What do you want to program today?

Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

2011-10-06T09:56:00.000-07:00

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.”

Visual Studio: ASP.NET MVC, Flip quickly through your controllers and views

2011-05-16T13:52:00.000-07:00

This tip is specifically for those writing ASP.NET MVC applications using Visual Studio

As your MVC application grows, the number of views and controllers can grow pretty quickly and ctrl+tabbing through them gets pretty painful, sometimes only to discover that you don't have *that* view open, so you need to go find it. That's where this tip comes in, if you right click on your controller, there's a menu option to go to the view, likewise, if you are in the view and right click there's a menu option to go to the controller, now, if you are a mouse guy, this is enough for you, you can stop reading now, but there's a quicker way, you can assign a shortcut key to those options

Go to Tools, Options, Environment (first option), keyboard, and type "GoToView" (without the quotes) and assign the shortcut you want, chose one that is not being used, or one of a feature you don't use (there are millions of those), for this type of thing that I do a lot, I like using keys that are easily accessible, put that F1 key to good use!!, do the same thing for the "GoToController"

Click OK and you're ready to roll, go to your controller and press your shortcut, you'll be flipping through your views and controllers like there's no tomorrow!

You're welcome J

Kindle: We were unable to download the book... please try again later

2011-03-19T21:28:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I installed Kindle on my Mac Book Pro, then only after a couple days of using it I suddenly got this error and was not able to open any of the two books I had just bought, I was able to open the books just fine on my iPhone and iPad, but the Kindle for Mac kept giving me this error message no matter how many times I tried clicking; a search on Google gave me 3 results and no solutions, so I uninstalled the App and reinstalled, got nothing. I tried the Tools menu, manage your Kindle from the Kindle app which takes you to the amazon site, noticed the "your orders" at the bottom and the options to download the content, tried that a few times, still nothing, another thing I noticed on the Kindle app was that the title was something like "???????????????? Home", I knew something was messed up bad, but even reinstalling didn't fix it, so in one last desperate attempt I checked out the Kindle preferences [Command]+, or under the Kindle menu, preferences, I clicked the only button there: "Deregister", agreed to the warning and selected "remove all licensed content from this device" and clicked "deregister" again on the warning window; a register button then showed up, I clicked it to register the app again, had to agree to some other warning, and that right there was the solution, I was able to get my books (had to download them again) and start reading, so I'm just leaving this out there in hopes it can help someone else; long story short, deregister the app, make sure to select "remove all licensed content from this device", then register again.

FluentNHibernate: "unable to locate persister:"

2011-03-02T07:52:00.000-08:00

There's quite a bit of info out there for this error message, but all I could find refers to xml configuration, the recommendation being somewhere along the lines of:

Make sure your mapping file is named *.hbm.xml
Make sure it is set to an embedded resource.
If all else fails, debug.

What most articles fail to mention is the root cause, which is the fact that NHibernate was not able to load the mappings for the class you are trying to use in your query, knowing that you can at least focus in a single area, in the case of fluent nhibernate, the configuration looks something like this:

public static ISessionFactory CreateSessionFactory() {
   return Fluently.Configure()
   .Database(MsSqlConfiguration.MsSql2008.ConnectionString(c => c.FromConnectionStringWithKey("AppDb")))
   .Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.Add<ProductMap>())
   .Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.Add<CategoryMap>())
   .ExposeConfiguration(c => c.SetProperty("current_session_context_class", "web"))
   .BuildSessionFactory();
}

The two .Mappings() lines are the bug in this case, any subsequent calls to it override the first one and you won't be able to query Products
There are two ways of fixing this, one you can tell it to load all the mappings found on the same assembly as the first map

   .Mappings(m => m.FluentMappings.AddFromAssemblyOf<ProductMap>())

or if you want to be specific:

   .Mappings(m => { m.FluentMappings.Add<ProductMap>();
                    m.FluentMappings.Add<CategoryMap>(); })

Hope someone else finds this helpful

IE 9 : How to get your old address bar back

2011-02-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

IE9 introduced a new address bar that is located on the same row as the tabs that are open, that may be useful for some people, but for everyone else it's just annoying, luckily they added an easy way to change it back to the same way it was before, all you have to do is right click on any tab or the tab area and you'll get a "show tabs on a separate row" option at the bottom

And that's it, you get your old address bar back :)

SQL: Group datetime by an arbitrary time interval

2010-12-10T15:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, a co-worker came to me with a puzzle, he wanted to write a query that would group records by intervals of 5, 10, 15 minutes, ideally just passing a parameter to the query to specify the time interval, I sat down and after 5 minutes I came up with the solution:

declare @interval int

set @interval = 5

select datepart(hh, DateTimeColumn)

, datepart(mi, DateTimeColumn)/@interval*@interval

, count(*)

from thetable

group by datepart(hh, DateTimeColumn)

, datepart(mi, DateTimeColumn)/@interval*@interval

The trick is highlighted, though it looks like the division and multiplication eliminate each other, what is really happening is an integer division, which, multiplied by the same number, gives you the right intervals:

here's the (minutes) values pattern for an interval of 5

minute divided by 5 multiplied by 5
0 0 0
1 0 0
...
5 1 5
6 1 5
...
10 2 10
11 2 10
...
from there you can include more fields in your select criteria, make it prettier, etc

declare @interval int

set @interval = 5

select convert(varchar(8), DTColumn, 1)+' '

+convert(varchar(2), datepart(hh, DTColumn))+':'

+convert(varchar(2), datepart(mi, DTColumn)/@interval*@interval)

, count(*)

from the_table

group by convert(varchar(8), DTColumn, 1)+' '

+convert(varchar(2), datepart(hh, DTColumn))+':'

+convert(varchar(2), datepart(mi, DTColumn)/@interval*@interval)

which produces something like:

11/12/10 10:10 28

11/12/10 10:15 11

11/12/10 10:20 57

hope this is useful

VirtualBox VM won't release the mouse

2010-11-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post to share this, I'm playing with VirtualBox on my OpenSuse 11.3, installing Windows XP on a VM, I decided to click inside the VM while it was still installing, hoping that the right [ctrl] key would release the mouse, but that didn't work, Googled a bit with no good results, there's many related articles about this issue, but no solution, I was ready to give up so I hit ctrl+alt+del and what do you know, that released the mouse :)

hope this helps someone out there

Apple intuitiveness: Upgrading OS X results in downgraded components

2010-09-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

I just upgraded my OS X to Snow Leopard (yeah, a bit late), first of all I just can't wrap my head around the idea that OS X runs on a single hardware configuration (ok, maybe 3) yet it took over an hour to install, while Windows runs on millions of hardware configurations and can install in 15 mins (as in, ready to start using it), I just can't find that intuitive, it doesn't make sense; but anyway, one of the 3? 'big' features in this update is Safari 4, before installing I noticed I already had Safari 5, so I went ahead and did the install, to my surprise when it finally finished I had now Safari 4!! WTF? over an hour upgrading and they couldn't check if the components had a higher version than the one being installed? To be honest I was afraid to check if there was something else that got downgraded. Upgrading OS X results in a downgrade of it's components! how's that intuitive?
To top if off, after upgrading I went to check for updates, there were 776MB of updates (and these are the people who make fun of Windows updates?), and sure enough, Safari 5 was on the list.

So, to recap: I had Safari 5, I upgraded OS X, it got downgraded to Safari 4, then I had to get a 776MB update to get back to where I was before the upgrade. Intuitive or not, I'll let you be the judge xD.

Update. after another 10 minutes, more updates came up, this time an additional 200MB, requiring, of course, that I reboot again.

MissingManifestResourceException was unhandled

2010-03-05T08:22:00.000-08:00

Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture. Make sure "PostProcessing.ConfigurationForm.resources" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly "PostProcessing" at compile time, or that all the satellite assemblies required are loadable and fully signed.

There are many articles related to this one but they all point to a different solution than the problem I had, so I figured someone else might run into this

you can get this exception if you declare a class before the code of one of your forms

This will generate the error:

public class SomeTestClass {...}
...
public partial class ConfigurationForm : Form ...

The fix is simple, either move your class after the Form class, or (better yet) move it out to it's own file

Software ever changing truths

2009-11-02T12:02:00.000-08:00

Quite often in software [development] (more often than not?), as time goes on, what is truth, becomes not truth, and this is possibly one of the reasons it makes software development so difficult, human brains are normally trained to learn stuff, but are not trained for dis learning and that's where the problem resides, as humans, once we learn something a certain way and we learn that that is good (or "the best way"), it is very difficult to change our minds to do it differently.

Programmers are frequently questioning what is the best way to do x or y, in many cases people will grab the first result from a web search (sounds familiar?), take that as the absolute truth, apply it to whatever problem they are solving and move on with life, though other times the ramifications of such learning experience will carry over much further, maybe the person will write a blog post about it or teach his/her co-workers, thus distributing the knowledge.

Keep in mind that is not always about finding out the best way of doing things, some other times we find out that something is not possible, and this last one might be worst, more so on young developers, learning that something is not possible is very dangerous, have you seen an elephant tied to the tiny stake? it has learned that as soon as it reaches the end of its rope, it can't go any further.

Many of these truths come from respected authorities in the world of software, maybe from the software vendor itself or the official community around it, making matters even more complicated because they are the source and you trust them. The key here is not that you can't trust anyone, it's only that you should not lock that into your brain as the absolute truth, software is always evolving, it's always changing truths.

There are few things that you should take as the absolute truth though ;), among them:

There's usually no best way of doing things, there's only a better way(s) of doing it.
Software development is not black or white, in fact I think most of it is gray area.
There are no hard rules in software development, it'd be too easy if that was the case.
There is no such thing as an impossible thing, only incapable beings.
Software is always evolving, what is truth today may not be the truth tomorrow.

All I am saying is that whenever you come to "the best way of doing" (be it an algorithm, a technology, framework or methodology), a performance comparisson that shows that X is better than Y or something that is "not possible", it doesn't matter who it comes from, take it with a grain of salt. What is truth today may not be truth tomorrow.

