Thought Net

ASP.Net 4.0

2010-02-25T12:59:00.003+05:30

We have been living in the ASP.Net 2.0 world for too long. The latest and the (not-so) greatest (because its beta) ASP.Net version (.Net framework 4.0 beta) is out for a while with the latest version of Visual Studio as well. Some of the key new features of the new ASP.Net version are mentioned below for you to realize that ASP.Net 2.0 is too old for our own good.

There was a lot of hype around ASP.Net MVC in the past few months and it had mislead people to think that the next versions of ASP.Net is all MVC. Actually speaking ASP.Net 4.0 consists of lot more. ASP.Net MVC is just 1 of 4 main components.

The 4 components are;

1. ASP.Net Web Forms (What we use to know - However lot of new things here as well)

2. ASP.Net MVC

3. Ajax

4. Dynamic Data

The purpose of this post is to discuss new features added to ASP.Net web forms and will be really useful for someone who's not particularly interested in MVC but still want to try out new ASP.Net version.

Let me list down some cool features of ASP.Net 4.0

1. FormView Control

- Uses CSS instead of Tables to create the layout (Efficiency)

- Standard Compliant (Better chance of cross-browser compatiblity)

2. ViewState changes

- Always turned off by default

- Base control classes has a new property 'ViewStateMode' which can be used to put it on only when needed

3, Client ID

- It used to be lengthy non-predictable Client IDs. With this one users have flexibility over how client - IDs are generated

- A new property 'ClientIdMode' is introduced which has values like 'static','Predictable' etc.

4. ASP.Net routing

- Originally for MVC, but a more simpler version is available for web forms now.

- Rest like simpler, SEO friendly URLs

5. QueryExtender Control

- Filters DB results according to client side selections. Limits number of DB calls and optimizes the application.

6. ASP.Net Core Enhancements

- Session State Compression

- Cache improvements

- Browser capability extender

I will try to discuss in more detail about the areas which I find useful in some upcoming blog.

War Heroes - Then and Now

2009-12-11T00:30:00.004+05:30

This was drawn by the artist on 9^th October 2009. Much before any SF-Presidential election story. Should appreciate his futuristic view.

However I’m pretty sure that couple of more notices (even after the one in front) are still missing. But don’t worry, we will soon see them….in TV, Radio and Roads.

The Sri Lankan people surely know how to do 'Kelaguna Salakeema'. It's in our blood man!

Just think about the sheer effort, resources and money put in to the huge campaign of the government. The propaganda units of the Nazis would learn a few things from this. Who pays for all these?

I was no fan of war anyways but the way treat someone who had saved the government asses so far which hasn't done anything positive beside the war (i.e in the minds of majority Sinhalese at least) is shameful. If they treat someone like SF this way, what do you expect they'll do with someone like Lasantha.

I thought Sri Lanka was only going in circles. Now I think we are just a turning our selves to a well functioning time machine, only thing is this goes back in time in record speeds.

SVN Patch

2009-11-30T05:08:00.002+05:30

I recently come across the 'Patch' feature of SVN and found it to be a very useful tool in several development scenarios. SVN patch feature is basically exporting the changes you have made to your source code in to a zip/patch file. It will contain all SVN meta data in addition to the files and you can apply the patch from a different place/machine to the same source code base. Some of the situations I feel a patch is useful are;

1. As a mean of code review / Collaborative Development

Code reviews don't necessarily have to happen as a meeting. The reviewee can pack his changes as a svn patch and email it to the reviewer who can check it in the context of the current code base and do necessary adjustments and commit it. This is more suited when the reviewer is someone from the same team and most probably a senior person in the team.

I've heard that lot of open source projects use this feature to make sure that the commits coming from all around the world are in line with the quality of the code base.

2. When working on top of another developers code base

Many consultants and senior team members have to work on other developer code bases (and machines) sometimes. This is specially true for consultants. Sometime a fix or a change has to be done on top of a an already uncommited changes in the code base. Then the best thing to do is to create a patch from the changes you just did and then revert the changes in the code base. Then you can just apply the patch only. That way you are not altering the external developer code base but still can get u'r local changes in to SVN.

The same scenario is useful when u need to get in a quick fix on top of a not so solid code base which is under serious change.

Are you getting enough sleep

2009-11-28T18:05:00.003+05:30

I recently got an email from a friend about a leading Indian CEO 'Ranjan Das' being killed by a stroke. He was a very active, fit man who took active part in sports (He's a marathon runner). He had good eating habits as well.

According to the article the primary reason for the stroke was lack of sleep. Most of us in the competitive world (Specially so in Software field) go through a lot of nights without sleep. The most dis-heartning thing is that most of us tend to be proud about ones ability to go on without sleep. 'I worked for 20 continuous hours man...WOW'. That's just not right!

