Jeffrey Richter Publisher: MS Press, 2006 ISBN-10: 0735621632 ISBN-13: 978-0735621633
	C# Programming Language, 2nd Edition Author: Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Wiltamuth, Peter Golde Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2006 ISBN-10: 0321334434 ISBN-13: 978-0321334435

Of course this is only a list, and it can always be improved. If you have any observations or additions, don’t hold back! Until then Professional C# 2005 and C# Programming Language are on top of my list.

PS: Todi also was kind enough to give me the links to the ECMA C# and Common Language Infrastructure Standards. It’s worth taking a look!

Last October, Andrei Csibi introduced me to 3 of his coworkers: Cornel Raţ, Ioan Lazarciuc aka Cret and Adi Muresan. They were all 3rd year students at the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Computer Science department. I’ve previously met Cret 2 years ago at a .NET Introduction course.

Adi, Cret and Cornel were interested about the Microsoft Academic Program from TUCN and from then we met and discussed different things, over coffee (coffee = fastest way to get Salo anywhere).

After some time, we received a mail from the guys, saying they would like to host a .NET Course this summer. We were glad to hear that and decided to help them.

The Course started with the interviews, about 1 month ago. There were 27 candidates but we only had ~11 spots. I happened to be around and I was a little surprised about how professional the whole process was: the started with OOP basics, C#/.NET basics, and steadily asking more complex questions. They also tested the candidates ability to handle a large amount of info in a short period.

After this, Razvan, Catalin, Liviu, Adrian, Ioana, Lidia, Sorina, Ovidiu, Iszabela, Adrian, Vlad, Marius and Paul were selected.

The Course was started by Cornel with .NET basics and steadily going through the CLR, CTS, WinFX, interfaces, delegates the Visual Studio IDE,… Ah, almost forgot: we used the Visual Studio Beta 1 IDE. It looks and feels pretty nice, so by February 2008 we should have a better development tool.

Next, Cret took over and talked about WPF – what, why and how. Although he explained the advantages over the classic model, he started with code and only afterwards he went to XAML, following Charles Petzhold’s book, “Application = Code + Markup”.

Adi presented WCF: hosting, service and data contracts, transactions… Unfortunately I missed it

The guys carefully split their presentations in such a way that everything discussed would have the prerequisites previously mentioned. Cret really needed this in order to better explain Dependency properties and all the interfaces in WPF.

In between, Cornel had a LINQ presentation & demo, Adi transformed his mobile phone into a bluetooth presenter with a little help from Java ME and C#, and one of the participants, Catalin, had a XNA presentation. Salo and I were invited to talk about something, he did Silverlight and I did .NET Concurrency. It went really well.

In the end, the guys reviewed the projects previously assigned and organized a prized-quiz, having 3 MCTS vouchers as prize.

This was an excellent experience! I did learn a couple of things myself, I’ve changed my philosophy to that of “you can do better with a smaller, more prepared, group of people”. All these guys were carefully selected and all of them proved to be extremely serious about this course: they all came, they did their homework and had nice projects.

I also found out that I should switch ASAP to Office 2007, Powerpoint has the ability to retain the Visual Studio color theme through copy-paste.

I would like to thank the professors from the Distributed Systems department for providing us with a better lab and a projector. Also, congratulations to the participants and mostly to Cret, Adi and Cornel for hosting this excellent course!

Link to photo album: Flickr or Picasa

Although the last theme, Fallseason looked pretty nice, the orange colors did not look that good on certain LCD monitors, so I decided a change is needed. And also, it’s not Fall (i.e. at the moment I wrote this). I’ll probably keep it for later!

I still have some minor details to resolve, like changing the main picture with something computer relates, editing the Author field…

UPDATE: Alex was kind enough to allow me to use one of his excellent photos, as header for the blog. Thanks again!

On the other hand I’ve managed to reduce the bot traffic on my site from 12000-15000 hits/week to ~30, just by permanently redirecting an older trackback link to 127.0.0.1 . Even without this, BadBehavior did an excellent job, leaving Akismet to deal with roughly 2-5 spam/week.

Schumi handled the Java part, while I went on the .NET path. The presentations turned into a discussion and we had a friendly versus between the 2 (Java & .NET). Unfortunately the time was not sufficient for such a vast subject.

The study is a compilation of the documentation available on the MSDN Library, articles on MSDN Magazine, concurrency chapters from the books MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536) Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation by Tony Northrup, Shawn Wildermuth, Bill Ryan and CLR via C#, Second Edition by Jeffrey Richter, and also my personal experience.