Information disclosure: It's everywhere

2009-10-30T15:04:00.000-07:00

You might have seen stickers like this in the back window of some minivan and maybe you thought it was funny/cute/stupid, but did you ever think of it as information disclosure? What's the big deal about showing all of your family's names? glad you ask :), let me briefly describe something that happens in Mexico and South America: Virtual kidnapping extortion, criminals will call your phone, tell you that hey have kidnapped your kid (they have the names you graciously provided) and ask you to immediately pay the ransom, when in reality they don't have your kid, but use the emotional momentum to take advantage of you. This is only one example of how they conduct these activities, there are many other ways, and I'm not trying to make you scared of that, but to make a point on information disclosure. It can be found in the most innocent places and if you think this can't happen to you, then you're already very vulnerable.

You've also probably seen this:

I couldn't even tell you how many blogs have been hacked because of that (hint: too many), WordPress makes it too easy to break those sites when new vulnerabilities appear (as they do every other week).

I have seen systems where they use some employee id as their login credentials, that id is visible when the computer is locked, and it turns out you can call the help desk, provide them with that id, the person's name, and they will happily reset the password for you.

Unfortunately there are no rules that I can give you or that I have ever seen anywhere to prevent the issue of information disclosure, I'm just trying to raise the awareness on the potential issue that represents having information that bad people can use for malign purposes both in your systems and your own life. The only thing I can tell you is that information disclosure is really everywhere, in your comments, in your configuration files, disclosing the components that your app users, that version, that user id, etc. even in that innocent sticker.

Security does get in the way of usability and usability gets in the way of security, just give it a second thought and be careful out there.

There is no such thing as a secure system, all you can do is raise the bar a little bit more and yes, security by obscurity may be your friend some times.

Duct tape programming: Elegant code doesn't pay the bills

2009-10-21T09:26:00.000-07:00

Finally decided to jump into the Duct Tape programmer conversation that's been around the internets for the last weeks; talk about flame wars! a large portion of the blogging/twitter community took this post as an attack on TDD, Agile development practices and overall quality software development; which makes perfect sense if you think about it, that's what they sell, that's what they blog and tweet about all the time, so, Joel's post hit some sensitive nerves there. All of those patterns and practices fanboys are trying to convince the world that the duct tape programmers are those who don't care about quality and that they are just writing software that is not maintainable, extensible and all those things that we expect from good software. Those are the same people that quickly dismiss content that is "purely technical", you'll see them talking and talking all the time about good patterns and practices, but not so much about implementations of anything down to the actual code level. I say, theory is good, but without the practice, it's useless.

Unfortunately for them the very first example of duct tape programming that jumps out is StackOverflow, a site that has been developed by self acknowledged duct tape programmers, but also a site that has proven to be fast, reliable, and has delivered tons of features over time, which tells me the code is very extensible; I'm sure the code is not something your average programmer could get a grasp of and would probably make purists throw up a little bit here and there, but is code that does what it supposed to do, and does it very well (do I hear ship it?)

When I stated that in Twitter about SO, some didn't believe it (which tells me they thought it was so good it couldn't be duct tape programming, but there are podcasts you can look for and listen to what they have done), and someone else madly replied to me, arguing that SO was the only real example of successful duct tape programming, unfortunately for them (again) if you look at the tremendous success on Apple products lately, you'll see duct tape programming all over the place, Apple is the King (or Queen?) of duct tape programming, specially the iPhone development ecosystem, it's not all that pretty but Apple has always delivered what people want, you may read my own blog about many stupid things that Apple does, but on the end, people are very happy with their products, and that's all that matters, people don't care that the underlying infrastructure or the code for the apps looks like crap, I'll say it again: it doesn't matter.

The biggest problem with purists is that when you focus on making every single line of code fit within a pattern, it's very easy to cross the line of over engineering and forget about the very basics of software development, which is, it has to meet your customers expectations, and you have to deliver, if you don't deliver a product, it doesn't matter how good the code is, unfortunately elegant code doesn't pay the bills, getting the job done does.

A brute-force solution that works is better than an elegant solution that doesn't work. Code Complete 2

My most frequent pattern is "whatever works", I'm not afraid of throwing in procedural, OOP, functional, dynamic, stored procedures, you name it, whatever gets the job done (ok, except for XML, I hate XML) in a way that works and allows me to extend that code later, but most importantly, I am used to delivering good results, always, no excuses, you'll often hear me say, is not an option, it HAS to work. Don't get me wrong, I'm very strict with my code, I like elegant code, I follow good SOLID principles, I write unit tests when a piece of code definitely needs it, is just that I don't force everything into a pattern, I don't always write my tests first religiously (ok, actually, I never write the tests first, I think it's stupid). That for me, is the duct tape programmer. You just have to know when to pull the plug and keep in mind the most important feature of your product. Shipping is that feature, without it, whatever you do, even if it is a master piece, is worthless.

Now, when you corner purists showing them good results from duct tape programming, they argue that it takes very talented people to pull that off, sure, nobody said it was easy, it takes talent, it takes reading and understanding all those "purely technical content" entries, experimenting, playing, hacking, on the end, software development IS a people problem. I think methodologies are for people who don't have the talent, but that's a whole different topic.

There are no hard rules in programming, it would be too easy if that was the case.

disclaimer: I took the "elegant code doesn't pay the bills" phrase from someone in Twitter, sorry, can't find it now.

Mac intuitiveness: syncing notes and hard limits

2009-10-03T13:26:00.000-07:00

I've had this issue from day 1, every time I sync my iPhone after I have added or modified some notes, I get this message

I usually keep around 10 notes on my iPhone, so, of course it's always going to be more than 5 freaking percent, why should it care that I change even 100% of all my notes, just keep a history if that's the concern, the other issue is that if you plug your iPhone in to sync it and walk away, you'll come back one hour later only to find out that it hasn't finished because it is stuck on this stupid dialog. Really bad usability there, hasn't improved even with the countless iTunes updates.

Always remember the least surprise principle.

Apple intuitiveness: The lost OK button

2009-09-25T14:22:00.000-07:00

Every time you connect an iPhone/iPod to a Mac, iTunes does its thing, takes forever syncing and what not (one of those things is that it steals the focus, which I hate) and when is finally done, it comes up with this dialog:

Maybe it's just me, but it took me a long time (and I mean, months) to realize that it wasn't referring to an OK button, just that it was OK to disconnect your device; so much for being intuitive.

But then again, I'm not the only one who thinks that iTunes sucks

Ping doesn't cut it for connectivity testing

2009-09-23T08:41:00.000-07:00

A failed ping only means that the ping failed, doesn't tell you much about the connectivity.

On some twitter discussion today I was reminded of how often people use the ping command to test for connectivity, what a lot of people don't know, is that ping is just another service, and can be disabled or blocked, -as it has become more frequent these days-, rendering this method useless, on top of that, more often than not you need to test connectivity to a specific service; a much better approach is to use telnet. Using telnet you can actually test not only that there is connectivity, but that you can reach the desired port.

Some frequently used ports:

20, 21 Standard FTP

23 Telnet default

25 SMTP

80 Standard web

115 SFTP

443 Standard secure web

139 NETBIOS (file and printer sharing in Windows)

143 IMAP

445 SMB (to connect to Windows from other OSs)

You can find a bigger list here

an example of testing if you can access the web on some ip:

telnet 192.168.1.2 80

when the connection succeeds, you usually just get a black screen, with the cursor staring at you, if the connection fails, you will get an error message

As a final note, in case the connection fails, you might want to use tracert -d [ip address] to get more details of why the connection fails

How to: Save GIF files in MS Outlook

2009-07-17T10:31:00.000-07:00

For some reason MS Outlook doesn't give you an ~~option~~ easy way to save animation files (.GIF), actually it won't let you save .JPG, .PNG, etc directly from a message and what it does instead is that it gives you the option of saving it as BMP, but many times this is not desirable, every once in a while I need this and I keep forgetting how to do it so I decided to use my blog once again for the purpose of remembering later how to do something; it actually works quite well, so here it is

I actually lied on the title, there are ways to save the .GIF files in Outlook, but I'm not going there, there is a much easier way, forward the message to a web-based email account such as Yahoo or Gmail (haven't tried Hotmail, but it probably works there too)

You'll be able to save the files from there as you would expect, with a right click, save file as...

Programming is like Chess

2009-07-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

For a long time I have believed that software development is just like a Chess game, but apparently not many people have thought about it this way, just *bing* it and you'll see less than a page of results (Google is no better), of course this is about to change as I write this post and everybody sees the light... or not

anyway, let me elaborate on my analogy

The bad programmer
Arguably the average programmer, makes a move without thinking about the side effects, his capacity of analyzing problems is not all that great, there are so many side effects (breaking code, introducing bugs, security, etc) but this guy is not even aware of most of them, he basically relies on the debugger and if it runs on his machine then is good to go; when stuff inevitably breaks he just goes back and makes another move that seems to fix the problem, if you give this guy a large project it is likely that he'll make a stupid move that will just cause Checkmate on the project

The good
Analyzes different paths and choses the one he thinks is best, this player can play a good game, every once in a while his analysis is not that through and makes some mistakes but he can learn from that, this guy usually delivers good quality software with few bugs that he can go back and fix quickly enough to be acceptable

The best
This guy can make a whole bunch of moves all in his head, he's informed about all the latest techniques to defeat the opponent but he doesn't just rush and use them in a game, he tries them first on his own little projects and ends up using the ones that he proves to be useful, the ones that are shorter, quicker and give him the best return, he knows the techniques to use with the small projects and the ones to be used with large projects, and he knows they are very different, this guy knows what the opponent is thinking, he knows what the opponent will respond to every one of his moves so he usually chooses the best move... he knows the side effects; the "works on my machine" is not on this guy's vocabulary.

As you can see the the main two differences in my analogy are the capacity of analysis (selecting the move) and the awareness of the side effects (what happens when you make that move).
The opponent is your software project, the move is writing the code, the side effects are everything else that is affected by that.

When was the last time that you introduced a new bug fixing that other bug or writing some new functionality? or when *they* found bugs of your code right after it went to production? or when it worked on your machine but not on the server?

