Lazy Developer

Azure Book Reviews

Jimmy — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:06:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I've got two Windows Azure books from Apress for review and giveaway on the group meeting. In the very moment when I opened the first one I knew it will be difficult to review books about a something I don't really know that much about. Usually I would need just a few hours to say if I like a book or not but this time was different. After struggling for a few days the task started to be even trickier but on one moment I said to myself "hey! You don't know Azure so try from that perspective" and that is what I'm trying to do here.

Windows Azure Platform

Like I said, I don't know the great deal about the Windows Azure and I would like to learn not only how to write a code, but also understand the cloud. For that I found this book perfect indeed. The first part is focused on the idea behind the cloud, how to use it in the business and when to do so. It also shows what other competitors have to offer. It's very good read thought. After that the book goes deeper and deeper in the Azure, showing in the first place how to start, how Azure is organised and how to make it working. It's very good if you've never even looked there. Rest of the book is going deeply in each part of the Azure. The relation of code to text is definitely in favour of the latter and you can find a lot of explanation on how things are working that helps to understand both the concept and the code.

Introducing Windows Azure

The title is, in my opinion, a bit misleading. I wouldn't call this book an introduction and it seems to be more focused on those who either knows already something about the Azure, or just don't care in details under the hood. After a very short introduction, that takes just a bit more than two dozens of pages, the author throws you straight into the code. If one compare that with over a hundred pages of introduction in the previous book, the difference will be obvious. Does it mean this book is bad? Hell no! This book is just soaked in a code; every page is just packed with diagrams, screenshots and code samples. This is amazing book if you are a hardcore coder or if you have read the previous book and has an appetite for more.

To conclude this short review, both books are very good, both are dealing with the same technology and even examples are somehow similar. From the other angle both are very different and approach the topic from very different angles. If you know you need the cloud right now, pick up the second one and sink in the code. If you are just checking, grab the first and enjoy the whole new world opening in front of you. After that, grab the second book if you will need more.

Safe Redirect (302 Found)

Jimmy — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:33:37 GMT

I’ve just came across a question what to do if the url I wants to redirect to is invalid (server is down etc.). Obviously the redirect will fail but that is exactly what I would like to avoid. The solution is dead simple and can look like that:

        1: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

       2: {

       3:     TryRedirect(TextBox1.Text);

       4: }

       5:  

       6: private void TryRedirect(string url)

       7: {

       8:     ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback = delegate { return true; };

       9:     HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);

      10:     try

      11:     {

      12:         using (HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse())

      13:         {

      14:             if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)

      15:             {

      16:                 Response.Redirect(url, true);

      17:             }

      18:         }

      19:     }

      20:     catch (Exception ex)

      21:     {

      22:     }

      23:     Response.Redirect("Recovery.aspx?url=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(url), true);

      24: }

Of course much more can be done here. One can store recovery url in config file or have it dynamic depend on some criteria such customer name. Each failed redirection can be logged and/or reported somewhere etc. But the idea is dead simple.

ReSharper vs. CodeRush+Refactor! Pro – The Battle Begins

Jimmy — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:18:53 GMT

After Visual Studio 2010 has been released my first question was when DevExpress will release plug-in for the Beta. After few minutes with Google I found that it will not be very soon. To be more precise, I couldn’t find anything on that at all. On the other hand, I found that ReSharper for VS2010 will available in about a month. That gave me a kick to try to use ReSharper and maybe even switch over. Over next few weeks we are going to see how it will end up.

See you at DDD South West

Jimmy — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:35:00 GMT

I'm heading down to Taunton this Saturday for DDD Sout West (www.dddsouthwest.com) where I will have a session (see below). Pop in and say hello if you will be there.

Hope to see you there.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 Available for the MSDN Subscribers today

Jimmy — Mon, 18 May 2009 08:18:00 GMT

Today, May 18th, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 will Available for the MSDN Subscribers today. As GMT resident I'm waiting for someone in Microsoft to come to his/her desk and enable it. Wake up!!!

http://blogs.msdn.com/dannawi/archive/2009/05/15/visual-studio-2010-beta-1-available-for-the-msdn-subscribers-on-monday-may-18th.aspx

Geneva Beta 2 Released

Jimmy — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:42:00 GMT

Geneva Beta 2 has been released yesterday. Nothing more to add but link: http://blogs.msdn.com/card/archive/2009/05/12/what-s-new-in-geneva-beta-2.aspx

Interoperability

Jimmy — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:39:00 GMT

In a few weeks I will be giving presentation about interoperability with WCF on DDD South West. It will be my first presentation on an event bigger than a user group meeting. If any of you will be on the event please come over to say hello. Also, I'm open to any suggestions and ideas on what you would like to see.

