My first experience using Kindle3

September 17, 2010 Opinion 5 comments

First of all, getting goods from Amazon to Ukraine isn’t impossible

I decided to try to buy something directly from Amazon (without resending to postal), because had a great desire to own Kindle and besides it costs much less if I would buy some other e-reader here in Ukraine. Reader with same capabilities/quality in Ukraine but from other vendors costs about 300$. At the same time Kindle3 costs 139$. Of course delivering to Ukraine has its price – 20.98$.

I booked it on August 23 and have it in my hands on September 15 delivered by postal service USP. And btw time it get to deliver to Ukraine after it was shipped from America took few days!

Impression

Guys, this toy is awesome! You may know that I got sick in recent days so I lied in a bed and put few books on my Kindle. Reading is just pressure. But you will need a lot of light. Under daylight it is perfect, but when you use another light, you might need few sources working together, also it depends on the book you read, because if it is something you can increase font size you might be fine with low light.

I also tried Wi-Fi and first thing I used to see was my blog. To be honest browsing internet on Kindle is painful and also you will have to do zooming often.

Picture above was added after this post has been posted.

File Formats

Since this is my first e-reader I will not be able to accurately compare it with others, but I’ve seen a lot of other and do not see if they could be better. The most used argument about using other readers was ability to read other formats like *.pdf and etc. So I thought it will be able to recognize only this types of formats:

Kindle (.azw), text (.txt), Mobi (.mobi, .prc).

BUT it turns out that nothing prevents you from reading PDF. But I’m not sure about other formats.

I used Caribre converter to have my books in .mobi format. So if you convert .chm file or some other well structured file you get good file in output. If you convert .pdf file what you will get depends on your pdf file. In other words tables, graphics can be shifted/moved/disaper. If your pdf is set of pictures it is useless to convert it.

Only benefit from converting I see is possibility to use different features like changing font sizes.

I used to read pdf file by changing text direction to horizontal and it works well for me. Book looks exactly as it should look. Also if you pdf file is set of pictures it will take very long (10-15 sec) to change the page on kindle.

I hope that very soon I’ll read dozen of books and will spread all the wisdom I got thanks to Kindle :)

5 comments

Book Review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

September 16, 2010 Book Reviews, TeamWork 3 comments

This is probably first book I read about management particularly in software industry. Book provides couple of very interesting ideas, that can help software projects succeed. It states, that most of the problems in projects are not related to technology, they have sociological nature. So next time you hear about some troubles within your project, that something cannot be done, or can be done but requires enormous amount of time, or that someone cannot be in time with some tasks ASK YOURSELF questions: Are you sure that each team member feels that he is part of the team? Does everyone feel himself responsible for the work he is doing? Is he/she interested in work? Does environment surrounding employee facilitate him?

Indeed, do you remember days when you were distracted too many times per day by stupid not important things and in the end of such day you weren’t able to remember what you had done? I remember when one of my team-mates complained about such situation to SM. What do you think was the response? – That it is all about time management. I would say “Yes and No”. Some workaholics hide their real efforts under what they call “time management”, but there are people who want to work only 8 hours per day and then be back at home with their family. So in their case couple of distractions per day can lead to low performance. Book gives some technics on how to decrease such situations and also how you can build team which will find their own ways to distill their work and remove all not necessary things.

In book I found one way-way too interesting experimental activity to crystallize your teams. So authors propose organizing competitions on weekend for teams (4 members) working on small project (2 people-months). During the competition you as project manager should serve them. Get them out to some extraordinary restaurant at 2 am, yeah at night! Do something that will make them feel your care. In the end there should be lot of winners in different nominations.

This was expensive experiment, but book also proposes other expensive events like flying with whole teams to other countries on the company day for example. I heard about such entertainments at least in two Lviv’s companies. They are now proud of that.

Have you ever heard about black testers team dressing black clothes and making all developers scared, because they will definitely find tonnes of bugs in their programs? No? Except of this there a lot of very interesting examples of how something can be self-organized to reach highest performance and results without managers boring decrees.

Book will bring to the table a lot of interesting facts and ideas about Peopleware. And I would highly recommend to read it to have better understanding of what really has impact on your team progress.