Every time you make a move, stop and think about the side effects, there are always side effects, if you can't think of them, there are tools that can help you think better, such as Unit Testing, the more you practice it, the better you'll get at it, I promise

Firefox taking a long time to start after upgrading to 3.5

2009-06-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

Firefox 3.5 (code name Shirekoto) is out, get it while is hot!

After updating it and running it for the first time, I got this little window

It took me a while to even realize that that little guy was somewhere on my screen, I thought Firefox was just taking a long time to start after the update, then I clicked on the taskbar icon and that's when I saw the little window, I tried to re-size it but it didn't allow me to, all I could do was close the little (attempt of) window, then Firefox ran normal

thought I would blog about it in case this happens to more people

symptom: Firefox takes a long time to start after updating to 3.5
solution: click on the taskbar firefox icon and find the little window on your screen, close it, then Firefox will run normal

Are we done with XML yet? hello JINI

2009-06-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

I have never been a fan of XML, I've hated it from "day one", the format is too inefficient, too bloated; I have had some ideas on things that can be done to reduce the size on xml data sets, such as having some kind of header definition embedded at the top of the file and other ideas, but the point of this post is not to talk those ideas, but rather my own proposal to start getting rid of xml.

One area where I find particularly painful to use XML is on configuration files and my proposal to fix this problem is to formalize a new format, which I call JINI for now. JINI is a subset of JSON similar in simplicity to the good old .ini files and it's used specifically for configuration purposes to replace all those app.config xml configuration files

Benefits
- Simple
- No brackets
- Simple
- Shorter
- Easier to read
- Simpler
- Everything that can be expressed in XML, can be expressed in JINI, but simpler

Too bad "jini" is kinda already taken (2 million results on Google and 714K on Bing say so)

I thought someone would have come up with this idea already, but a quick search gave me nothing, so I thought I would get the ball rolling

what do you think?

How to: Convert DIB to Bitmap

2009-06-22T17:28:00.001-07:00

During the weekend a friend asked for some help on code to convert a DIB to a Bitmap in .NET, he had found some code in internet and it almost did everything he needed but the image was getting cut off along the sides, we figured the issue had something to do with getting the pointer to the bitmap, so we digged more and found some more code that then we had to make a couple fixes and changes to get it working. Since I was not able to find a full working solution to the problem I decided to write this post, I saw many people asking the same question in multiple forums so hopefully this will help

First, you’ll need to add System.Drawing.dll to the references of your project, then you’ll need to add the following uses clauses

//Name spaces needed
using System;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
using System.IO;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

the next step is to declare the BITMAPINFOHEADER structure, this can be declared outside your class:

[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 1)]
public struct BITMAPINFOHEADER
{
   public uint biSize;
   public int biWidth;
   public int biHeight;
   public ushort biPlanes;
   public ushort biBitCount;
   public uint biCompression;
   public uint biSizeImage;
   public int biXPelsPerMeter;
   public int biYPelsPerMeter;
   public uint biClrUsed;
   public uint biClrImportant;

   public void Init()
   {
       biSize = (uint)Marshal.SizeOf(this);
   }
}

Then you need to import a function from GdiPlus.dll

//GDI External method needed Place it within your class
[DllImport("GdiPlus.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true)]
private static extern int GdipCreateBitmapFromGdiDib(IntPtr pBIH,
   IntPtr pPix, out IntPtr pBitmap);

Now we can get to the actual code to conver the DIB to Bitmap, note the use of a helper function GetPixelInfo, this was the culprit of our issues, and the one we had a hard time finding then getting to work, the function BitmapFromDIB that you’ll find all over the web doesn’t have this code and so it doesn’t work in many cases, in fact the function that you'll find all over the place has a parameter pPix but it doesn't specify how to get this value. This code needs to be declared inside your class

//THIS METHOD SAVES THE CONTENTS OF THE DIB POINTER INTO A BITMAP OBJECT
private static Bitmap BitmapFromDIB(IntPtr pDIB)
{
   //get pointer to bitmap header info       
   IntPtr pPix = GetPixelInfo(pDIB);

   //Call external GDI method
   MethodInfo mi = typeof(Bitmap).GetMethod("FromGDIplus", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic);
   if (mi == null)
       return null;

   // Initialize memory pointer where Bitmap will be saved
   IntPtr pBmp = IntPtr.Zero;

   //Call external methosd that saves bitmap into pointer
   int status = GdipCreateBitmapFromGdiDib(pDIB, pPix, out pBmp);

   //If success return bitmap, if failed return null
   if ((status == 0) && (pBmp != IntPtr.Zero))
       return (Bitmap)mi.Invoke(null, new object[] { pBmp });
   else
       return null;
}

//THIS METHOD GETS THE POINTER TO THE BITMAP HEADER INFO
private static IntPtr GetPixelInfo(IntPtr bmpPtr)
{
   BITMAPINFOHEADER bmi = (BITMAPINFOHEADER)Marshal.PtrToStructure(bmpPtr, typeof(BITMAPINFOHEADER));

   if (bmi.biSizeImage == 0)
       bmi.biSizeImage = (uint)(((((bmi.biWidth * bmi.biBitCount) + 31) & ~31) >> 3) * bmi.biHeight);

   int p = (int)bmi.biClrUsed;
   if ((p == 0) && (bmi.biBitCount <= 8))
       p = 1 << bmi.biBitCount;
   p = (p * 4) + (int)bmi.biSize + (int)bmpPtr;
   return (IntPtr)p;
}

finally, as a plus, what my friend actually needed was to convert from DIB to TIFF, so he wrote a function to do that, this function reuses the BitmapFromDIB function and allows you to set the image resolution

private void SavehDibToTiff(int hDIB, string fileName, int xRes, int yRes)
{
   //Identify the memory pointer to the DIB Handler (hDIB)
   IntPtr dibPtr = new IntPtr(hDIB);

   //Save the contents of DIB pointer into bitmap object
   Bitmap myBitmap = BitmapFromDIB(dibPtr);

   //Set resolution if needed
   if (xRes >0 && yRes>0)
       myBitmap.SetResolution(xRes, yRes);

   //Create an instance of the windows TIFF encoder
   ImageCodecInfo ici = GetEncoderInfo("image/tiff");

   //Define encoder parameters
   EncoderParameters eps = new EncoderParameters(1); // only one parameter in this case (compression)

   //Create an Encoder Value for TIFF compression Group 4
   long ev = (long)EncoderValue.CompressionCCITT4;
   eps.Param[0] = new EncoderParameter(System.Drawing.Imaging.Encoder.Compression, ev);

   //Save file                       
   myBitmap.Save(fileName, ici, eps);
}

//Helper to get Encoder from Windows for file type.
private static ImageCodecInfo GetEncoderInfo(String mimeType)
{
   ImageCodecInfo[] encoders = ImageCodecInfo.GetImageEncoders();
   for (int j = 0; j < encoders.Length; ++j)
   {
       if (encoders[j].MimeType == mimeType)
           return encoders[j];
   }
   return null;
}

and that is it, hoping this will help someone out there

What are those colors on IE tabs?

2009-06-13T14:24:00.001-07:00

I thought this was one of the best features in Internet Explorer 8, but not everyone gets the meaning of the colors on the tabs. The colors represent that the tabs are related, meaning that you followed a link from one page, IE opened another tab and assigned the same color as the previous tab, so that way the tabs that are derived from other tabs are now all grouped and it’s very easy to see this, very useful when you have multiple tabs open for different purposes. I just had to blog this because someone actually asked me what those colors were for, so I figured there’s more people who may have the same question.

Silverlight how to: Add a user control to another user control

2009-05-31T17:35:00.001-07:00

I'm starting to experiment with SilverLight and there's plenty of material out there, but some of the small details are really hard to find. The first application I'm working on requires a couple user controls, one embedded in the other and I spent a couple hours finding how to insert the user control into another control, then to the page, I thought it would be as easy as drag and drop but that didn't work, tried a few other things with no luck, turns out you have to add the namespace to the xaml, similar to the way you declare your controls in ASP.NET
The top xml of a user control (or the Page.xaml which is really just a user control) looks like this:

right after the last line with xmlns, you can type "xmlns:[prefix]=" (where [prefix] is the prefix you want to use in the xml to add your control, and make sure to add the = at the end); intellisense will do the rest, the first line of the drop down will contain the default namespace of your assembly, select that and you're good to go, it will look something like this:

You can now start adding your control by typing <prefix: wherever you want to add your control and again intellisense will do the rest for you, you will be able to select any of the user controls that you have created previously under that namespace.
One last thing, if you will be referencing that user control from the code behind, you will need to name your control:

<prefix:MyUserControl Name="myControl" ></prefix:MyUserControl>

Doing so will give you strongly typed access to the instance of the control in your code behind, public members included

myControl.SomePublicMethod(someParameters);

my solution to Eric Lippert's quiz

2009-04-16T14:58:00.000-07:00

Eric posted a quiz a few days ago, it generated quite a number of responses, so I thought I would answer with the shortest possible C# answer (with my previous team we used to kinda compete on refactoring), so here it is (Justin and Paul, bring it on!):
The problem:
Write me a function that takes a non-null IEnumerable and returns a string with the following characteristics:

(1) If the sequence is empty then the resulting string is "{}".
(2) If the sequence is a single item "ABC" then the resulting string is "{ABC}".
(3) If the sequence is the two item sequence "ABC", "DEF" then the resulting string is "{ABC and DEF}".
(4) If the sequence has more than two items, say, "ABC", "DEF", "G", "H" then the resulting string is "{ABC, DEF, G and H}". (Note: no Oxford comma!)

My solution:

static string JoinStrings(IEnumerable<string> strings) {
    int len = strings.Count();
    return "{"+(
        (len > 1) ?
            strings.Take(len - 1)
            .Aggregate((string head, string tail) => head+", "+tail)+
            " and " +strings.Last()
        : (len == 1) ?
            strings.First()
        : "")+
        "}";
}

public ASP.NET MVC { get; private set; }

2009-04-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

For the 2 people who don't read many blogs (or twitter), but do read this one, yesterday it was announced that ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is open source baby! "Free like Speech." and there are no restrictions to the platform either, the license is MS-PL which provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.

The first question that was raised was "can I submit patches?" and the answer is no, however nothing stops you from going and creating your own copy (forking) and start modifying it and redistributing it like this guy has already done.

You can get the source code here.

Did you know? Interface members are allowed to be private

2009-04-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

This one comes as a surprise to most people, but it is possible to have a private implementation for an interface member, let's look at a very simple example, just for purposes of the ilustration.

public interface ITest {
    void Test();
}
 
public class Test : ITest {
    void ITest.Test() {
        Console.WriteLine("test");
    }
    public void Test2() {
        Console.WriteLine("test2");
    }
}
 
class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        ITest t = new Test();
        t.Test();
        Test t2 = new Test();
        //t2.Test(); //<<=== doesn't compile

If you don't believe it you can try it of course.

But why is this useful or how do you use this?

The technique allows you to ensure that the method is only visible to those who are using a variable of the interface type. All this does is to force the use of the member through an instance of the interface, meaning, for this example, if you want to get access to the .Test method, you can only do so through a variable of type ITest.

The only trick to make this work is to precede the member declaration with the Interface type as in:

void ITest.Test();

Not the most useful of tricks, but something to have on the bag of tricks, or maybe something to make you win a bet ;)

Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely? The simple guide

2009-03-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

The post about the new dialog for secure/unsecure items in IE8 has had quite a few visits, so I thought I would make it much easier on the visitors to get to what they specifically need, I am guessing they are arriving here mainly to find out:

1 - What the heck does it mean.
2 - What they should do to see the full page.
3 - How can they get rid of the stupid message.

1 - What the heck does it mean?
They inverted the question from the previous dialog:

"This page contains both secure and nonsecure items.
Do you want to display the nonsecure items?"

So that more people will just click the default, and by doing so IE will not display the unsecure items on the page.

2 - I just want to see the entire page, what should I do?
Click NO

3 - How can I get rid of the stupid dialog once and for all?.
The short answer would be: Tools>internet options>security>custom level>display mixed content: Enable.
The long answer is on this other post: How to: Prevent the security dialog about unsecure items in IE

hope this helps! If I didn't answer what you were looking for, please let me know in the comments.

How to: Prevent the security dialog about unsecure items in IE

2009-03-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

keywords: IE8, mixed, content, dialog, warning.

In my previous post about the new dialog in IE8 about mixed content, someone asked "How can I prevent this message from reappearing?", I thought it would be a good-to-have post and started writing this, but someone else already answered it (thanks Anonymous), in any case, here's what you need to do if you don't want to see that dialog:

tools>internet options>security>custom level>display mixed content: enable

Note that if the site you are visiting is NOT on the internet zone, you would have to make the changes to the appropiate zone:

here's how you tell which "zone" you are on, on the bottom right hand corner of the browser you should see something like this:

If you double click that, you can make changes to the other zones (Local Intranet, Trusted sites, restricted sites)

Just click the zone you want, and it will bring up the first dialog (from this post) where you can make the change.

This applies to IE8, IE7, IE6 (I don't know about older versions)

Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?

2009-03-20T08:11:00.001-07:00

keywords: IE8, usability, warning, error, dialog

Update: If you just care about making the dialog disappear go straight to comments or this post for more details, if you want the simple answers check the "simple guide". This post was originally intended for developers but it seems a lot of people are looking for an answer to this puzzle.

IE8 has been released and it's got a few really cool features as well as some really good protection mechanisms, all in all, a fairly good release.

But then I found this while navigating a secure page (Gmail)

Say what???

In what felt like I passed out I had to re-read the full dialog, then took me about 5 seconds to get what the dialog was telling me and about 10 to understand what would happen if I clicked NO.

I'm copying the contents of dialog text here just for SEO

This webpage contains content that will not be delivered using a secure HTTPS connection, which could compromise the security of the entire webpage.

Why did they change the previous dialog?:

This page contains both secure and nonsecure items.
Do you want to display the nonsecure items?

The new dialog seems very confusing to me, the extra text after the question just makes it even more confusing and for as long as I can remember we've had the same old dialog, which seemed fine.

Notice that even the answer is the opposite for the new dialog, maybe this is the reason it feels like asking a negative question.

I think the intent is for users to click the default yes, since 99.99% users don't really read any dialogs, and that will cause IE to not display the unsecure items on the page.

Pure Apple intuitiveness: The new iPod shuffle morse code control

2009-03-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

I don't even have to try for this one, these are the instructions to operate the new iPod shuffle that has no controls on it, but defers that to the earphones, which is another WTF all on it's own

This are the buttons you get

You see, having a single button that performs so many different commands kinda defeats the purpose, imagine having an application with a single button to perform all the activities

update: Gizmodo calls it Morse code, I like it

Pure Mac intuitiveness: The keyboard

2009-03-04T17:17:00.001-08:00

The newer Mac keyboards have 2 delete keys, but that's not the WTF (or maybe it is, but whatever).
I have some files on my desktop (is that what is called in Macland?) that I want to delete, so I select the files and hit the first delete key... nothing, the second delete key, nothing... WTF!!

After trying Ctrl, Option, Command, Shift and their combinations with the delete keys, finally found one that worked, I already forgot which one though.

How is that intuitive?

Pure Mac intuitiveness

2009-03-02T13:50:00.000-08:00

I think I've had the worst luck with Macs in general; what you see here is a picture of Firefox on my iMac. Every single time I open Firefox, that's what I get and I have to grab that little window somewhere between the red and green little icons, drag it over to the left of my monitor, then make the window bigger. I think this started happening after I removed a monitor from the iMac.

Maybe it's just me, but I just don't see how that's intuitive.

By the way, I wanted to edit the image to add some more context but I didn't find an obvious way to edit the picture, neither from the context menu, or once on the preview, there's gotta be a way (you know, like in Windows, just right click, edit), is just doesn't seem to be all that intuitive.

Windows 7 installation: The product key does not match current Windows SKU

2009-02-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

I just finished installing Windows 7 on my iMac, I had no problems during the installation until I got to the product key part, I grabbed a new key from the MS site, only to find out it didn't work, then I tried with another key, no luck, long story short, I tried at least 5 keys, including one I had already used to install it on my laptop, none of them worked.

Google has very few links to people who have had the problem, and the only answer seems to be that you may have downloaded the checked build, and you need to chose the Ultimate version; I had chosen Business edition.

Chris responds: You are probably installing from the "checked" ISO image. Please choose "Ultimate" and your key should work.

However, when you are on that screen there is no way to go back, do I don't know how you would select Ultimate.

Anyway, the solution that worked for me was to simply leave the field empty, yup, that simple.

So, if you downloaded the checked build, chose the Ultimate version; if you're stuck in that page, I hope this helps you

Windows 7 beta availability extended until Feb 10th

2009-01-23T21:35:00.000-08:00

Due to the high interest in Windows 7, Microsoft has once more extended the download deadline

Because enthusiasm continues to be so high for the Windows 7 Beta and we don’t want anyone to miss out we will keep the Beta downloads open through February 10th. Customers who have started but not completed the download process will be able to do so through February 12th.

This will give you more than enough time if you want to try the beta. There are good reviews everywhere you look, so if you haven't decided, you are missing out a lot, especially if you are using Windows Vista. It is important to note that product keys will be available even after that

Product keys for the Windows 7 Beta will continue to be available. So if you have the Windows 7 Beta but didn’t get a product key you will be able to do so even after February 12th.

MSDN and Technet subscribers need not to worry about any dates as they will have access throughout the entire Windows 7 Beta phase

download link

Multiple profiles per user in twitter

2009-01-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

Don't get too excited, that's just my proposal for twitter;

I would like to see something like

http://twitter.com/BlackTigerX/technical
http://twitter.com/BlackTigerX/personal
http://twitter.com/BlackTigerX/family

I think there are many benefits to this

There are some of us using multiple accounts, one for each language.
Some people even use different social networks similar to twitter, one for each aspect.
When I subscribe to someone I only care about X (technical, personal), not Y.
Noise reduction, big one.
Would enable twitter searches on specific "tags" to find more relevant content.

Each profile could be protected to only allow the people you want, they could even be invisible so only the people you want even know about it.

People could subscribe to all public profiles if they wanted to.

The twittering tools would have to change a bit, just to specify which "tag" or specific profiles to tweet to.

I think it would reduce the noise considerably since the same account now allows you to deliver content in different branches.

I'm getting more and more ideas, the more I think about it, the more I like it.

oh, and yes, that's my twitter profile...(sigh, in English for technical content)

Windows 7 beta availability extended until Jan 24th

2009-01-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

If you haven't been able to download Windows 7 beta you can still get it; due to the high demand MS has extended the availability to 2 more weeks and they won't limit it to a fixed number of downloads.

Due to an enormous surge in demand, the download experience was not ideal so we listened and took the necessary steps to ensure a good experience. We have clearly heard that many of you want to check out the Windows 7 Beta and, as a result, we have decided remove the initial 2.5 million limit on the public beta for the next two weeks (thru January 24th). During that time you will have access to the beta even if the download number exceeds the 2.5 million unit limit.

you can download it here
source: Windows Team Blog

About the new Google favicon

2009-01-10T08:58:00.001-08:00

Google just rolled out a new favicon, in this picture we can see all 3 favicons they've had

The icon that was originally submitted was this:

André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil, submitted the design that inspired our new favicon

It seems to me the original favicon was much better than the one they came up

The one they chose feels too noisy, what do you think?

source

Windows 7 beta now avaiable to the public (first 2.5 million downloaders)

2009-01-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

They are going to go fast, so if you want to try it, go get it now

First post from Windows 7 beta

2009-01-08T21:00:00.000-08:00

I'm running Windows 7 beta 64bit on my Mac using VMWare Fusion, even in this configuration things are looking pretty good, definitely a good improvement over Vista, they got rid of a lot of the UAC popups in areas where it just makes sense that way. The new task bar seems pretty good, it will take me a little bit getting used to, but mostly because I use it different than most users. My quick launch is gone!! I'm definitely going to need my quick launch back (I think).

I love the snipping tool, similar to the one found in Mac, users who have always used Windows will find it really nice, is like a print screen on steroids, you can capture free form, rectangular area, window, and full screen; very intuitive and very fast, pretty much instant

Perhaps this is what Vista should've been, so far all the reviews I have seen have been very positive in all areas, this post is just another "me too!"

Windows 7 beta available for MSDN and Technet subscribers

2009-01-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

all the reviews say it is really good, what are you waiting for

oh that's right, no MSDN subscription, don't worry, it will be available to the public on friday

of course you could also find it on Bittorrent (just be careful)

Apple products keep dissappointing me

2008-10-26T16:22:00.000-07:00

My iphone is broken, I cannot charge it, plugging it to any computer does nothing, completely fried. I turned on the blue tooth on the Mac to connect to it, all I could do was connect to it, absolutely nothing else, shortly after I got the equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death on the Mac; the Mac has been freezing on my, Fusion has been getting slower...

I had to email every picture from the iphone to my self, everything else will be lost when the battery runs out, I will get a new iPhone tomorrow (went to the store and they confirmed it was fried)

I bought the latest and greatest equipment to avoid exactly these types of problems, I don't think I want any more Apple stuff now, not worth it so far

SVN playing jokes on me

2008-10-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

I've had issues with SVN before, but this time it went a bit too far

icons started disappearing...

but then it got too far

you don't know how much icons do for you, 'til you don't have them =o(

string format gotcha

2008-09-27T21:12:00.000-07:00

here's a simple, inoffensive looking piece of code:

...
LogError(string.Format("some message, some variable value {0}" + ex.Message, varValue));
...

Can you spot the problem with this code?

poor's man way to mount images in WinXP

2008-09-08T11:00:00.001-07:00

For those who don't know, you can mount an image (.ISO, .UDF, .CDFS, .JO, ROCK) in Windows XP and you don't have to burn to either CD or DVD, you can just load it and have it as a virtual drive and do everything you need to do with it from there

For those who do know about these tools but don't trust installing any tool you find on internet, there is a little tool from Microsoft that does just this in a very simple and effective way

just download the Virtual CDRom Control Panel tool from Microsoft and follow the instructions on the readme file:

1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

that's it

invisible CAPTCHA

2008-08-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

I was checking the status of my iPhone order (yes!) on the AT&T site, and I came to this CAPTCHAI thought it would be easy, as I didn't see any characters, I just hit ENTER, but...

sigh... =o(

Recursively delete .svn folders the easy way

2008-07-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

you can really use this to delete any given folder that you need to delete recursively, but I needed this today, and google only gives me the answer for linux, and some strange solutions to do the same in windows.

here's a simple solution that works from the command line (the easy way, right?):

for /f "usebackq" %d in (`"dir *.svn /ad/b/s"`) do rd /s/q "%d"

more than anything I know I will need this in the future, so here it is for me, hoping that it can help someone else out there J

Delta runs Linux on their planes

2008-07-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

got this during a trip to Las Vegas this past weekend, these are the screens attached to the back of the seats

SQL: You can't update a function while debugging it

2008-07-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

article applies to: SQL debugging
keywords: SQL, debugging, VS2005, functions, stored procedures

I learned this the hard way yesterday while I was RDing (Remote Desktop) into my computer, debugging a SQL function from VS2005; I then, found a bug on the function and proceeded to update the function externally using Microsoft SQL Server Management Express (uff, that was tiring), however when I would execute the alter function it would take forever and never actually come back, I thought it was something with my RD session, so I logged in to the SQL server directly and tried there with same results, after a few minutes of waiting for SQL to commit my changes I realized I was debugging, and had stopped on a breakpoint on that function, I then exited out of VS debugging, tried again and voila it worked instantly.

So, yes, it was my bad, but I never got a timeout or any message indicating what the problem was, what if two developers are working on the same thing?
perhaps some work could be done to fix that, I can't imagine that being too hard, it DOES know that is locked, why not just give the user a message?

anyway, just sharing my experience with you, hoping it helps

Welcome to the family

2008-06-22T17:47:00.000-07:00

I have joined the club, went to the store and bought the iMac 24" 3.06 GHz =o), the screen is awesome, makes my "old" 21" monitor look tiny

So far I have been quite a bit disappointed by the "usability" of the Mac, I guess I had really hight expectations for it, just the fact that the first application you have up there is the "finder", tells me something is not quite there, my biggest problems so far:

- short cut keys are different
- you install some application, then is just gone, you have to find it using the finder
- right click, where the #$%&** is my right click!!! - got it, you have to "ctrl+click"
- mouse buttons (or lack of)
- window resizing, why can I only resize from the bottom right corner??
- lack of "window restore", after maximizing the window

Right now I'm downloading Vista to install it on Fusion, we'll see how everything goes after I get familiar with it

the "welcome to the family" is what they told us at the store when we bought it, will keep you updated about my ~~rants~~ experiences

Twitter is down, I blame http://www.tweetwheel.com

2008-05-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

Twitter is down again, at this pace is going to be pretty hard for another popular social network to take twitter off the #1 position as the worst social network (uptime); you can check it out here

Social network downtime Jan-Apr 2008

I blame it on tweetwheel.com, who do you blame it on?

No anchor member was specified for recursive query *

2008-03-25T15:15:00.000-07:00

I got this error while working on a recursive CTE query, I entered the error message in google/live and got zero results so I had to do some more study on CTEs and I thought I'd share the answer to this problem.

From the MS documentation we read:
The first invocation of the recursive CTE consists of one or more CTE_query_definitions joined by UNION ALL, UNION, EXCEPT, or INTERSECT operators. Because these query definitions form the base result set of the CTE structure, they are referred to as anchor members.
CTE_query_definitions are considered anchor members unless they reference the CTE itself. All anchor-member query definitions must be positioned before the first recursive member definition, and a UNION ALL operator must be used to join the last anchor member with the first recursive member.

Basically you cannot make a recursive call before you have defined the initial data set, let's see with an example:

This would be valid:

with example(col1, col2, iteration) as
(
--first, we defined the base set
select col1, col2 from someTable where col1 is null
union all
--then we can make the recursive call
select t1.col1, t1.col2
from example t1 inner join SomeTable t2 on t1.Col2 = t2.Col1
)
select * from example

and this would generate the error

with example(col1, col2, iteration) as
(
select t1.col1, t1.col2
from example t1 inner join SomeOtherTable t2 on t1.Col2 = t2.Col1
--ERROR:we have not defined a base set before making the recursive call
union all
select col1, col2 from someTable where col1 is null
)
select * from example

Hope this helps someone out there

Do you not want to exit? yes, no, cancel, FileNotFound

2008-03-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

This article refers to UI best practices

~~The title of the post is of course an exaggeration of asking negative questions but serves as a perfect example for what I'm trying to tell you~~
I thought the title of this post was an exageration, but after seeing that dialog...

Don't ask the user negative questions

More often than not you'll confuse that crap out of the poor user; users are already too scared of answering questions to still bother them with the opposite of what they want, it's a simple and basic rule, but I still see a lot of software (and developers) that use negative questions/options for data input.

The most common use of negative options is probably disabled

just compare:
Label X visible?
Field X Enabled?

To:
Label X Invisible?
Field X Disabled?

That subtle change makes it much harder to answer the question correctly; so prefer Enabled over Disabled, Visible over Invisible, Active over Inactive, etc

The same concept applies when naming variables or methods, in very few cases the negative is a better option, so just go with the safer option, it's easier to process, we are used to answer "positive questions" and the opposite usually causes us to think which makes things not intuitive

Puzzle

2008-01-24T10:17:00.000-08:00

Justin came up with this problem as part of an actual project and it puzzled me the simplicity of the problem and definition of the solution in your head, yet the complexity of the expressiveness in code for the solution, maybe another language would be better suited to solve this problem?

you have an array of the Doc class which has a DocIndex property, for which the property is not set, some elements of the array may be null

//*** small version of the Doc class, just for the puzzle
class Doc {
public int docIndex;
}

Doc[] docs = new Doc[] { new Doc(), new null, null, new Doc() };

then you have an array of ints that represent the indexes that are already taken, e.g.

new int[] { 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 }

your job is to assign the indexes to the Doc[] that are not "taken" (exist in the array)

so, for these examples:

The expected output would be:
existing :
2 3 5 7 9
docs :
0 1 4 6 8

existing :
0 1 2 3 4
docs :
5 6 7 8 9

existing :
5 6 7 8 9
docs :
0 1 2 3 4

what do you think of this problem for a code interview?

find all tables with column name *

2008-01-19T08:30:00.000-08:00

Applies to: SQL
Tested on: SQL 2005
Keywords: SQL, column, all, tables

I'm going to need this quite often...

just execute these queries on the same database where the tables reside

--get all table names for a specific column name
SELECT o.name as TableName
FROM sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id=c.id
WHERE c.name = 'YOURCOLUMNNAMEHERE'

you can also perform like queries

--get all columns and table names for a 'like column' query
SELECT c.[name] as ColumnName, o.name as TableName FROM sysobjects o inner join syscolumns c on o.id=c.id
WHERE c.name like 'COLUMN%'

C# vNext wishlist: comma less argument list

2008-01-10T08:19:00.001-08:00

Mitch Denny has a post about his feature request for the next version of C#

he wants to have a shortcut to format strings, which would basically allow you to go from this
string s=string.Format(”{0}{1}{2}”, a, b, c);
to this:
string s=@(”{0}{1}{2}”|a|b|c);

I don't think I like the proposed alternative, all you are doing is replacing the "," with the "|" character and making the name shorter.
You could always write your own little wrapper:
//*** you could call it "f" if you wanted
static string fmt(string format, params object[] parameters) {
return string.Format(format, parameters);
}

and get
string s=fmt("{0}{1}{2}",a,b,c);

which is almost the same as the proposed solution

another problem is that this proposal solves a very particular problem which is string formatting and we can get pretty much the same by writing our own little wrapper

but anyway, it gave me an idea for my own feature request
comma-less arguments

string s=fmt("{0}{1}{2}" a b c);

The scope of this change is much wider and actually "desugars" the language

now this change will most likely not happen, since this is a C family language and would take a significant change to the parser but this is my own wish/feature request so there you have it

VS2008 download complete

2007-11-19T11:20:00.000-08:00

now burning using the RKTools (poor's man cd/dvd burner tools)

downloading VS2008...

2007-11-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

is not listed in the msdn subscriber downloads section yet, we got it through clicking "sign out", then we got to this page, (you you have to use IE) and down at the bottom you'll see a list of top subscriber downloads, you click there on the "Visual Studio 2008 * Edition...", you sign in, and are taken directly to the download

11% so far... have to go get some DVDs =o)

This application has failed to start because js3250.dll was not found.

2007-10-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

This has been a long known issue with Firefox, and so far it doesn't seem like there is an answer, the error messages are:

"This application has failed to start because js3250.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix the problem."
"The Procedure entry point in JS_HasInstance could not be located in the dynamic link library js3250.dll"

some suggest uninstalling/reinstalling Firefox, creating a new profile, removing FF completely before reinstalling, downloading a new js3250.dll file, deleting a trojan file ipv6monl.dll, etc; some solutions work for some people, some work for others, here's what worked for me

In my case the problem only happened under a restricted (non-admin) user, I looked in the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox folder and the js3250.dll file was there, so I ran the firefox.exe directly from there and it ran ok, then I replaced the shortcut I had to point to that location and it's working so far

hopefully this will help some other soul

My predictions (about Leopard) for next week

2007-10-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

- Apple will have their biggest software/hardware (MacPro, MacBookPro & Leopard) sale in history.
- There will be people camping out, waiting to be the first ones to get Leopard.
- They will run out of stock in a few stores.
- Adoption of Macs grows at least 25%.
- Very soon we'll start seeing problems (and updates) in a few applications.
- We'll also see quite a few (a lot?) security problems in the OS and applications for the rest of the year and there after actually

...and I hope to contribute to the cause! =0), and I know quite a few others in the blogosphere will too

small refactoring for working with nullable types

2007-10-15T20:42:00.001-07:00

the article applies to: C# 2.0

C# 2.0 brought a new feature: nullable types, you already know they are cool and have been using them for a while, however, how many times have you seen (or written) something like:

//SomeClass.SomeObject.BoolProperty is of type bool?

if (SomeClass.SomeObject.BoolProperty.HasValue && SomeClass.SomeObject.BoolProperty.Value)...
//something

because you can't write:
if (SomeClass.SomeObject.BoolProperty)...

That will not compile

The problem I have with that code is that it is repetitive, and is long, so what can we do?
you can write this instead:

if (SomeClass.SomeObject.BoolProperty??false)

much better, isn't? if BoolProperty has a value and the value is true, it will return true, otherwise it will return false; now, of course you can use the same technique with other types:

string firstName;
public string FirstName { get{ return firstName??""; }}

this code would ensure that FirstName will never be null (I'm pretty sure you've seen lots of "object reference not set blablabla" because of this)

Other examples:
int? result;
...
return result??-1; //if result was not set, return -1
---------------------------------------------------
bool? result;
...
return result??false;
---------------------------------------------------

That's it, hope you find it useful
Remember that the best code, is no code at all

Get last day of month

2007-09-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

applies to: C#, .NET
In the spirit of sharing code, and I think this is the second time in this week that I need this function

DateTime GetLastDayOf(DateTime date) {
return new DateTime(date.Year, date.Month, DateTime.DaysInMonth(date.Year, date.Month));
}

google (reader) search, finally

2007-09-06T00:15:00.000-07:00

woohoo! you can finally search on your google feeds, plus 2 little features

you can see 1000 items (instead of 100)
you can hide the sidebar using the mouse

You can search all your feeds, the feeds from a folder or the posts from a single feed. In fact, you can perform two searches: one for a folder or feed and another search for the posts that contain some keywords and are from the folder or feed you've previously selected. The results are sorted by date and it takes a couple of seconds for them to show up.

This might not be available to all users right now, mine got updated on the fly (without the page being down or having to reset/reload at all), I saw the new features announced but mine was still on the old version, then started working on some code and went back to check my feeds and I had the new version

so when are you going to let me highlight stuff?
that would be a killer feature

I don't need any help!

2007-08-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

But I do need my F2 key to rename stuff J

I had to use this keyboard because my pc broke, long story short, made me realize how much I use the keyboard

is my password too complex?

2007-07-25T00:07:00.000-07:00

this post from Scott reminded of a few days ago, when I changed my msn (live?) password and the next day I wasn't able to log back in because the hotmail (msn/live) passwords only allow a length of 16 characters and for some reason I was double typing 2 characters without noticing, after a while I figured it out and realized that I am using the maximum length allowed for passwords, and of course I use upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols... and of course I have categories of sites and the passwords I chose for them, depending on the importance and the security they implement

no wonder a number of people have looked at me like I'm some weirdo when they've seen me typing my passwords... mmm...

am I a freak, or is this normal among geeks? maybe... but there is no security in this world, so all we can do is raise the bar a bit

blog.Resume();

2007-07-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

wow, it has been over a month since my last post; at work we went live with our first customer and it got intense, we had some critical things that needed to be fixed for the particular environment, and we did it quickly and successfully, I am part of a great team and we're pulling it out together.
UAT anyone?... better not talk about it, it's almost back to normal now, we are finding new features that need to be developed, but things should slow down and this blog will continue it's "regular" operation, at the personal level I've had some rough situations lately as well, but is also pretty much over; I've been so busy that I even missed my 11th birthday at the company I currently work for.

So meanwhile I still need to catch up with my blog reading, you can see some of the stuff I have been reading as I catch up.

I did not get an iPhone, nor am I planning on getting one anytime soon, but I do hope to get a Mac when they release Leopard in October, I do have a feeling that we will start seeing a lot of vulnerabilities in the Mac OS soon though (just remember you read the prediction here J)... just like Firefox is getting hammered right now (you should actually go read this now, it's pretty bad)

'til next time

concatenating strings and nulls in SQL

2007-06-15T21:47:00.001-07:00

let's start with a table from scratch

create table test(
firstname varchar(10) null,
lastname varchar(10) null
)

we then insert some data (sorry about people with these names)

insert into test values ('john', 'smith')
insert into test values ('john', 'doe')
insert into test values (null, 'perez')

we're ready to concatenate some strings:

select lastname + ' ' + firstname
from test

but we get:

1 smith john
2 doe john
3 NULL

what happened?

in SQL, when you concatenate strings, if one of the strings is null, the result of the concatenation is null.

At first you might think this is bad, but it can actually help you more than it hurts, you just have to know the trick, so what do we do to fix the query?

select isnull(lastname, '') + ' ' + isnull(firstname, '')
from test

now we get:

1 smith john
2 doe john
3 perez

ok, but how is that helpful?

well, let's suppose you want this format:

lastname, first name

but only if there is a first name, if the first name is null you just want the last name with no comma

let's say there is a rule on the database that the last name cannot be null, so we can write the query as:

select lastname + isnull(', '+firstname, '')
from test

and we get:

1 smith, john
2 doe, john
3 perez

see, I concatenated the comma with the first name, and if the first name is null, the the comma gets eliminated as well

Just one more trick for your bag of tricks

C# quiz #2: objects, strings, null

2007-06-12T22:50:00.001-07:00

this is a continuation from the previous quiz; given this class definition:

public class Foo {
    public void Bar(object x) {
        Console.WriteLine("object x was called");
    }
    public void Bar(string x) {
        Console.WriteLine("string x was called");
    }
}

what will be output to the console with the following code:

Foo f = new Foo();
try {
f.Bar(null);
}
catch {
Console.WriteLine("no method was called");
}

Extra points for explaining why

how to tell google to NOT load the country specific page

2007-06-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

Scoble is having this issue right now, I've had it in the past and forgotten to post this here, google tries to play smart and load the country specific page, so if you are in Mexico and you go to google.com, you'll get google.com.mx instead, to fix it just go to this url

google.com/ncr

Cheap tricks to get a more popular blog

2007-06-10T12:21:00.001-07:00

There are a few tricks that I have seen used more and more lately to try to get more attention to blogs

1) use adult content related words to refer to some technical topic (but not necessarily), some recent examples of such use recently:

you are likely to get some "google love" for sure with those keywords

2) get in a debate with some "big guy", this technique is getting used more and more lately, we have
Jeff Atwood vs Petzold's
Ayende vs Ted Neward's
Ayende vs Sam
Rob Conery vs Ayende
Nick vs Sam
heck, Ayende vs the rest of the world, J

etc, all you have to do is talk trash about something a guy posted on his blog, or about some of the work (usually open source) the guy works on, if your blog is not very popular, make sure to leave a comment on the other blog so the guy notices you

3) ask for link love, this specific case actually has a merit, this should be listed under "how to get a popular blog in 10 days", but the idea is the same

sigh... boring stuff, but I guess it works if all you want is to get more people to your blog (inflate your numbers), even if what they find is not exactly what they were looking for (first case)

programming practices: never say never

2007-06-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Jan Bannister wrote this post: bool considered harmful, and writes:

Never Use Bool, or more specifically never user bool as a parameter. It is the most foolish of datatypes and conveys the smallest amount of information possible.

I can disagree with that in a number of ways, but the culprit was the "never use bool as a parameter", the biggest problems I see
- you would end up with hundreds of enums to replace your bool parameters, and then
- where do you put all those enums?
- at some point you would probably duplicate some of the required functionality

so, what do we do, bool is still "harmful", but not always, that's the key, I can think of at least 2 situations where you don't necessarily need to replace your bools with enums
- private methods: they are (hopefully) only used in that class... and the method is not that big, and the class is not that big, and you added comments for the method/parameters... sigh...
- functions with a single parameter that is just an on/off thing, e.g. SetVisible(true)

there, now it doesn't sound that bad, bottom line, never say never, don't abuse any technique

C# Quiz #1: overloads, strings, nullable types

2007-06-09T10:22:00.001-07:00

*This is also a test of the latest Windows Live Writer

given this class definition:

public class Foo {
public void Bar(string x) {
Console.WriteLine("string x was called");
}
public void Bar(int? x) {
Console.WriteLine("int? x was called");
}
}

what will be output to the console with the following code:

Foo f = new Foo();
try {
f.Bar(null);
}
catch {
Console.WriteLine("no method was called");
}

*update: I messed up the code while trying to upload another post, I recovered the original post from my RSS feed

Filemon saves the day once again

2007-06-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

I'm back, I had a head injury during a soccer game, I was very dizzy for over a week, but it's all good now

This time it was an ActiveX control (we're still fighting with ActiveX controls), I thought I had done everything I needed to do to get it up and working, but it would simply not load, so I loaded Filemon to see if it was even referencing the dll file, and it found two references, one to the GAC folder, and one to the program files\Internet Explorer, but no reference to where we actually copied the dll.

So I decided to copy the dll to where IE was looking for it, I copied the file to
c:\program files\Internet Explorer\
and everything started working wonderfully

I guess I could've added it to the GAC too, but I was very frustrated at that point since I thought I had tried that before and still wasn't working.

anyway... I guess that's another trick you can try when you have tried everything else deploying your ActiveX control, use filemon to see where IE is actually trying to load your dll from, and copy it there

and if you still don't know what filemon is, you owe it to your self, it's an amazing tool, it will save you many hours of headache (just not the ones caused by injuries during a soccer game J)

how to: fix google reader when it reports new items that we cannot see

2007-05-22T21:47:00.000-07:00

every once in a while (happened to me twice today) google reader (for different reasons) reports that we have new (unread) items, but we cannot see them (because they don't really exist), to fix this problem simply
- click "all items"
- click "mark all as read"

GPS mobile phone tracking system, track any cellphone, anywhere

2007-05-22T21:28:00.000-07:00

wow... Found this via Aldoara, you thought cell phone tracking was only possible in the movies?... go check it out

.NET user control not loading under https

2007-05-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

keywords: .net user control, activex, ocx, IE7, IE, https, http, secure

Justin and I just had a heck of a week fighting ActiveX controls developed using C# in .NET 2.0, so we will be blogging about some of the issues that we found and their solutions (so we can remember later), the first one is about ActiveX controls running under https.

We developed our control, everything was fine, one of our clients wanted to try that over a secure site, so we said no problem... until we tried, and tried, and tried, and nothing worked, the control would just not load.

the solution ended up being really stupid (as is usually the case); when you include your control, you usually do something like this:

<object id="someId" classid="SomeDll#Namespace.ClassName"></object>

that's the way you'll find it in all the examples around the web, and that will work just fine (once you get past all the other stuff that is required to make it work) under http, but when you move that to https, it will simply not work.

the solution?

when you create your control, you assign a guid to it

[Guid("CAE67AEA-F489-4e52-956B-CCC774F40A3A")]
[ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.None), ComSourceInterfaces(typeof(IControlEvents))] // --Expose events
[ComVisible(true)]
public partial class MyControl : UserControl...

something like that...
well, to make it work on https, you simply have to use that GUID, not the class name, so you would just write this on your html code

<object id="someId" classid="clsid:CAE67AEA-F489-4e52-956B-CCC774F40A3A"></object>

done, hope we saved you hours of headache

(humor) I'm a programmer...

2007-05-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

a little humor

one hour of timezone difference doesn't always mean one hour of time difference

2007-05-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

this is one of those "why didn't I know that?" stupid little things...

this caught me off guard as I was traveling, I went to a city that I knew was under the next timezone, so I adjusted my cellphone, but the time didn't change... I got confused for a little bit, then started changing to other timezones just to realize this fact

after that I verified the same behavior on my PC, if you still don't believe it you can try right now, switch your pc to different timezones, and you'll see the time changing unexpectedly

e.g. the actual time is the same at
(GMT-07:00) Mountain Time (US & Canada) and
(GMT-06:00) Central America

I know of at least one application where this actually causes a problem...

how to: easy way to see the methods and properties exposed in a TLB file

2007-05-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

...just drag and drop the file in Visual Studio (at least in VS2005 it works), it will add it to the object browser and you can expand it to see it's methods and properties full definition

igoogle broken... again

2007-05-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

a few days ago I saw that the google personalized pages (now called IGoogle) was broken, but mine was fine, so I laughed at all of those souls (just kidding), but today my igoogle is broken! aaarggh, nothing works, I can't minimize/close any gadgets, the gadgets are there but don't display anything, I can add new ones but they don't work

sigh...

fix your mom's computer for mother's day

2007-05-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

I thought this would be all over the blogosphere by now, but is not, and I thought it was a good idea, this comes from Joel Spolsky

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.

for those of you who may not know, copilot is software that allows you to connect remotely to any computer, you don't have to worry about firewalls, etc, it just works

check it out

ActiveX control to load PNG files in IE7?

2007-04-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

I just saved this SilverLight poster to my local machine and tried opening it with IE7; I was greeted with this message. I was surprised but I clicked on it to activate it, only to get this error message:

WOOT!?

Windows.Vista.Downgrade();

2007-04-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

my main reason to downgrade my laptop OS is because my Cingular 8125 won't work as a modem in Vista, and I really can't live without that now, which is the same reason (or so the rumors say) I won't be getting an iPhone when it comes out, being able to use my cell phone as a modem and have internet "anywhere on the road" (at least in USA) has been really great, I can't go back to not have that

other reasons are the many problems with VS2005 and Orcas on Vista, I really want to play with F# and don't want to deal with a beta product in a buggy IDE, yesterday Justin and I were playing with F#, expect posts on the subject soon

downgrading has been painful because XP didn't recognize a lot of the hardware, whereas in Vista everything just worked, for now I'm still keeping Vista on my PC though... XP feels old, but it works

burning iso images to cd / dvd in Windows Vista

2007-04-28T18:22:00.000-07:00

for my own reference and to help anyone out there looking for this
took me a while to find it because I was looking for "burndvd"... arrgh
keywords: cdburn, dvdburn, burn, rktools

you can use the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, after you install this kit, you will get a couple command line utilities under c:\program files\windows resource kits\tools\

cdburn.exe
dvdburn.exe

usage:

cdburn image

yahoo mail acting funny...

2007-04-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

sigh...

...the attach files button doesn't work either

Oracle sucks, part 2 of 1000: setting variables

2007-04-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

you don't use SET to set variables values
SET variable_name = value;

this will give you a "ORA-00922: missing or invalid option"

you set variables Delphi style

variable_name := value;

Oracle sucks, part 1 of 1000:executing queries vs scripts

2007-04-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

I just have to blog this to remember in the future, and hopefully blog about other countless issues with Oracle

This applies to running multiple statements to create functions, views, etc

When running as a query:
when creating or replacing functions, include ";", at the end, then a "/" on the next line
when creating or replacing views, don't include the ";", but include "go"

otherwise you'll get things like
" Warnings: --->
W (1): Warning: execution completed with warning
<--- "

"[Error] Script lines: 639-664 ----------------------
ORA-06575: Package or function FUNCTION_NAME is in an invalid state"

and your functions/views won't be modified

when running as a script, everything needs ";" at the end

Deploying .NET 2.0 security settings without SDK or caspol

2007-04-19T09:52:00.000-07:00

This article applies to Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Security
keywords: CAS, full, trust, assembly, security, policy, mscorcfg.msc caspol.exe

When you want to adjust the security settings in .NET 2.0 you use the mscorcfg.msc tool (Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration)

However sometimes in a production environment you might need to do the same thing in a bunch of machines, and the problem is that the mscorcfg.msc tool is only included in the SDK which is over 300 MB, another option is to use the caspol command line, but that will scare most people away, there are a lot of people having this problem, so I thought I would post an easier solution here.

I lied on the title of the article, you do need to the SDK, but only in one machine, since you are a developer (right?) I suppose you have Visual Studio, and that includes the SDK, if you don't have the SDK installed on any machine, then you need to download it and install it at least on one machine.

Once you have that you can use the mscorcfg tool, setup the machine with the permissions that you want, trust assemblies, adjust zone security settings, etc, then when you are done, use this option

Configure Code Access Security Policy

Create Deployment Package

you will see a new dialog, which doesn't have many options

this dialog is a bit weird and buggy, but all you have to specify is a file name in some valid folder, for example c:\SecuritySettings

the other thing you might want to change is the security policy level to deploy, if you are deploying to production machines you might need Machine or User
click Next, then finish.

What this little wizard does, it creates a package with all the security settings on that machine, and puts it in a simple small executable program that you can run in any machine to adjust the security settings to match that machine.

now all you need to do, is take that file to the machines where you want to deploy your new security settings, run it and you're done

When you run the file you are naturally tempted to wait for a dialog to come up and ask you to click next, next, next, finish, but no dialog will pop up, you'll see it flash for a second and then it will dissapear, that's all it does (you might need privileged rights to run that file), if you were able to run that file, the security settings have been changed.

now if "it works on my machine!", you can make it work in other machines too =o)

Everything you ever wanted to know about .NET garbage collection

2007-04-19T07:34:00.000-07:00

or almost everything on garbage collection, the related CLR and BCL, you will find it on Chris Lyon's blog, I found his blog and read it all yesterday, I'm still digesting some of it, a lot of good stuff, I had to include most of his blog entries on my link blog

everything you blog can and will be used against you

2007-04-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

At some point or another almost every blogger writes a controversial article, some bloggers do it so frequently that it doesn't generate that much press now.

Some will try to dictate rules for the blogosphere, that kinda defeats the purpose of the blog, I think that's just people trying to create the next buzzword or leave their legacy which translates into popularity and everything that comes with that, if you are a "z list" blogger like me, it probably won't make a difference if you post something that is incorrect.

**see notes at the end
Today I see this post from Sam Gentile: "Wanted: A Windows Edition for Non-Idiots"; my whole issue with that is calling regular users idiots; if I use the keyboard and command line a lot does that make me an advanced user and makes you an idiot because you don't?

Be careful when blogging, regardless of your blog popularity, you never know when it can be used against you (in a job* interview for example), I'm not going to recommend a code of conduct, all I'm saying is use common sense, respect your readers and respect everyone in general

* fixed: thanks Sam
** Sam updated his blog and changed the "non-idiots" part to "Power and Pro Users.", kudos to him for doing that. I've wanted to blog about this a long time ago, my whole point is just watch what you write on your blog (book, speech, etc), it may come back and hunt you later

hello world from FSharp

2007-04-14T12:03:00.000-07:00

Justin and I are beginning to play with F# (1.9.1 has been released)

open System;
Console.WriteLine("hello world");
let name = Console.ReadLine();;
Console.WriteLine("hello "+ name);
Console.Read();

we'll see how this goes, hope to blog about it soon

updated Notepad is out

2007-04-14T11:16:00.000-07:00

Notepad2 that is =o)

The most important changes in Notepad2 2.0.x compared with version 1.0.12 include support for ini-file storage of the program settings, modeless find and replace dialogs, multiline find and replace operations (using backslash expressions), optional file change notification, and many more.

There's also some regressions, i.e. ANSI code page support has been reduced to the system default, the bookmarks feature has been removed, a few syntax schemes have been dropped, and Notepad2 does no longer run on Windows 9x. If you need any of these features, you'll have to stick to Notepad2 version 1.0.12.

read the full list of new features here

if you are still using Notepad, you might want to give Notepad2 a chance, is just as light weight as Notepad, but much more powerful

no more screen saver for me, thanks McAfee

2007-04-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

I've had the BSD screen saver for a long time... is gone now =o(

is not about the pattern, it's about the practice

2007-04-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

There's a discussion going on in the blogosphere about "bashing patterns", Corneliu (parallel thinking) says:

This month seems to be the month of bashing the singletons and some of the other design patterns.

From posts like Singleton Considered Stupid to Singleton – the most overused pattern and Criticism on one the Patterns (Blog 3), the blogo-sphere is full of comments about why singleton is bad or evil.

I don't think the problem is with the use of the pattern, but with the abuse of them; but this has always been the problem in programming in general, most of the time programmers learn a few things just to "get things working", and as long as it works "if is not broken why fix it".
Is it all the programmers fault? I don't think so, I think it has to do a lot with management requesting things to be done by yesterday (bad estimates), but that's another topic which has been discussed quite a lot already

so this is not a new problem, is the same old problem (abuse of techniques) applied to the patterns, the patterns are good, the implementation may be correct, but the usage (the practice) of them is the problem

why the singleton? I think because that's one of the "easiest" ones, you can pretty much copy and paste it, you don't even need to understand the inner workings, you just know that "it will be a single instance of your class", and that's something you can't do with other patterns

we need to teach better usages, better practices.

time to update your PDF reader

2007-03-28T18:36:00.000-07:00

If you are not using Foxit reader yet, do your self a favor and download it now; now if you had used it before and you had problems with some pdf files, this is the time to give it a second chance, version 2 just came out and at least in my experience I am able to open all the files now, including those that I couldn't open before

Foxit reader is a lot faster than acrobat reader, and it doesn't install any additional garbage, is just what you would expect from a "pdf file reader"... that's what it does, and (now) it does it well

Fix RadWindow caching

2007-03-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

This article applies to Telerik's RadWindow component

This is a nice wrapper to create popups in your asp.net applications, but it has a problem; it caches it's contents automatically; it took me a while to figure it out, but you can solve that with a simple property:

radW:RadWindow
ID="WindowAttachFile"
runat="Server"
NavigateUrl="AttachFile.aspx"
ReloadOnShow="true"
Height="230px"
Width="410px" Modal="true"

hope this is useful for any soul out there

google reader is being updated... scary

2007-03-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

They've changed some links to buttons and stuff and I just realized that I have so much stuff in google that "one day without google" would put me behind in a lot of things

programming with a mouse considered harmful

2007-03-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

I had a hard time deciding if the title should be "programming with a mouse considered harmful" or "real programmers don't use a mouse"; but I think you get the idea

I'm mentoring a guy right now, and he started using the mouse to move around in the code, I told him

"don't use the mouse, that's a bad practice"

It doesn't matter how many years you have been programming, if you use the mouse, you are implicitly slow, you can do things at least twice as fast using only the keyboard.

leave the mouse for things that you don't usually do, but for everything that you are doing in code there absolutely no reason to use the mouse; if you are new to programming it should be a lot easier to learn to use all the shortcuts, if you have been programming for a while is definitely harder (and you probably think you're better off without them at this point) but you would definitely increase your programming speed

I am known for being pretty fast (and they say I'm cocky for that matter), but one of the main reasons I'm fast is because I learn to use the shortcuts, I had a hard time switching from Delphi IDE to VS, but I did it without remapping the keyboard to use "Delphi IDE style", I think it's a bad idea to remap the keyboard to your specific style, specially is you do some type of pair programming (you are doing paired programming, right?)

you don't have to learn all of the shortcuts available, just the ones for all the little tasks that you do commonly when programming

use the keyboard, program faster

let's all just develop ASP.NET in notepad / is not about the tools

2007-03-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Jeremy Miller started a conversation on .NET testability (or the lack there of), Ayende agrees with him

I can definitely see this, I have suffered from this... but!

I don't think the problem is with the tools, in any case the problem would be of the TDD community, Ruby on Rails is open source, why can't we create asp.net on steroids?
seems like we know exactly what we want, the concept is there, the code is there, just needs to be implemented in .NET

there was a provocative comment to Jeremy's post:
"What if I want RAD and I don't want tests?"
there are some strong arguments against this, but the truth is for most developers that's all they want

everyone can say X sucks, Y in this other language is much better, why can't we say let's create Y for asp.net?

would people really use it? or is this just a TDD religion thing? (I'm gonna get in trouble for this)

I'll tell you what, that's exactly the reason why Microsoft didn't put something like that in ASP.NET, TDD advocates are not the broad audience, the majority of the "developers" don't really know or care about TDD or refactoring or patterns and practices, they just "want stuff to work", and yes, the rest of us have to pay the price, but nobody is forcing you to use RAD if it doesn't work, you have to use the right tool.

I can agree with this:

I really think the .Net community needs to reexamine and debate the merits and appropriateness of the Visual RAD approach.

the key here is the .NET community, people keep asking Microsoft to solve all these problems, are these problems really the developer's problem? or is it just TDD community problem? how big is that community?, where is the community? why can't that community do it? let's stop blaming it on something else

is kinda late, I was just kidding with Notepad and I've just hit another trip around the sun...

what are those S-1-5... things I see on the security tab?

2007-03-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

sometimes you right click/properties/security on things like files and you see some garbled things like S-1-5-7blablabla...
They are called security identifiers (SID), I bet at some point you thought that they were just "messed up things" or garbage or something like that?

well, they actually have a meaning, here's a full list:

Anonymous Logon (S-1-5-7): A user who has connected to the computer without supplying a user name and password.

Authenticated Users (S-1-5-11): Includes all users and computers whose identities have been authenticated. Authenticated Users does not include Guest even if the Guest account has a password.

Batch (S-1-5-3): Includes all users who have logged on through a batch queue facility such as task scheduler jobs.

Creator Owner (S-1-3-0): A placeholder in an inheritable access control entry (ACE). When the ACE is inherited, the system replaces this SID with the SID for the object's current owner.

Creator Group (S-1-3-1): A placeholder in an inheritable ACE. When the ACE is inherited, the system replaces this SID with the SID for the primary group of the object's current owner.

Dialup (S-1-5-1): Includes all users who are logged on to the system through a dial-up connection.

Everyone (S-1-1-0): On computers running Windows Server 2003 operating systems, Everyone includes Authenticated Users and Guest. On computers running earlier versions of the operating system, Everyone includes Authenticated Users and Guest plus Anonymous Logon.

For more information, see Differences in default security settings.

Interactive (S-1-5-4): Includes all users logging on locally or through a Remote Desktop connection.

Local System (S-1-5-18): A service account that is used by the operating system.

Network (S-1-5-2): Includes all users who are logged on through a network connection. Access tokens for interactive users do not contain the Network SID.

Self (or Principal Self) (S-1-5-10): A placeholder in an ACE on a user, group, or computer object in Active Directory. When you grant permissions to Principal Self, you grant them to the security principal represented by the object. During an access check, the operating system replaces the SID for Principal Self with the SID for the security principal represented by the object.

Service (S-1-5-6): A group that includes all security principals that have logged on as a service. Membership is controlled by the operating system.

Terminal Server Users (S-1-5-13): Includes all users who have logged on to a Terminal Services server that is in Terminal Services version 4.0 application compatibility mode.

Other Organization (S-1-5-1000): Causes a check to ensure that a user from another forest or domain is allowed to authenticate to a particular service.

This Organization (S-1-5-15): Added by the authentication server to the authentication data of a user, provided the Other Organization SID is not already present.

that's it! now you still don't know what they are because you didn't read this thing, but you have a reference that you can keep in your bookmarks

dude!, I'm not getting a dell, I'm getting a Mac

2007-03-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

and one of the main reasons why is parallels. We have seen virtual machines in all the operating systems for quite a while now, where the guest operating system sits there in it's own window.

Parallels takes this to a whole new level, it allows you to integrate the Mac and the guest OS into the same workspace! such that you can switch applications from a Mac app to a Windows app all in the same workspace (desktop), that's amazing!

take a look at the picture to see more detail, both Mac apps and Windows apps "blend" seamlessly although the apps still live in a different OS,
The apps running in windows show up in the Mac "toolbar".
It even allows you to copy and paste between the two (and according to Justin you can also drag and drop)

that's good software.

dude!, I'm getting a Mac... just wait 'til Leopard comes out =o)

This is what happens when you forget to deploy your Telerik RadControls folder

2007-02-26T09:57:00.000-08:00

This article applies specifically to applications developed using Telerik Rad Controls

I was having a stupidus momentus (tm) yesterday, I forgot to deploy the RadControls and I kept getting this error:

Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at Telerik.WebControls.RadWindowManager.BuildTemplates()
at Telerik.WebControls.RadWindowManager.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.Render(HtmlTextWriter output)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlForm.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Page.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at Telerik.WebControls.RadAjaxManager.AJAX_Page_Render(HtmlTextWriter output, Control container)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildrenInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ICollection children)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderChildren(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Page.Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControlInternal(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer, ControlAdapter adapter)
at System.Web.UI.Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter writer)
at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint)

Telerik could do better with their exception handling, but anyway... I just needed another pair of eyes to see the issue