Early morning train

Jimmy — Sat, 09 May 2009 16:37:00 GMT

Finally I have some spare time to actually sit down and write something ant even this only because I'm in the 6.48 in the morning train for London and apart of sleeping I have nothing better to do. It's been a while since my last post and I think I lost my blogging commitment somewhere. Assuming I ever had any. Anyway, that is not really relevant to what I wanted to write about.

Stroud

What is your first thought when you thing about developers' communities? Mine always was something around free t-shirts and having a fun. I still think the same way but cool and free t-shirts were recently replaced by hard work. Luckily fun is still there. Why hard work then? Well, if you are not from my area you may not know but I've started a user group and it's a whole lot of work. I've never suspected that there are so many things to do and to manage but even if I would I will do that again. It's a great experience and even better satisfaction when you see people coming over for a meeting.

Kemble

It's taking a while to write that, maybe because I'm working on my DDD presentation in the same time. Back to the user group thing. Everything really started over a year go when I thought about this for a very first time. Since then I was talking and promising that I will start one soon and those were empty promises for a long while. Finally I grabbed enough courage and determination and started. The very first thing was to have a web site. After a quick look around I decided to use the offer Kentico has for user groups which includes a free hosting. Perfect, no costs involved. After a few days of work the site was up and running. Then I had to face the greatest challenge and find at least a few members. A quick chat with my manager and all my colleagues had the group in their objectives. I'm joking of course but it's roughly how I started; by spreading the news among everyone I knew; and it worked. At this moment the counter hit over 60 members which seem to be not very bad for the area I hope.

Swindon

The very first meeting was a huge stress. Not only the meeting itself but also organisational aspects of it. I had to find a venue that would suit people from all locations around, which will have required facilities, close to a bar and cheap. Yes, money was the biggest problem I had to face and I have to admit I'm quite lucky here for my manager agreed to sponsor it. It is however difficult, especially if you don't know the area very well like me. Finally the very first meeting was a big success with 25 people, great presentations and my lack of experience and confidence. Now, when I'm close to the fourth meeting next week I feel like veteran and you know what? It feels good.

Ditcot

Over last few months I had to manage many, many things. I had to find another venue that will be cheaper, preferable free, because I couldn't assume I will always be able to pay. I had to find some sponsors to have swags to give away because people love swags. Then I had to find speakers who will come over here to show something. It's challenge and quite a lot of work sometimes but I've never regret I started. I have feeling I'm doing something good and it feels just great.

Middle of nowhere

If you are thinking about setting a group then stop and just do it. You will never regret.

First GL.net Meeting

Jimmy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:23:23 GMT

The GL.net very first first meeting will be on 25th February 2009. Two truly great speakers kindly agreed to join us. Guy will be talking about new features in C# 4 and Paul will show live coding session with Silverlight. The meeting will be held in Royal George Hotel, Birdlip, UK. If you are living or just visiting Gloucestershire then don't wait and go to the meeting page to register now.

I hope to see you there.

New User Group

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:51:38 GMT

Happy New Year!

Finally, after ages of talking about I did it as my New Year resolution. Just few hours ago, GL.net user group has been officially open. Herein I would like to invite all .NET geeks from Gloucester, UK area. Of course, anyone else is warmly welcome.

Cheers

I've seen enough

Jimmy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:04:16 GMT

Once upon the time I posted about a job opportunity here, in MessageLabs. Now, after dozen or so interviews I can say I've seen enough to post some reflections. I hope that this post will help one to get most-dream job.

Let's get started from the very first thing that recruiter will see which is CV. Since we started hiring I have seen a lot of CVs. Some of them were good, some were bad and some were terrible. So terrible that I even didn't read them in whole and today I would like to focus on that.

How long is your CV? Two pages, three, maybe even four? What about 11 (that's eleven, it's not a typo)? How one could expect any recruiter will read that? And yes, I've got one CV that was so long. Why is that important? Well, CVs are usually coming in batches of 8-10 or more. Some statistics says that average time spend on reading is about 30 seconds per CV and I have to agree with that. Your job as a candidate is to find a way to hold recruiter longer and encourage him to read your CV in details. You have just 30 seconds to say something interesting. Why then I'm talking about number of pages and not about design or visual excellence? When CV is two or three pages long I can scan through is in 30 seconds but I can't do that with ten pages. This quick scan is the very first thing recruiter will do. Just put yourself into his skin. You are sitting 7th hour of a day, you are hungry and tired and in one moment new CV arrived. What you will do when you will open it and see that it has eight pages? Will you read all of that? Will you even look onto that? I don't really think so. You will just look onto the very first page or two when you expect to see some kind of summary. For that you need just a quick look. When I'm looking onto CV (I'm not a professional) the very first thing I'm looking for is a summary. Then I will do a very quick look onto career history, looking for some key words. What if I will find that too long, too boring? I will throw it out.