Try this test to figure out whether you get enough sleep. It's called 'Epworth Sleepiness Scale'.

You Tube Pickups

2009-10-25T22:51:00.002+05:30

The best way to overcome the laziness to blog is to pick interesting stuff you come across in Internet directly to your blog. Call it stealing, cheap writing or whatever...that's what I'm gonna do right now!

1. An inspirational talk by Maldivian president at the U.N. This is a good lesson to Sri Lankan 'මහ ජනතාව' (General Public) who are used to highly emotional yet out of context roller-coaster 'Ego Rides' caused by our leaders talking to international audiences. This guy looks in to the future while we keep going backwards in search of our 2500 year old holy-land.

2. Although not directly relevant to SriLanka, the discussions on Universal Health Care in US is a good source of learning. At SriLanka we should be in good hands since our Health Care is basically a Universal Health Care system, but lack of application and discipline has made it a mess. All capable people are relying on private hospitals for their well being while lots of innocent go ill-treated by public health system day by day.

Irena Sendler - War Hero

2009-09-19T05:32:00.004+05:30

Have you heard of 'Irena Sendler'. I'm pretty sure most of us haven't. She's no superstar, great politician, a sportsperson or a media personality, besides she's not even among us now. She's dead for more than an year now. Why her story caught my attention was because she's known as a 'War Hero'. 'War Hero' - a term we heard so frequently and still continue to hear. She's a war-hero for the same reasons that could cast her as a 'traitor' in different times and circumstances...only time will tell.

Irena was a Polish aid-worker, activist during World War II in German occupied Warsaw, Porland. She had lead the smuggling of small children from the 'Ghetto' - Huge Jewish Villages (In reality those were high wall camps keeping Jews before they were taken for concentration camps for group execution). She got the chance to visit the Ghetto as a health worker and risked her life escaping children out. She together with her colleagues forged documents and planned escapes one after the other. Usually smuggling children after sedating them and putting them inside coffins, bags or helping them to crawl through sewers to reach outside world. It is said that she had a dog who traveled with her and trained it to bark at Gestapo. The barking sounds of the dog sometimes helped her to keep sounds of children unheard.

She was ultimately caught and was severely tortured and was given death sentence. Her hands and legs were broken. She somehow manage to escape on her way to death sentence by bribing the soldiers as they left her in the middle of a jungle. But she survived and lived and operated in hiding till the war was over.

She kept a jar full of names/details of all the children she rescued, hoping that someday she could reunite them with their parents. But it was later found that no one was able to find their parents as they were either killed or lost.

She was nominated to the Nobel along side Al-Gore (How much have we heard of Al-Gore and yet how Irena evaded us? Amazing isn't it?). All of us know that Al-Gore won it for creating a slide shore on global warming :).

Since we as Sri Lankas have also come across a long and dirty war there should be Sri Lankan 'Irena' personalities. But the media doesn't seem to be interested yet. They will be interested in 10-20 years time...I hope. (It took almost 50 years for the world to really know the heroics of Irena). But every time you come across a War-Hero or Freedom-Fighter who is so called since he's good at killing enemies don't forget to remind your self that there should be 'Irena's as well. It would be a great reminder of humanity left in us, however scarce that may be these days.

Passing Parameters to Silverlight 3 Components

2009-09-11T23:57:00.004+05:30

When you go one level up from the typical test projects, you come in to a situation where you need to tweak the Silverlight client app based on some sever side logic. For this to work silverlight supports the concept of InitParams. InitParms allows a hosting aspx page to pass parameters to a Silverlight client application. All over the web this process is well explained, except for one little glitch. i.e It's explained for Silverlight 2, not for the latest Silverlight 3. This gap is critical, since a lot has changed from SL2 to SL3. Specifically the removal of <asp:silverlight ../>, <asp:mediaplayer ../> is pretty significant because most of variable passing information in web is related to <asp:silverlight> markup.

In SL 3 instead of <asp:silverlight> an object tag is used

<param name="source" value="{XAP_FILE}"/>

<param name="onerror" value="onSilverlightError"/>

<param name="background" value="white"/>

<param name="InitParams" value="showall=true"/>.....

Now the question is how to set InitParms dynamically. See here for InitParam explanations. The previous links discuss InitParam in detail, but fail to provide how it can be passed dynamically (by hosting aspx page). But I found a close to working solution here but it didn't work for some odd reason. Ultimately a link to a document from Silverlight team on specific changes due to <asp:silverlight> component been missing provided me with the working solution.

The solution is to use a Literal control as value and set the Literal text in the server side aspx code.