<br />

3 comments

My Company-Wide presentation on Domain-Driven Design

September 14, 2010 DDD, Presentation, PublicTalks No comments

So, last week I was asked to talk on the Domain-Driven Design for the whole company. I was really pleasant for being asked for this and not vice versa. Often guys schedule such meeting because they need it to fill-in one of the requirements for the promotion. (Ok, I delivered many presentation, and some of them were counted as Company-Wide).

View more presentations from Andriy Buday.

Tuesday, Presentation for Main Office

Whole night before presentation I spent reading some awesome articles on DDD and really enjoyed it. That leaded to 4 hours of sleep. Also I took some anti-cold medicine with paracetamol, like on the picture below:

Rule of the presenter, you probably have never heard about:

Sleep well before you presentation day OR be double-triple prepared
Never-never take medicine that plays some role on human psychological properties

I was losing control while delivering presentation. That is complete crap, you cannot imagine. In the middle of presentation I did not even know what happened few moments ago and I was needed to overplay pretending that I see slides for the first time. It was hard to talk and I tried to play more with audience. Was really nice that I got one or few really knowledgeable attendees who knew everything.

Feedback that I got from this office is like 4.5 out of 5, in details my knowledge of topic and presenting was ok, but something was not really up to their expectations.

I would like to mention about guys who were very kind and took me to the Main Office in 15 minutes after I left English class. I appreciate this very much. Thank you!

Wednesday, Presentation for Dev Centers

Next day almost in the evening (6:30 pm) I had to provide presentation to dev centers through phone connection. This time I was sitting in char and was relaxed, so it was easy to speak. But it is quite hard to keep contact with the audience. They all were in different cities. What is going on in Sevastopol, and does Rivne hear me well.

Did not get official feedback from them. None voted :(

Thursday, Presentation for Lviv2 Office

This delivery was the best, since I by intent slept well and the whole atmosphere in the office is very familiar for me. Only one drawback – about 12 developers attended this session and I expected much more in Lviv2 office.

And feedback that I got here is just awesome. 5.0 out of 5.0. Rehearsing is really cool toy for speakers. Imagine, all my capabilities has improved in 2 days significantly in eyes of listeners, but in fact I did not even read any word about DDD in this time span.

No comments

IT-Jam 2010 Kharkiv

September 13, 2010 IT-Jam, MEF, Presentation, PublicTalks 4 comments

So, that have happened: I visited Kharkiv and I spoke on Managed Extensibility Framework at IT-Jam conference.

IT-Jam

So the whole conference was divided into many sections in which of them Speakers, like me, talked on different stuff. Sections were: (.NET), (Databases, Management), (Mobile, WEB), (PHP, QA) and they were located on 3rd floor (see picture below).

(Yeah! Really lot of Open Space)

Except of the regular speeches in Open Space sections, there was a huge showroom, were Guru, as they call them, were talking:

As I read from other blog posts this year it was first year, when IT-Jam had separate section for .NET and I should be proved that I took part in it.

So the agenda for .NET section:

Viacheslav Agafonov – Visual Studio 2010 new features,tips and tricks
Dmitriy Maleev – Parallel extentions in .NET 4.0
Andriy Buday – Managed Extensibility Framework
Krakovetskiy Aleksandr – Building rich data-driven applications with ASP.NET Dynamic Data
Andrey Kasha – Data Visualization in Silverlight
Sergey Lytai – Performance Silverlight application on Windows Phone 7
Roman Yakimovich – Web-projects competitive analysis: cheap and cheerful

My presentation

Since I was speaker I did not leave my .NET section till my delivery, so I listened to Viacheslav and Dima. Both presented very well. Dima made the whole public laughing by using jokes with mentioning Kharkiv’s governor and organizers of the IT-Jam.

My time. I plugged in proector and it turned out, that my resolution has significantly decreased. Was needed to move to “Full Screen” mode in VS and making sure that other tools I’m using fit well. My presentation was more about writing code then about showing slides and talking around them.

Here is presentation itself:

View more presentations from Andriy Buday.

In first demo I wrote ever simplest console application, you probably saw in many introduction videos on MEF.
Second demo was dedicated to demonstrate features of the MEF, like Laziness, Recomposition, Metadata. So I built simple WPF (maybe my second WPF app, after VS plugin) and plugin functionality. Each plugin was able to provide simple string. Here I mentioned one of the teachers on first courses in Lviv University. She used to write “Hellow Word!” :) on the board. So I was needed to implement new version of plugin (Metadata) and reload it (with Recomposition, for example). Guys, who studied there do you remember?