Usually they are the clearest sample for those bad practices are contractors. For reason I can't fully understand they tend to write details of every project they were working on. I will analyse one example to show you what I'm talking about. From obvious reason I can't say whose CV it was. It was extreme, eleven pages long monster that I dug out from my trash by risking my life and consciousness. Let's then look what we have here. First two pages are a summary. Normally I would say summary is a good thing but two pages long? Then there are two pages of career history. Most recent, which is most important is just a name and dates. Then there are five other which some of them are just names and some has full description, responsibilities and so on. Then there are a few lines about education and hobbies. Not that bad so far? Not really because a monster is just right there – seven pages with projects descriptions without any headlines, highlight and other things that could help with killing that beast. What the hell is that? It's just seven pages of flow written in 11pt Arial. I wish no one to get that CV.

Talking about bad things would be just cruelty without showing good ones. There is good practice that CV should be two pages long and I think that makes a lot of sense. Some people will argue that they have a lot of experience and need more pages to cover everything. Let's say you are applying for .NET developer role. Technology is changing so fast, that, except some extreme cases, all experience older than 5 years is not worth anything more than being mentioned in a summary. I had CV from a candidate that spent over 10 years writing in some odd languages such as Perl and only a year in .NET. What is the point of spending four pages on full history when from .Net point of view he is junior developer with one year experience? Neither I care of Perl nor I'm going to ask him questions about that. Instead of that he should write very long experience software development, engineering or whatever. There is no need to place more than last two jobs on your CV. Everything else should be in a summary.

As for a summary, there are thousands of guides and books about how to write CV and all they are talking about how to write the summary. It should be short, clear and on the subject. There is no need to list all operating systems you know when you are applying for developer role. Take a moment to think which of your skills are relevant to the job. Don't just write everything hoping that this will impress a recruiter because it will not. The only effect you will gain will be a trash bin. Think also how to show which skills are stronger than other. You can order them but don't put years or months of experience. That is not readable. Personally I solved that problem by using "skill cloud" in the same way as we have tag clouds on our blogs.

It's the time for some summary. Your CV is your business card. People leveraged business cards to art and we should do that with our CVs. It's about how other people will see us. In the same way we will not go for interview in dirty and ragged suit why we are sending dirty and ragged CVs? I could say now that my CV is great and show it as an example but I don't want for I know it's not perfect. However I spent over 3 years polishing it and making in nice and clean. I have nice skill cloud, short objective, logos from certifications and so on. I've managed to place my whole career experience which is nearly 10 years long onto two pages. I'm proud of my CV, are you?

Disclaimer: This post strictly represents my personal views and don't reflect any policy from MessageLabs.

Working with .NET 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008 and Team Server

Jimmy — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:03:00 GMT

I was trying to write that post for so long that I've started worry that there will be new version of the Visual Studio before I will even start. Finally, I found some time and here it is.

What I'm going to write about here is how to use the latest IDE to work with a .NET 1.1 applications. Before you will start asking why one would like to do so, there is an answer: because you can. But seriously speaking, I prefer to use much more matured IDE than the very 2003 version. There is also other, even more important reason - TFS. By importing your 1.1 projects into VS2008 you can use full benefits of TFS. That is worthwhile. So let's get started.

For quite a long time I was using MSBee and VS2005 however I was not happy with that and when I advanced to the 2008 version I started looking for something else. Everything started from the great post Jomo Fisher published on his blog "Hack the Build: Targetting .NET Runtime 1.1 Step-by-Step" and later update "Hack the Build: Use Whidbey Beta2 to target .NET Runtime 1.1" where he described approach that is a way better than using MSBee. Everything was working fine except resources. Jomo uses ResGen task from devices version of the MSBuild but from some reason that seems not working for me. Finally, after some tests I found that adequate tasks from MSBee are working just fine.

Visual Studio 2008

There are simple steps how to do that:

Download and install MSBee.
Download zip file attached to this very post. Put them into your MSBuild folder, typically "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\" or "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\" if you are living in 64 bit world.
The first one CrossCompile.CSharp.targets contains all information required to build most of the .NET 1.1 projects except the web and web services which. The latter are covered by the second file.
Import your 1.1 project into Visual Studio 2008.
Unload the project and edit the project file.
In the very first line you will see:

<Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="3.5" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

Change the value of the ToolsVersion attribute from 3.5 to 2.0 so the line will looks like below. That will tell the MSBuild to use version from .NET 2.0 instead of 3.5.
<Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="2.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
Near the bottom of the project file you will find an Import tag that looks like:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />

Replace that with:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\CrossCompile.CSharp.targets" />

or with that, if you have a web project:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\CrossCompile.CSharpWeb.targets" />
Close the file and reload the project. You may have to answer a security dialog where you shall choose "Load project normally" option.
In Visual Studio 2008 go to the Configuration Manager.
Select "New..." from the dropdown under "Active solution platform".
Select ".NET 1.1" or ".NET 1.1 Web" for a web project and click OK.
Build. You can add Generics namespace somewhere and check if there will be an error if you want to ensure that everything is working fine.