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">

<param name="source" value="{XAP_FILE}"/>

<param name="onerror" value="onSilverlightError"/>

<param name="background" value='<asp:Literal id="Color" runat="server"/>' />

<param name="InitParams" value="'<asp:Literal id="InitParams" runat="server"/>'"/>...

In the hosting aspx pages page load method we do the following;
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Color.Text = "White"; //You can call any server side code here
InitParams.Text = GetUrl(); //Implement any business logic to get url and return it according to InitParam standard, i.e url=urlvalue
}

Now that the InitParam is set you can use it in your silverlight application by initializing them during Application_Start of SL.
private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
string broadcastUrl = e.InitParams["bcUrl"];
this.RootVisual = new MainPage(broadcastUrl );

}

Now you can use this dynamically generated value for any logic within the SL application.
eg: Set the source of media element control, suppose you have a media element with id=mplayer
mPlayer.Source = new Uri(broadcastUrl ); //BroadcastUrl variable should be passed somehow to SL app. (May be via constructor as above)

හර්දය සාක්ෂිය

2009-08-30T09:28:00.002+05:30

තල් වැට එපිට උන්ගේ
මරනයේ හර්දය සාක්ෂිය
දකුනේ වීදි පුරා
ගොඩනැගි ලිප්ගල් මැද
පිලිස්සි යාමෙන්
ඉක්බිතිව

ෂේෂ වූ අගුරු කැටයකින්
දකුන ලියයි...
සියතින්ම මරා දැමු
ස්වකීය හර්දය සාක්ෂියේ
නව්ය නොවූ පරිඡ්ඡෙදය
මෙලසින්

පැහැරගැනීම්...
වධදීම්...
මරදැමීම්...
නවත්වව්.

-සුසිත විජේමුණි

රාවය පුවත් පතෙන් උපුටා ගත්තෙමි.

DB Schema Design

2009-08-27T06:59:00.002+05:30

We were in the middle of a DB Schema review and I thought of discussing some important points from it. You may have many more important things to add as well, so pls feel free.

1. Identify the Parent Table. It's good to identify whether your schema has a parent table or not. There could even be contention for the Parent table and then you have to decide whether you have multiple parent tables or not.

2. It's probably sensible to keep some tables in de-normalized form. Specially if your system is in the need of faster searches etc...

3. The tables should not contain any derivative fields. Eg: If for an event table start_date and end_date is included, do NOT include number_of_days as another field.

4. Its sensible to name the Primary Key column of each table as 'Id'. Also name each foreign key column as Id. Eg: If you have a School and Student tables where School has many students, Student can have Id and SchoolId columns. This could be specially useful for SQLGeneration logic later in the product life cycle if you do this consistently across each table.

5. Provide provisions for future extension or integrations to the system. If some of the tables (content) has a potential to be replaced by an external system(s) later in the life cycle, try to keep those tables isolated from your main tables by introducing a mapping table in between.
Eg: Assume that your crm system is capable of integrating with different ERP systems. Your system might anyway have to keep some information from ERP system duplicated in your system for ease of search etc... In this case it's not advisable to keep those tables tightly integrated to your main tables. The trick is to use an intermediate mapping table like ERPRef with an id and the rest of the fields keeping relevant ERP data together. May be you can just keep set of ERP specific Ids so that when u need data you can go and fetch it. Also you can have other base data in de-normalized form in this table to facilitate some heavyly used search within your system boundaries.

This would be the table facing heavy changes when your crm system is integrated with different ERP systems, isolating the core tables in your system.

For an example this table can have id,erp_ordertable_id, erp_account_id, suppliername, suppliercategory etc...

Then they came for you....updated

2009-08-08T18:02:00.004+05:30

I published the following poem on this blog on 1/13/09 after Lasanthas killing

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me
German Theologian,
Martin Niemöller
@ the time of the Great Holocaust

I found a slightly updated one reflecting on the changes happened in our 'Kingdom' during the last few months.

When those ‘civilians’ were killed in numbers, you didn’t speak up because your kith and kin were not amongst them.

Then they came for the journalists, you didn’t speak up because those journalists were betraying the motherland for chunks of dollars.

Then they came for the underworld gangsters, you didn’t speak up because they were already a menace to the society.

Then they came for opposition politicians, you didn’t speak up because of the simple arithmetic of (opposition politicians = traitors).

Then they came for you. But don’t worry. You are a patriot and you have a King to speak up for you. Long live the King!

From 'Thoughts of a Pessimist'

Mailchimp

2009-07-30T07:52:00.003+05:30

We are in the process of Re-Architecting a CMS/Publishing solution based on php/mysql. One of the features we are going to rewrite is its 'Newsletter' function. The problem with the existing solution is the scalability. When the number of subscribers grow large the 'Newsletter' function breaks down.

Alternatively to the option of improving the already written 'Newsletter' function we looked in to using a 3rd party service and came across 'MailChimp'. Mailchimp is a fully fledged email campaign management tool. Beside the core functionality of sending an email to a list of users at a designated time, MailChimp provides many other features such as;
1. Easy to use API and Off the shelf integrations to popular CMS systems - API is critical for our requirement
2. Rich Tracking, Reporting and Analysis Tools (Eg: Google Analytic integration)
3. Powerful subscription management features
4. Shopping cart integration
5. Ability to test your email in lot of different email clients before actually sending it - Inbox Inspector
6. Flexible Pricing Scheme
7. Support for different types of Emails (HTML, Text ) and also tools to design them
8. Higher guarantee for deliverability by implementing various Authentication schemes to pass ISP filterings

Boosted by the above product features, we were interested in finding out how the API would look like. Recently they have provided wrappers around the former API making it more easier to work with. There were PHP and .Net wrappers plus few more APIs done by 3rd parties. We wanted to check out PHP API/Wrapper.

There were only 2 classes to be learnt.
1. conf.inc.php - Contains all configuration information and is initiated automatically when included in your programme.
2. MCAPI.class.php - The main API wrapper class.

In addition there were many very simple easy to understand examples. For all we wanted to achieve with MailChimp there was an example. The usual house keeping work before and after each API method was not needed at all since the API wrapper is so neatly written.

Eg: When sending a campaign mail you juse have to do;
$campaign = new MCAPI($apikey);
$campaign->campaignSendNow($campaignId);
That's it! The configuration info like $apikey is stored in conf.inc.php file along with your MailChimp account information and you don't have to login or perform any other initial calls. Also the API is flexible enough to return info as php arrays, JSON or even XML.

Browser Wars - Under a New Set of Rules

2009-06-02T07:40:00.003+05:30

It's not a secret to know that there are hundreds of browsers. The cold war between the main players is no lesser secret.

With the industry joining the HTML 5 bandwagon the browser war has entered a new dimension. HTML 5 is the next generation HTML standard which is 'work in progress' by the way. As in the past the software developers have overtaken the standards bodies and started implementing this and some have even done beta releases. Google has also announced their willingness to fully join the club with Chrome at recently concluded Google I/O.

Some cool features of HTML 5 which caught my attention was,
1. The new video and audio tags
This enable application authors to create their own interface for video/audio players. This means that the browsers can also provide their own players. There is still conflicts as to which encoding/decoding mechanism to use as the standard.
2. More support for offline web applications
3. API exposing the browser history
This will be very welcomed by all the developers who had 'Back Button' problems
4. API for Background worker threads
This is a method to perform highly expensive computational tasks without interrupting the user interface.

Two main objectives of the HTML 5 standard are,
1. To foster interoperability of browsers
2. Introducing new APIs and Markup for emerging web usage patterns while being backward compatible with already deployed content

It is really fascinating to see that the user experience on top of the browsers is reaching a level very close to the desktop experience. With new communication platforms like 'Google Wave' we will be taken in to a whole new range of web applications. Below chart from O'Reily shows how the native client and web user experience is merging in the future. (Is Chrome in front of Firefox...duh..may be in terms of release date only)

What I would be interested in next few months is how Google Chrome would fair up with Firefox. Chrome did not came out well in it's first version. But I just feel that they will come with a bang next time around although the current news is not encouraging for Chrome.

Pickups II

2009-05-16T22:47:00.003+05:30

Here are few things I came across which caught my interest

1. Indika sent me this great article about something we have know for a long time, but conveniently ignored even longer.
"Characterizing people as non-linear first-order components in software development"

2. Saminda, a former work colleague at Eurocenter, who works for WSO2 now, has created this firefox add-on which enables seamless transition between English and Sinhalese based on 'Singlish' scheme. Specially useful for Sinhala users who do not want to learn the typical Sinhalese keyboard.

3. Rang Di Basanti is one of the best hindi movies I've seen (Better than slumdog). The song 'Lukka Chuppi' is a hypothetical dialog between the recently dead soldier son and his mother. The son is treated as a hero by everyone (And he himself conside himself to be one), but does it erase the void set in mothers heart ever? Facinating lyrics, music, vocals...and really relevant for the current times in Sri Lanka.

Video
Lyrics with Meaning

I suggest you watch the video along side the lyrics/meaning. Even better if you could watch the whole movie.

Keeping Web Sites Alive (IIS/ASP.Net)

2009-04-03T17:18:00.015+05:30

Problem:
IIS recycles app pools periodically and the first request which comes after a recycle takes too much time to process because the whole app needs to be loaded and compiled. By default the idle time is 20 minutes.

Solution:
1. Configure App Pool to recycle when you need it to
2. Setup a ping service which will act as the first request to reach the web site after a recycle

Method & Details:

1. IIS App Pools
IIS App Pool concept is a very useful thing in keeping web sites in same server seperate from eachother. App Pool recycling is also an important activity which cleans up left overs from your application runings.

But default IIS App Pool recycle options are not suitable for a highly responsive site. It can recycle

Every n minutes
After m requests
At specific times of the day
If consuming M amount of virtual or physical memory
If idle for p mins
If kernel request queue (where http requests are kept before dispatching to IIS) has more than x requests

You have to change the default settings to suit your requirement while making sure that recycling actually happens as well. I recommend using the specific time of day approach to force a recycle at a low traffic time.

2. Keep Alive Services
A Keep Alive Service will send a dummy request to your site just to make sure that it won't go to sleep (recycle). One other important attribute of a keep alive request is that it should not make the current logged in user count to go up. So typically Keep Alive services will send a request to a 'KeepAlive' web page of the site which is specifically made so that the user statistics are not screwed up. Following keep alive page will show the current time,

<html>
<head><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="300"></head>
<p>Current Time Is : </p><%=now%>
</html>

There are 2 kinds of Keep Alive services

Web based services - siteuptime.com, host-tracker.com
Standalone Applications - Siteup by Xequte

The standalone applications is useful but it has a heavy dependancy on the machine that you install it. If the machine is down or the application is shutdown by someone you have a risk. I recommend the usage of web based service (for a nominal fee). They provide much more features as well as releasing you the burden of keeping the keep alive service alive.

Sinhala Blogs

2009-03-29T02:23:00.006+05:30

There's a growing upward trend I noticed recently in Sinhala Blogging. 'Sinhala' or 'Sinhalese' is the unique language the Sinhalese (Nice recursive definition btw) people in Sri Lanka and it has never been the language for the computers or Internet in Sri Lanka. Times are changing though!

So is it a positive trend? I think it of course is. Your mother tongue is the best possible means of communication among your country men (and women of course, තව පොඩ්ඩෙන් ගුටි). And there are always unique stuff to discuss among your country men., beside the usual blog attractions like Holywood movies or technical developments. At a time when the traditional means of mass communication like print media and TV/Radio are meeting their (natural?) limitations and showing signs of being completely irrelevant and useless, I'd expect progressive advancements like Sinhala blogging to go a long way.

On the other hand Sinhala is not going to take us outside the country. So it's equally important for Sri Lankans to blog in English. Currently its taken as a fashion as well, but I guess the 'Kick' out of it will ware off with time when people realize it's own boundaries.

There's also an official body behind driving this initiative. You can get lots of useful information regarding Sinhala Blogging in their web site.
'සිංහල බ්ලොග් කරුවන්ගෙ සංසදය'

If you want to check out a few different kinds of Sinhala Blogs,
1. සුපුන්ගේ අන්තර්ජාල සටහන
2. කාලිංගගේ බ්ලොග් සටහන
3. මගේ මරණය

ප:ලි
මම සිංහල ලිවීම සදහා භාවිතා කලේ මෙතන

Pickups

2009-03-24T00:07:00.004+05:30

Thought of sharing a few things I picked up during the last week from Internet/Blogs.

1. TED - http://www.ted.com
A very useful site which you should visit every week.

2. Predictable Irrationality
Is the idea which challenged the classical economist view that all human decision making is rational (Can be minimized to a Cost Benefit Problem). Picked it up from TED and then viewed a few more video of Prof. Dan Ariely, who is the man behind the idea. See it here.

3. Everythin's amazing, nobody's happy
Picked up from Dr. Sanjiva's blog. A very simple yet a truthful view of the current generations ungratefulness towards the things that we enjoy for granted. See it here.

Backup Essentials

2009-03-12T00:28:00.003+05:30

Everyone of us has to format our hard disks once in a while. After switching to Vista I did that many times :). Although the usual data backup is done by most of us, I thought of putting down a list of things that we tend to overlook.

Outlook
1. Outlook Mail files (pst)
2. Outlook rules
3. Outlook personal contacts

Firefox
1. Favorites
2. Scrapbook
3. History
4. Passwords

Go here to find an easy way to backup complete firefox profile.

Anti-Virus
1. Settings (Special Blocks like TCP ports/Applications etc..)

Windows
1. Odbc DSNs
2. hosts file
3. Special gateway settings / TCP-IP (Eg: routes)

IM
1. Message History

IIS
1. All web sites and their settings in local IIS
Backing up IIS differs from one version to another. You have to do some googling and some tests to figure it out for your version of IIS.

A shortcut for all this could be to backup your windows profile directory. But it won't be a complete solution as some of the above could be saved in other locations.

Exceptions Revisited

2009-01-19T22:47:00.003+05:30

Exceptions are an integral part of any modern programming language. AS a mover from Java to .Net I have had my fair share of exception handling changes. In Java you have both checked and unchecked exceptions and the throws exception clause is part of the method signature. In .Net (C#) all exceptions are unchecked which was kind of weird to me at the start. But after programming with .Net for over 2 years now I'm pretty convinced that the unchecked exceptions are the way to go. But I came across Spec#, an experimental extension language to C# by Microsoft has decided to give checked exceptions another go and thus I thought I'd revisit the whole argument again.

When the chief architect of C# language, Anders Hejlsberg was asked why they opted to keep checked exceptions (which he recalls as 'handcuffs' on programmers ) he sighted 2 main reasons.

Scalability
Versioning

What he meant by scalability is the fact that when you write programmes which interacts with a whole bunch of other subsystems and APIs the number of exceptions the programmer is forced to handle grows out of control. When you just deal with the IO namespace in .Net framework this is not so much of an issue as you only have to handle a few IO exceptions but in large systems you can end up having to handle tens and hundreds of exceptions. So what happens is that the programmer gets tired of this and writes a big catch Exception clause which completely defeats the purposes of having checked exceptions in the first place. Or even worst they have the empty curly braces for each catch clause which is basically a planted time bomb. Another valid tactic people use is catching all checked exceptions and to wrap them as Runtime exceptions making sure that they no longer obstruct the users on top of the chain.

Under 'Versioning' the problem is that the throws clause is part of the method signature. So when you release a second version of an API or class library you can not introduce new exceptions or change existing ones since it will break client code. You are now left with having to declare a new method with a different set of exceptions which makes the API messy and unclean.

On the other hand one of the main arguments against unchecked exceptions is that the client programmer has to solely depend on the documentation of the API method to know what exceptions can be thrown by the function. But you can have a tool do this analysis for you like the 'Exception Hunter' from RedGate Software. According to Hejlsberg the most important thing about exceptions is not how you handle them, but how you release resource upon encountering one. This is perfectly handled by the try-finally blocks or using blocks in C# (Disposable pattern). The reason is that only a fraction of exceptions caught really need or can be handled by client code. The proven practice of dealing with unchecked exceptions is to let them propagate to the top of your call stack and handle them in a single place. By handling what is usually being done is a message to the user and graceful termination of the programme. We do this in very simple way in ASP.Net applications by using the Global.asax Application_Error handler.

War and Peace

2009-01-13T22:50:00.007+05:30

One of the most die-hard critics of current Sri Lankan government, Lasantha Wickramatunga was shot dead last week. He was the chief editor of Sunday Leader, a weekly newspaper in English. I must say that I have not read the Leader for a very long time and not a fan of Lasantha by any mean, but still I was deeply shocked at his demise. Although I have many a reservations about his never ending conspiracy stories , without a doubt he was the only main stream journalist in South who criticized the highly glorified war currently run by the SL government. Although the country is going steeply downward in terms of democracy almost the entire majority Sinhalese is glued to the war heroics like we are glued to a game of cricket won by the Sri Lankan cricket team.

The author of the attached EDITORIAL is ‘Dead Lasantha’ not the living one which makes its points send a more chilling wave through my spine than ever. The writing lists 4 very important assets of good governance.

1. Transparent

2. Secular

3. Liberal

4. Democratic

Please get away from the Wins in war fields for a second and give it a thought. Does your educated mind allow you to do that you?

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me

German Theologian,
Martin Niemöller
@ the time of the Great Holocaust

Gran Torino

2009-01-02T11:30:00.006+05:30

As of things to expect during the new year of 2009 in the very first day of the year, I had to go through an absolute crap bag of a movie and followed it up with one of the top notch movies in 2008.

The worthless movie was 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' although I'd wish the whole movie could have stand as a still photograph of Keanu Reeves. I don't think we need to discuss a lot about that one.

The follow up movie was 'Gran Torino' is by none other than Mr.Clint Eastwood. Gran Torino has Mr.Eastwood himself as the main character 'Walt Kawoski' a former World War I soldier who operated in Korea. Kawoski is a very independent man who has a past which he likes to forget and a very lonely present time. At the start he projects himself to be a typical old age American who is so arrogant and big headed. His nerves are further tested by the fact that his neighborhood has ended up being a cross-cultural dump yard of people. The movie beautifully shows how the bond between him and the two young Hmong girl and boy builds up. As the movie unfolds the very same characteristics of Kawoski which you hated at the beginning starts to first entertain us and then even educate us about human relationships towards the end. Eastwood with his ever deepening voice of his cracks up some very good humour and also forces us to appreciate the fact that old style of living is indeed simpler & better.

I always judge a movie either by the number of 'Ohhhhhh' feelings or the number of feeling of some heavy chunk stuck up in the top of my throat. Being ‘Ohhh’d is an indication of being tricked by the movie which is good most of the time (Remember Usual Suspects/Memento). The second is the feelings we have towards the characters and their situation which indicates how well the movie has bonded us with the characters within 1 or 2 hours. Gran Torino left me up with a few heavy chunks stuck up in my throat (specially at the end) as an appreciation of how pure and worthy plain old style human relationships can be without all the religions and sciences trying to dissect and describe it.

I would recommend any of you to get a DVD and watch this.

Opera Mini on NOKIA 6500

2008-11-29T23:02:00.009+05:30

I bought a NOKIA 6500 slide and was very interested to see how the Opera browser would work on it. I had once worked with a colleague from India, Deepak who now works for Opera. He had given me enough reasons to at least try it. So I decided to go for Opera Mini. But getting it to work was not so straight forward. In this post I will explain how I got it to work step by step.

From my service provider I got the web settings such that the default browser started to work. Well, Opera cannot be so far away now…So I downloaded Opera Mini to my laptop and transferred and installed it on the phone. But when I started Opera I was surprise to see the "Failed to connect to the Internet". In this article the cause for this problem is explained in detail. In short the reason is that the service providers use an internal Access Point setting which results in no Access Point being available in the phone. So the solution is to create your own Access Point with the settings found on the internal Access Point used by the internal browser. The disappointing thing is that the mobile phone manufactures do a terrible job of documenting these things and also the opera mini settings page does not list Sri Lankan service provider details plus nokia.com does not also have Sri Lankan network details.

Menu > Configuration Settings > Personal Config. Settings >
You will be able to see the existing web connection or access point. Write down all its details.
Now under Personal Config. Settings choose Options > New > Access Point and provide the details
These are the details I provided
1. Account Name - MyAP
2. Data Bearer - Packet Data
3. Under Bearer Settings provide exact same details you found under Bearer Details in the default browser access point.
Now under Menu > Configuration Settings > Preferred Access Point provide the name of the AP you just created (MyAP)

After that Opera Mini (Or Other Data Applications) will start to connect to Internet.

Zeitgeist Addendum

2008-11-16T15:12:00.009+05:30

I have watched the second part of the Zeitgeist, "Zeitgeist Addendum". This is more focused on the naturally corrupt and faulty nature of the worlds current monitory system, specially the Banks. Also in the last section of the movie it devotes it self to explaining the solution. Discussing solutions and possible actions was very interesting as it gives us more courage to do something about it. The final section introduces the viewer to the 'Venus Project' which proposes a very different and at this point of time very radical social system, which is driven NOT by money, but by technology. I propose every one to watch the 2 Zeitgeist documentaries to get a fresh perspective of what's happening around us. The awakening I got after watching these 2 is somewhat similar to what I got after watching the first Matrix movie.

PS : A better quality version of Addendum can be obtained via Torrents.

Efficient Outsourcing

2008-11-02T09:30:00.009+05:30

The business model at Eurocenter is 'Extended Engineering'. Although the fancy term might give u the feeling that it's actually another term for 'Out Sourcing', it's not. We try to be partners of our client which in most cases is an ISV, Independent Software Vendor. Our ISVs are from Scandinavian countries and we tend to work with them not for a project or 2, but for a long time. We already have several clients who had been working with us for more than 3 years.

Although one of the strengths of Eurocenter is its commitment to delivery once a project is signed off, a recent whining I get from one of the clients is that time taken for us to sign off a project is too much. This is due to the fact that we like to resolve as many grey areas as possible in the scope to prevent scope creep and unhappy situations with the customers late in a project. Mind you our projects are usually small in size, roughly 3000 hours and completed within 6 months or so. But what I noticed is even for a project which is smaller than this we take around 1 month of back and forth discussions to finally agree and start the project.

This is not healthy for an ISV who's looking forward to cut down on his Time to Market by partnering with a company like Eurocenter. We have tried framework agreements where the client basically agrees to pay for a certain number of resources for an period of time (6 months) which is kind of Time & Material job. But this is more suited for projects where customer manages the resources and provide them small grained tasks as oppose to whole projects. The typical advantages customer gets by working with a company like Eurocenter is that the emphasis in quality and process. But in a time & material based cost structure this is not captured and the customer can't expect the same quality & process benchmarks as a fixed price complete project. In case of a typical product development (Which builds a specific product for customer) we follow the fixed rate model where we scope & estimate prior to sign off. This is where the initial delays are seen, when we try to agree on scope & estimates.

One of the models we came up in our discussions recently is a model where as soon as the client gets the idea of a product/project and wants it to be done by us, 1 or 2 resources from us can start working on the project while also scoping and estimating. There is always a % of actual project work which can be done before the scoping is not completed. There is a risk of the project not progressing after couple of weeks. What we have agreed is to share this risk with the client. So for the initial work that we do on this project will be billable to the customer on a time & material basis. This gives the client time to go through scope & estimates properly while knowing that he's not impacting the final delay of the product by much. On the other hand we get to provide our resources with billable work which is both good for the company and satisfying for people. In the current fixed price model we end up having 2-3 resources doing non-billable work for a few weeks just because customer hasn't yet signed off a project rather than any other technical problem. Of course the client and the outsource company can't do this if they have met for the first time. You need to have a certain level of trust and confidence on both parties for a model like this to be a success. We plan to employ this tactic soon and see how it goes with matured clients of ours.

If the model proves to be a success it can be one of the most efficient models of outsourcing. while managing the risks.

Eurocenter - CMMI Level 3 Company

2008-10-26T11:06:00.011+05:30

Eurocenter, the company I work for has achieved one of its biggest milestone by becoming the first Sri Lankan software company to achieve CMMI Level 3 Dev maturity level. CMMI is a process improvement model proposed by SEI (Software Engineering Institute - Carnegie Melon). The exact achievement of Eurocenter is CMMI for Development version 1.2. Out of the 22 processes in CMMI Dev 1.2 Eurocenter was evaluated for 17 processes up until Level 3 which is depicted below. Out of this Supplier Agreement Management was not considered as its not part of Eurocenter Core Processes.

This project started more than 1 year ago involving many colleagues at Eurocenter. I was involved in the SEPG group which was focused on defining processes. Also the project I was involved in pass year was considered as one of the two focus projects which got evaluated for all 17 processes. My process area was Engineering and the processes were Requirement Development, Technical Solution, Verification and Decision Analysis and Resolution. It was a great learning experience and a test for all of us. The achivement has proved that Eurocenter is now leveling with the best companies of the world in terms of process.

Have a look at the list of companies who had achieved various maturity levels up until now. I will update the post as soon as Eurocenter is also officially added.
CMMI wikipedia site is here.

UPDATE : Eurocenter had officially awarded CMMI Level 3 certification. Check this link for the official CMMI page.

Zeitgeist

2008-10-12T22:04:00.004+05:30

One of the biggest news to hit the media in recent times is the US economic turmoil, which in turns affects other parts of the world in different strengths. The hottest story before this in my mind was the 9/11. In addition one of my main areas of interests is the concept of religion. I have come across a documentary this weekend which discusses and disects ares similar to the above. This is a very popular documentary which is placed in top 5 of the all time best documentaries in imdb. Say HI to 'Zeitgeist, the movie'. After Micheal Moore documentaries, this is the most interested I have become for films of this kind. While Micheal Moore clearly exhibits his hatred towards a certain set of people and focus groups Zeitgeist projects a much broader view of a system which is built upon greed and lies.

Zeitgeist identifies a triplet of myths upon which the current world empire is built upon. The myth of religion, country and prosperity. These are 3 symbols of modern americansim where it's metrialized (Clearly mentioned over and over again in current US elections) as faith (Christinaity), national security (anti-terrorsim) and economic wealth. The movie clearly articulates that all 3 of these is based on either pure myth or is a carefully staged act to make sure that a few can prospour in the expense of a blind-folded nation (world). The movie also is clearly in 3 parts where I prefer the third part which talks about how the central banks (Federal Reserve) have consumed countries in to a never ending debt cycle. And that it's merely a property of the system to have recurring cycles of booms and busts (recessions) is cleary understood. The fact that the movie was made much before the current economic problems speaks volumes. Almost everything in part III of the movie can be related to the current economic problems.

On the other hand it's the internet which had made Zeitgeist a runaway hit after it has been freely distributed in google video. Also the main authors of the film Jaque Fresco an Architect, Engineer and a Futurist has used Internet to spread his ideas for a long time. Jaques main idea is to use science, nature and technology instead of religion, politics and money to decide the future of our world. I suggest everyone of us watch this movie and treat it not as just another 9/11 conpiracy theory but take the more broader view to change our own lives and then our societies in turn.

Some other interesting links related to this are,
1. Zeitgeist Wiki Link
2. Movie Review
3. Zeitgeist Addendum, the follow up

Also check out some e-books available on the Zeitgeist Movements official web site.