In the end I got many-many questions. It was just question-storm. Wow! I really liked it. Just presenting is very simple, but being able to answer for all questions is something where you should be additional prepared.

Parts Lifetime Question

There was one question where I answered not completely correctly. Question was: “Does CompositionContainer keep references to the parts it clued together.” I answered that yes. But correct answer is not that trivial. MEF is smart enough to keep references only to things that are shared and do not implement IDisposable. You can read in details here. I hope that guy will take a look at my blog and will get correct answer. I really worry about my reputation as public speaker.

As I counted up to 70 people were listening to me and this is the biggest audience I ever had. Hope that number of readers of my blog will increase. Cannot check it right now, since I’m now in train and out of any acceptable connection.

THANK YOU ALL!

Thanks to organizers everything was on the top of people expectations. They managed to host 1200 attendees and make everyone happy. Plus to organizing conference they prepared free food everywhere and party for the evening. They made IT-Jam awesome kick-ass cool event!

Kharkiv

Next day I had great time in Kharkiv, I will probably put link [here] to the blog post of my girlfriend very soon. Really enjoyed its monuments (except of “red star” kind), a lot of fountains, great zoo, cable way and other see-sights.

4 comments

Speaking on MEF at the IT-Jam, Kharkiv

September 9, 2010 Events, MEF, Presentation 5 comments

I’ll be speaking in Open Space Discussion at IT-Jam in Kharkiv this weekend.

So here is the road I will have to take to get there:

For some reason Ukrainian flights are way-way to expensive and therefor not acceptable by most of the people here. Even more this infrastructure is not really developed to be able to provide good services.
That is why I will have to spend 18 hours only for one way trip (>1000 km). At least I’ll have few friends with me and paper book to read.

Since it is far from Lviv and event is only for one day I’ve decided to stay there for one additional day and go out sightseeing.

Aha, almost forgot, I’ll be speaking on MEF:

After I’m back I will definitely post something about this event.

5 comments

Continuous Integration – Test Environment

September 4, 2010 CI, Environment, UnitTesting 6 comments

Couple of days ago I’ve been on CI seminar, where guy had been talking about concepts of the Continuous Integration and at some moment mentioned about testing environment and it suddenly dawned upon me and I would like to share my thoughts on this.

Two of many concepts of the CI are:

Have repository with all needed to build product on the virgin machine using command line.
Unit Tests, Integration Tests and Deployment should run on environment similar to production.

Feel the difference?

Ok, why do I ask about this?
Maybe a week ago we’ve moved to approach that builds sources and runs unit tests on absolutely virgin machine. Simply saying, nothing is installed into GAC, except of maybe .net framework. Everything needed we take from library folders under source control. And I agree that is really good thing. Compiler is also ok to build projects when they have reference only to root assembly in folder of other assemblies of some particular component. BUT, when you execute your code (run tests) CRL tries to find assemblies in execution folder and then in GAC. Since we have nothing in GAC, we should ensure that everything gets copied to execution folder, and here we dive into issues.

Fixes

In case of simple referencing this is not a big issue. You just should be as a spider and catch what is missed on enigma CI build machine. In some cases this is very trivial – you see System.IO.FileNotFoundException, in other cases it is not obvious.

Interesting trick

Here is one of tricts that we were needed to apply to make UT happy:
Since dll-s like sqlceme.dll are part of SQL CE, but are not CLR dlls we cannot reference them. So we add them as link in your project and then change Build property to “Copy Always” to have them in bin.

There were some other tricks we were needed to try. They are simple, but there are many.

Main Question is still remaining

All that is not main intent of this post. Main is this: Do I really need to do this. Why is this correct?

And if we are so dedicated to CI, then I would like to know also what are we testing? That our code is able to run even if none of 3rd party components are installed?

I still have some doubts, maybe I’m wrong. I would really appreciate any of your thoughts, comments that will help me figure it out and find the right way.