I devised the study in two major parts, following the concurrency models:

• threads – the Thread and ThreadPool classes, along with the synchronization mechanisms
• processes – the Process and AppDomain classes

For every subject, there is a C# example, the advatages, disadvantages and recommendations also being provided. Additional specialized features/components like the BackgroundWorker thread, the APM or methods to detect/avoid deadlocks are also presented.

The documents/resources are available here, or:

• Memory Support – the full PDF document containing the description, purpose, members, examples and advantages/disadvantages/recommendations
• C# Examples – ZIP VS2005 solution containing the examples for each subject, just select which project to run
• PPT presentation – summary of the Memory Support, available only in the ZIP below
• everything -ZIP containing all above resources

If you find this useful, let me know!

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Why not fix your mom’s computer?
You know: remove the spyware and adware, install Firefox, and make it so that weird toolbar toast doesn’t pop up every 15 seconds.
To make it easy, this Sunday we’re making Fog Creek Copilot absolutely free.
No strings attached. Just go to https://www.copilot.com on Sunday, get a free pass, and we’ll email your mom a link she can click on to download the helper application. It’s really easy.

I’ve just gave it a try, connecting to my Father’s computer at work and it worked pretty well.

The connection was a little slow, but I guess it has to do with the fact that many people are using it today (www. copilot.com loads slowly) and also with my upload speed (256 kbits).

The best part about this is that you can use it almost anywhere. Just visit the site, select help/receive help option, communicate the code to other person, download the exe files and connect. If you have a good firewall, you’ll need to confirm that you accept Copilot’s requests to connect to XYZ.

How is this better than usual Remote Desktop Connection or desktop sharing using Netmeeting? Well, first you don’t need to setup all those services/options, and if you are behind a NAT, you don’t have to port-forward any ports to your computer. Of course this is only for assistance, you won’t be able to connect remotely to your computer.

Just give it a try!


PS: On June 17th (Father’s Day) you’ll have another opportunity to test drive it free, the whole day! Maybe I’ll connect to my Mother’s computer that day

A fost un prozator, eseist, un reputat jurnalist si editorialist roman, comentator al fenomenelor politice si culturale romanesti. Mai multe puteti afla de pe pagina Wikipedia dedicata in cinstea sa, aici.

Recunosc, cu rusine, ca nu sunt familiar cu lucrarile maestrului. Dar aveam placerea sa-l ascult in fiecare saptamana pe postul Antena3, la emisiunea “Sinteza Zilei” moderata de Mihai Gadea.

Dl. Paler comenta mai toate aspectele societatii romanesti, atat politica dar si tendintele societatii in materie de cultura, idealuri, etc. Mi-a placut ca a fost un om obiectiv, a fost un aparator al democratiei [a fost persecutat politic pe vremea comunismului], dar mai ales pentru ca era un om care prin ceea ce zicea, indemna la gandire.

A fost unul dintre putinii oameni de cultura care au ramas in Romania si, vb unui jurnalist, ne-a parasit intr-un moment in care tara avea mare nevoie de el.

Scriind acestea, nu pot ascunde durerea, dar sper ca totusi ideile sale nu vor fi pierdute, si cineva mai tanar ii va implini idealurile, acelea de a ridica societatea din stadiul de ignoranti manelisti, cat mai sus.

Dumnezeu sa-l odihneasca in pace!

But first you need to…

• recover data
• check your computer for hardware problems

I’ve just returned from my cousin, where a computer crashed. Because there was some important info she needed to recover, she called me before taking the PC to Service. I had 2 posibilities:

1. take the HDD out, physically mount it in another PC, save data and then place it back, or..
2. boot Linux from a Live CD, mount the needed partition, copy data and good bye!

I’ve selected no. 2 and proceeded as following:

• enter BIOS and select the CD-ROM as primary boot device
• boot Linux from live CD (I used Ubuntu 6.06 LTS)
• mount the selected partition using the terminal command
• copy important data either to
  • flash drive
  • network share using Connect to Server

All this was done in around 10 minutes.

From here you can either send the PC to the Service Department or debug it & reinstall it yourself. (*)

If you select the latter, one of the best tools for testing hardware components is the Ultimate Boot CD. It comes as a bootable ISO image.

Burn it on a CD and run it. It contains the best tools for memory testing, CPU testing, peripherals testing and others. Be sure to visit their site before you use it (It would make sense to make the visit and get to know the tool before the PC crashes).

If everything is OK, you can proceed with reinstalling the OS.



UPDATE: my friends Razvan and Bogdan Hobeanu found a pretty cool solution using the Vista DVD. Just visit their blog (Romanian)

(*) You can also use the Recovery feature of the OS, if one is provided. However, in these cases I stick with the clean install.

This training (or seminar) was organized by Microsoft Romania and it was intended for software pros from the area of Cluj-Napoca. Myself, along with a couple of other Microsoft Student-Partners, were lucky enough to receive an invitation.

The trainer was Adi Stoian from TechReady. I’ve previously met Adi last November at the TechEd Developers Conference in Barcelona.

I was really looking forward to see him in action because last spring he trained around a dozen CS students along with my MSP colegue, Mihai Hudea in an activity of the MS Center in the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. It was a great succes!

The agenda included:

• Methodologies
  
• Team & Project Management
• Requirements Analysis
• Application Life-Cycle
• Visual Studio Team System & Team Foundation Server

Every attendee received a copy of the book “Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System“, by Sam Guckenheimer and Juan Perez, foreword by Ivar Jacobson.

I browsed it a little and it covers all the aspects presented at the seminar.

I have to say it was an intensive training. But Adi is a great speaker and knows how to present, keeping the audience interested the whole time. My top subjects were life-cycle and requirement analysis.

Adi also owns the media portal www.techready.tv. If you understand Romanian, you can watch several presentation, including the one I spoke of above.

My wish became reality in early March when I learned about a .NET 2.0/3.0 training organized by one of the best software companies in Cluj-Napoca, ISDC. I submitted my resume and few days after I was scheduled for a test. All I knew about the test was that it was about .NET, C#. I thought it would probably an easy test, combining basic .NET stuff with OOP. That thought changed 2 minutes after I started the test: the vast majority of questions were strictly about .NET 2.0 features. Although I moved to Visual Studio 2005 (an .NET 2.0) soon after it was RTM (fall 2005), I didn’t actually study like I did when I got my MCP Certification on WinForms.NET 1.1.

With every new question, I was becoming more disappointed of myself. The result page almost made me K.O. I couldn’t believe that I scored so low. A couple of minutes later, someone came and assured me that my score was pretty OK and told me that I will be notified if I qualified.

Of course i was sure that would not happen. That same evening I started looking for good books on Amazon and asking recommendations from my friends. I wanted to learn.

A few days after I received a call that made my day: I was announced that I qualified for the Training. After a few modifications in the Faculty Schedule, I confirmed. I also learned that the test was actually a hard one. A relief, but not enough.

The training was organized in 8 modules, twice a week. The first meeting was an introduction between each other. We found out about each other and also received a short visit from Todi Pruteanu, Academic Relations Team # Dev Tools – Microsoft Romania and also met our trainer Sorin Dolha. Sorin is a MCSD, owns his software company DLH Soft and his a great trainer. The more the time passed, the more I was amazed of how much this guy knows: every new subject would start with a little theory and after that only coding. And I mean CODING! For at least 4 hours a day he would code in front of us, explaining each step, without any documentation. The most interesting part was when we started modifying the solution he designed, when he successfully implemented all our requests.

A little about the course agenda: we learned about App design: Data Access, Business Logic, U.I., Model-View-Controller pattern, Multi-threading, WPF and others.

Although it doesn’t seem that much, it was. I had the opportunity to watch how an application is designed and build, in a professional way, with a Client-Server architecture, multiple tiers and layers.

Also, before one of the meetings, we were invited by the ISDC Management to an open discussion. We learned a little about:

-the company: ISDC is a Romanian-Dutch software company, providing software solutions to important corporations in Western-Europe. You can find out more here

- the projects they worked

- the business.

Another thing we learned was about the ISDC-Academy. This is a project they started with the objective of helping young people in their programming careers. They have Trainings, Knowledge Groups, Project Competitions and even High-School events, like High School Excellence Club and Competitions. This is their way of giving back to the society, and I really like this initiative. More here.

As a conclusion, I can say that this training was a great success. I learned a lot, made some new friends, both from the fellow trainees and employees, including Senior Devs

If you have the opportunity to apply for a training in ISDC or a similar company, do it! It’s worth it!

i.e., soon after birth, the parents begin teaching the child most of the stuff necessary in this world. They teach him to walk, to speak, to behave… If for the most physical learning it comes from instinct, the intellectual abilities are a more complex area. In order to properly build the foundations, parents begin with the basics moving on to more advanced things. On the way, the child is given feedback about what he/she does right and what is does wrong.

A few years after, it’s time for school. Although it’s not that obvious, the feedback is still there, in the form of grades (and other). As the child evolves on the educational latter, this feedback becomes more important, i.e.:

Primary And Secondary School are for establishing social connections and building the intellectual foundation

High-School is a period to decide on the profession one will follow

University is the place to learn about the world of the selected profession

Further into the future I can’t really say, because I’, only in the 3^rd step. But what I want to emphasize is that the feedback one receives is more important with the age. And it probably never stops

—

So what’s all this Real Feedback stuff? Well, first I heard this expression a couple of months ago, from 2 friends. They were extremely happy that they received feedback from somebody; feedback that they thought it will help them work better in the future. I have to say I hadn’t fully realized what they meant until now.

In the last 6 months but mostly this last month I have received a lot of feedback. Most of it was by request.
I’m not going to go into the details, I’ll just stick with what I feel is the importance of feedback:

1) No man is born all-knowing

There will always be other people with more experience in different areas. During the learning process, these people will be able to guide an apprentice to a higher knowledge level

2) The smart person learns from the mistakes of others’, the average man learns from it’s own mistakes and the fool never learns

Even though I think the best experience is your own, discussing with other people may help a person avoid some mistakes someone else did. If not that, at least know the danger

3) You learn all your life

This is the most important aspect.

I had a conversation with another friend about the learning process. I was saying that you need guidance to really learn something while he was saying that in order to learn, you need to work on your own.

Now I think we were both right: No one can pour knowledge into another ones head without that person to work, but no one can really learn without a little guidance from the pros.

Basically, the feedback is one of most important aspects of the learning process

—

Now, going back to the real feedback: as I said sooner, it means feedback that is objective and helpful. Most important helpful in making people really understand problems and make them more successful at what they are doing.

In my case, I have to say that it made my decision easier. Why? Because I talked with persons I trust and I respect, with pros that once were in my shoes. I don’t know if it’s the right decision, only time will tell.

—

More importantly, I think feedback has a greater value in the Computer-Science world. I’m not an expert and I don’t pass myself as an expert, but working with computers is not easy. We work in an abstract world, all/part of it stored inside our minds. It’s probably easier for someone to build a house from the basic ingredients than building a simple OS using a PC and C++ books.

Also, the business of computer programming is not about computers. It’s about humans, persons. We build software to run on computers, but for humans. Receiving feedback from the users is becoming more important: just look at the Agile methods. But I’ll blog about this some other time, when I’ll be more experienced.

—

At this time I feel I’m only beginning to understand this world, to have a bigger picture. But I am always willing to learn more, so I’m waiting for your feedback

But enough with that, welcome to my improved blog. Although it’s not quite finished, I took my time to personalize it according to my taste. I hope you like it too.

I must say it was only now that I realized how powerful this WordPress is. It is well designed, powerful, secure, extensible and easy. Real easy! My original decision to use WP due to cheaper hosting for PHP, although I would have preferred ASP, proved to be a great decision.

I setup this blog about 5 months ago. It was simple and quick, but I had assistance from a pro, my colleague Tudor. He really helped me configuring my anti-spam filter, i.e. a CAPTCHA plugin called AuthImage. This plugin worked well for about 4 months, but after that a lot of spam started to pass.

Because I really hate spam, I decided it was time to work on my blog. I searched for a new anti-spam solution and found it immediately on the WordPress Support. Apparently CAPTCHA is no longer an efficient method to stop SPAM and an better solution would be to use BadBehaviour with the already installed plugin Akismet ( it comes with the default WP kit, all you need is a code from WordPress ). The best thing about this solution is that it no longer requires for a check code from the user. An it works!

Another visible modification is the theme. I found this great theme called Fallseason. FallSeason^1.0 is a free, lightweight, tableless, fluid W3C-compliant WordPress Theme by Sadish Bala, based on a design by NodeThirtyThree. A little customization and voila.

Last, I added a Contact form which I haven’t tested yet. You can find it here. It’s basically a plugin, adding a new page. I don’t know if Bad Behaviour 2 and Akismet apply to it, but it has a clever safety feature.

LATER EDIT 1: Works great! Doug confirmed that Bad Behavior 2 keeps spammers away from the Contact Form, but Akismet does not.

Soon, I’ll fill my About page and also the Blogroll.

LATER EDIT 2: I updated them both.

Ah, I also added a picture with the word “Tudor”. It’s an artwork I did in the 10th grade, copyright © 2000. I’m as proud of it today as I was then.

LATER EDIT 3: The site pagerank is now listed on the homepage, using the Google Page Plugin by Chabaan.

LATER EDIT 3: Added the Evermore plugin. It shows short previews of posts on the home page. Much better than the default excerpt function in WP.

My list is:

I. Best Practices

1) Code Complete 2 – Steve McConnel

- excellent book – MUST READ – teaches you patterns & practices available in most programming language

2) The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master – Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

- excellent book – MUST READ – goes very well with CodeComplete2

II. Algorithms

1) Introduction to Algorithms – Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein

III. Computer Architecture1)Computer Organization and Design 2 – David Patterson, John Hennessy

2)Structured Computer Organization 5 – Andrew Tanenbaum

3)Modern Operating Systems 2 – Andrew Tanenbaum

- books that begin with the low-level inner-workings of a PC, up to application level

IV. Books I haven’t read yet, but I heard they’re really good

1) Writing Secure Code 2 – Michael Howard, David C. LeBlanc

- very appraised book, on top of my list

2) Computer Networks 4 – Andrew Tanenbaum

There were some other books mentioned there, but most were destined for a specific area. Andrei settled for Code Complete 2 and The Pragmatic Programmer

Well, the the most important thing about TechEd is that it is one place where people meet to find out about new Microsoft technologies and improvements. The first thing is that this is an OFF LINE meeting. That’s right, and it is a very important aspect. A few days ago I went to a RONUA (ROmanian .Net User Association Group) meeting. It was related with TechEd, but what I want to point is that Aurelian, the RONUA coordinator, highlighted the fact that off line meetings are extremely important. And I fully agree! Physical interaction can help you to better understand a subject or see it from a different perspective . It can’t compare with online interaction or isolation.

So why exactly is it so important or helpful? Hmm… I’ll tell you from my perspective.
As you probably know, I went with Todi, the Microsoft Academic Program Manager and 6 other Microsoft Student Partners. Although I’ve met all of them before, during these 4 days I got to know each one of them:
- Tudy Damian – Sys Admin & Web Developer, with passion for Astrology, leader of the most important Romanian guild from Guild Wars
- Mihai Tataran – former Team Lead in UPT, following a Master and founder of startup HPC Consulting
- Sorin Damian – Team Lead in UAIC, my Nemesis in computer games and a guy who appreciates fine cars
- Lucian Baciu – Team Lead in TUIASI, an art and nature lover and passionate with engineering
- Alex Ghiondea – former Team Lead UPB, art lover, an explorer, a pro
- Alex Savu – Team Lead ASE, knows what he wants, takes photos of what he likes
- Todi – the man behind all this
Besides these modest descriptions, I got to know what they like and what they don’t, what they do and want to do in the future, we developed a friendship and I know that in the future I’ll be able to get help from them and help them if they need to. All this in 4 days.
Next, during the conference I met a lot of new Developers, both Romanian and other, as you know from my previous posts.

Going back to TechEd and the conference aspect, this is the real stuff! You get to see and meet people that design the future. You can actually see them in action both at presentation or at the Ask the Experts booth. I got to talk with one of the Speakers about PowerShell and even now I regret that I didn’t attend his presentation. Presentations… There are 10+ presentations that go in parallel so there’s no time to loose. The only downside is that you have to carefully select which one is most important for you. But this won’t be a problem, because al attendees receive their own DVDs with all the presentations. I can’t wait to get mine!

Even though I just presented my list and not expand any of the subjects, I have my priorities figured out for this next year and I must say that it is 95% based on what I’ve seen in Barcelona. I want MicroFramework, XNA and ORCAS for starters. I bet my friends (links above) have also defined there priorities. Some of them even blogged about them.

So my advice, whether you are a student but mostly if you are a Pro Developer is to go to TechEd or similar events. For me this experience was somewhat overwhelming, but I’m glad it was. Oh, and 1 more thing: I got in touch with important development companies that promptly inform me about new products or invite me to Beta programs. I found a couple of very interesting things I did not know about before.

Finally, I’d like to thank again Microsoft Romania, Todi and the Microsoft Student Partners from UTCN for giving me this opportunity. It was awesome!

I also found these beautiful youtube clips via Cristian Maier

You don’t know Romania? Take a look at some nice pictures and hear the beautiful sound of Gheorghe Zamfir:

LATER EDIT: embedded clips don’t work any more, here are the links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwGHFW33dHc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzcuBbztn-0

If you like sightseeing the wild countryside, find unique landscapes and natural wonders, visit historical places with traditional craftsmanship and many other things, visit Romania. You’ll like it!