That's all. Now you can use the latest VS to work with .NET 1.1 projects. Almost everything works as it should. You can run and debug, add new classes etc. You can also mix .NET 1.1 compatible and newer projects in a single solution, including test projects.

However, there are some limitations you should be aware:

Visual Studio will use .NET 2.0 template to add a new class. That means you will have to remove Generics namespace declaration from the class. One can play with templates and tweak them but I don't see that as a problem.
There is a bit bigger issue for web applications. From the same reason as above, Visual Studio will use aspx page template from the 2.0 framework which uses partial classes to separate your code from generated by the IDE. That means you have to manually tweak every page just after you added it. It's not a big problem however. My colleagues are using that method every day from quite a few months and we are fine.
Similar thing can happen when you drop control from the toolbox to a page.
I haven't done any extensive tests with forms applications and user controls. It builds but I have no idea how IDE will behave. You will have to find that yourself.

Team Foundation Server

There is not too much to write about TFS in that context. Once you create a team project and build you need to remember about two things:

Install MSBee and deploy target files on your build machine.
Remember to enter correct platform when you create new build. You can always edit TFSBuild.proj file later. Either way you should have:

<ConfigurationToBuild Include="Debug|.NET 1.1">
<FlavorToBuild>Debug</FlavorToBuild>
<PlatformToBuild>.NET 1.1</PlatformToBuild>
</ConfigurationToBuild>

And that is all. HTH.

MessageLabs is hiring

Jimmy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:48:00 GMT

MessageLabs is looking for a Software Engineer for my team based in Gloucester, UK. It's an excellent opportunity to join the best security company and become the part of the success story. Our team is group of friendly developers which are aiming to use latest technologies possible. There are a lot of challenges and exciting opportunities.

You will be mainly working on the next generation of core web services and system integration. Also I expect someone to assist me with building of our own customizable build framework based on TFS and MSBuild, and implement scrum process in the company as well. There is also a lot of work to be done in MOSS 2007. It should be obvious by now, but choosen technologies are .NET 3.5, WCF, Linq etc. I've managed to advance our development from .NET 1.1 to 3.5 in a bit over a year. If you are interested in working in environment where you can implement you ideas and bring latest techologies that is right place for you.

Sounds interesting? Please email me a CV (zskowronski (at) messagelabs (dot) net) or apply directly on www.messagelabs.com/careers. Please not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

Problems installing TFS Power Tools - March 2008

Jimmy — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 08:15:35 GMT

The new Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools, March 2008 edition, may cause 1722 error when installing. There is many possible reasons for that, however one I had can be easily eliminated.

First of all you should get log file. Easiest way is to run command line: msiexec /i tfpt.msi /le log.txt All errors that happened during installation will be logged into the file. If you are lucky enough to have the same problem (if having problems can be a sort of luck), your log file will be like that:

=== Logging started: 23/06/2008 09:06:02 ===

Error 1722.There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action DevEnvSetup, location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\, command: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv /setup

=== Logging stopped: 23/06/2008 09:06:51 ===

What you have to do now, is to run devenv /setup from command line and wait till finish. To ensure if there were no errors you can run echo %ERRORLEVEL% which should return 0. After that, you can rerun msi and this time install should go without errors. I can't guarantee that trick will do in your case as good as in mine, but it's always worth to try.

HTH

Microsoft Platform Test for Hosted Solution - Passed

Jimmy — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:40:02 GMT

Just two hours ago I finished Live Meeting session with VeriTest agent. One of MessageLabs solutions, the web service API that allows services configuration, just passed "Platform Test for ISV/Software Solutions and Hosting Solutions Competencies". I'm damn happy for that was not easy. Code itself was not a problem for there can't be any issues if it's crafter correctly. The big hassle was setting up environment that allows us to carry on test without compromising security. All that is now done and I am truly happy. And that is funny thing about that. I feel satisfaction I've never felt after writing code. That can mean two things for me. Either I'm writing a rubbish code or I'm experiencing manager level satisfaction. Hope it's second one.

Anyway, if there are any of you who are thinking about attempting one of Microsoft tests and needs some help - just let me know.