For fun (but maybe will get lucky) I also asked Martin Fowler in twitter:

6 comments

Developing Plugins for Visual Studio 2010

September 4, 2010 MEF, VS2010 1 comment

As you all may know Microsoft committed some efforts to make VS2010 easy to extend. Extensions are built upon Managed Extensibility Framework, which has been shipped in .NET Framework 4.0. If you haven’t heard about it go and check it out on codeplex mef web page or either read my quick article on it.

Visual Studio 2010 SDK

In order to build you first extentions to VS you will need to download Visual Studio SDK
Download Visual Studio 2010 SDK

After you have installed it under New Project -> Other Project Types you will see Extensibility, which leads you to this list of project types:

Add-in Project

If you selected Add-in project it will lead you to nice wizard, which will ask you if you want to have your AddIn in Tools menu if you should like to start it on the start of VS and what are about information. After you finished with wizard you will get project structure similar to this:

What is interesting about this Add-in project?

Connect class

First of all you get Connect class with provides you with basic method within which you can push in your logic. I put MessageBox.Show(“Hello World!”); under Exec() method.

Extensibility configuration

Also you have two xml bases fixes which are describing your plugin. One of the is located inside of your folder and another one lives somewhere like: C:UsersandriyDocumentsVisual Studio 2010AddinsAndriyAddIn – For Testing.AddIn

F5

When you hit F5, accordingly to project properties, it fires devenv.exe with key /resetaddin AndriyAddIn.Connect.
/ResetAddin Removes commands and command UI associated with the specified Add-in.

When it is re-registering AddIn it is using Extension configuration from file which lifes in Documents folder.You can go to Tools -> Add-in Manager… and turn on/off you plugin.

Here it is

For some odd reason I did not find any way to change the icon it gave for my AddIn:

Anyway it works as designed – show message box. :)

I was able to put my logo only into About section using this config:

<AboutIconLocation>D:DevelopersRoadMapRoadMap.VS2010ExtensionsMyAddin1AndriyAddInDevRoadMapToSuccess32.ico</AboutIconLocation>

Visual Studio Package Project

This time Wizard has 7 pages and it generates a huge (as for template) project:

See there MyControl.xaml? It is WPF UserControl which will be smoothly added to your Visual Studio (just like ToolBox).

To create something at least a bit useful I decided to create ever simplest RSS fetcher and use it for my blog. Being new to WPF it took a lot of my nervous to get that working. And one thought: Why did they create graphic editor for WPF. It is very hard to do something with it. XAML is way to much better choice.

So after I added some not really clear code (crappy?) like this:

            LoadRss();
            if (rssProvider.Document != null)
            {
                var entries = rssProvider.Document.GetElementsByTagName("entry");
                RssTextList.Items.Clear();
                foreach (XmlNode entry in entries)
                {
                    var displayItem = new DisplayItem(entry["title"].InnerText, entry["feedburner:origLink"].InnerText);
                    RssTextList.Items.Add(displayItem);
                }
            }

I know, I know, this doesn’t much standard rss xml, that is why my RssReader will work probably for feedburner urls. Honestly, I’m not sure about that.

Also I gave up to create binding for my ListBox as it could be preferable for WPF. I saw some ready controls for RSS reading, but hey I did it myself.

Ok. Under View -> Other Windows you will see just created Plugin window:

Finally, RSS feed of my blog inside of Visual Studio

And the whole buity of my today’s work – I can see my (or someone else post titles and by clicking navigate to web) inside of Visual Studio:

Looking forward to hear from you.

1 comment

Understanding FetchMode

August 29, 2010 NHibernate No comments

Few days ago I’ve faced with duplication of data in XML we send to vendors and it leaded my to basic understanding how fetching works within NHibernate.

Database

So to make things clear we will start with ever simplest database layout and few datarows as on picture below:

I’m using following code to test our activities.

private void FetchCustomerUseOrders(ISession session, FetchMode fetchMode)

{

var criteria = session.CreateCriteria(typeof(Customer))

.SetFetchMode(“Orders”, fetchMode)

.Add(Restrictions.Eq(“CustomerId”, 10));

var customers = criteria.List<Customer>();

Console.WriteLine(customers[0].Orders.Count);

}

It fetches Customer with passed in FetchMode and then uses Orders to examine how lazy loading works.

Then I’m calling method for each of the FetchMode in separate sessions like below: