People are not shapes on a diagram....they're people

Was listening to the Manager Tools Podcast in which they were discussing the fact that while we may plan and plan we must, the aspect of managing a project is really about the people involved. Moreover, the various diagrams that we create during the project inception and elaboration may be neat and pretty, the reality of working the steps are anything but that.

During the discussion they cited a poem from Stephen Vincent Benét entitled John Brown's Body dealing with the U.S. Civil War. Here is the relevant section:

If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares.  They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
--A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left
Of another string of blocks and crunching it up--
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way--
The General loses his stars and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block-parts.

Stifling Technological Innovation?

A straight forward post from Dave Hatter on the effects of corporate taxation on small business.

It would appear given the present political fervor of a new administration coupled with the current financial crisis that a perfect storm of over-regulation is on the horizon.

Value of Shorter Iterations in Project Management

Now with the start of the Spring 2009 term in the Business Informatics Graduate Program at Northern Kentucky University, I am taking Marketing Management and Project Management classes.

In the initial readings in the Project Management course deal with Work Breakdown Schedules, Organizations Breakdown Schedules, and Work Packages and how to best organize, monitor, and measure each step. As I read I am thinking of the value of shorter iterations within the cycles of a project.

Here is a discussion on the value of shorter iterations within software development that are in my view applicable to project management. Aspects such as more frequent feedback and a better understanding of the work package status makes shorter iterations attractive. With that said, I am sure that as the term progresses I will learn both the advantages and disadvantages to shorter iterations in project life cycles.

Simple Facebook Application

While I was off on vacation through the holidays I took an afternoon to put together a simple Facebook application in which Facebook users can display on their profile wall or box tab an English Standard Version (ESV) Bible Verse of the Day.

The application utilizes the ESV API.

Resizing an image on mouseover with Flex 2

I was updating my personal site created from Flex 2 MXML and ActionScript and needed to create hyperlinks from thumbnail images. The html markup for the image is created from content from an XML file. In the past, one had to escape html markup contained in XML elements and create a link to a larger size of the same image. In short, I was hoping to avoid that unpleasantness.

Enter the mx.effects.Resize class. Using this object you can control the resizing of an image when the user passes their mouse over the image. For example, you have a thumbnail image that you are displaying that is 150 by 150 pixels in your MXML file:

<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"
height="150"
width="150"
/>

You want to enlarge the image to a size of 450 by 450 pixels based on the action of a user. Instead of a link to a larger image, we will enlarge the image when the user passes their mouse over the image. To do this you can utilize the mx.effects.Resize class. Enter the following into your MXML file:

<mx:Resize id="resizeBig"
widthFrom="150" widthTo="450"
heightFrom="150" heightTo="450"
/>
<mx:Resize id="resizeSmall"
widthFrom="450" widthTo="150"
heightFrom="450" heightTo="150"
/>

Then, within the Image instance, modify it with the following:

<mx:Image source="yourImgPath/imgName.jpg"
height="150"
width="150"
rollOverEffect="{resizeBig}"
rollOutEffect="{resizeSmall}"
/>

Finally, recompile and you will see that when the user passes their mouse over the image it enlarges without the use of links to the larger image.

Genetic Algorithm for Network Intrusion Detection Rule Sets

This term (Fall 2008) at Northern Kentucky University (NKU), in the Data Communications & Networking class, I conducted some research for a project dealing with the use of machine learning applications for network security. Specifically, I created a genetic algorithm (GA), with the JGAP Framework, which can be used to produce Network Intrusion Detection Rule Sets.

Special thanks to Dr. Frank Braun, class professor, Dr. Richard Fox, Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Computer Science at NKU, and Mr. Klaus Meffert (soon to be Dr. Klaus Meffert) the primary author of the JGAP framework, for their assistance.

Here are the paper, presentation, and related files:
Paper
Presentation
GA Output
XML Output

Graffiti CMS C# Extended Link List

I have setup a site for a customer that utilizes the free version of Graffiti Content Management System (CMS ). The framework is great and runs pretty much out of the box on Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 framework software and runs on Windows Server with Internet Information Services (IIS). In fact, Intelligent, the creators of Graffiti state that their goal was to create an environment where users would not have to understand programming, design, and or system administration. I think they have come pretty close to achieving it.

What it meant for this client was that the setup and intial labor of the site was greatly reduced, thereby saving them money. In any event, I setup an account for the client and placed then in a manager role (which were setup and ready to go), that allows them to publish content via a handy WYSIWYG editor. One thing that the role is not able to do is to use the many widgets that are available for the site.

I posted a question on the Graffiti forum that asked is there a way to allow users in the manager role access to the Link widget where they could create links in a special area of the site where the widget is placed. I found that to date you can not. While looking I did find a widget that extends Graffiti's Widget class called an Extended Link List, that was developed in VB.Net. To better learn how to create extended widgets I ported the project to C# and posted it on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting web site.

If interested, here it is.

IT's About Business Objectives Stupid

Last term I was contacted by a professor, Dr. Kevin Gallagher, as he was questioned by a reporter who was working on a story about IT (Information Technology) programs, their variations, and how and why students pick their chosen degree program. Upon his request, I provided a short list of answers and that was that. Dr. Gallagher recently notified me about the article.

In short, the article is spot on concerning IT programs and the need of those enrolling in them to consider broader aspects of business objectives and not just technical knowledge.

Check it out.

Please skim this.

In a recent IT Conversations Interviews with Innovators podcast, the discussion centered on removing clutter from the visual field of students when training. That same morning I also listened to Scott Hanselmans’s podcast which dealt with micro-blogging. Here, the discussion utilized the metaphor of information as a river and how one deals with the torrent of news and data, specifically how one organizes it to be useful with tools such as twitter and RSS Feeds.

In both podcasts the talk touched on the issue of how possibly this instant information has made us less tolerant to large amounts of text in mediums such as books. There was also a mention of an excellent article in Atlantic Monthly by Nicholas Carr that asked the question, "Is Google making us stupid?" The question in my mind, along the same thought, is, "Does micro-blogging technologies such as twitter, IM clients, or text messaging foster a culture that lacks the ability to maintain a sustained period of attention to the formation of ideas and thoughts?"

Ironically, I used Google to find more information on the topic searching with the words, "google learning sustained thought." What I found an interesting article from the New York Times by Motoko Rich entitled, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?"

For those with diminishing attention spans I will get to the crux: some purport that digital text is read by those who otherwise would turn to the television or electronic gaming, and is therefore a gateway to more sustained reading. While that may be true, my concern is along the lines of Rich’s article:

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. "What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading," said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. "I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests."

Then, Rich’s article refers to Carr’s Atlantic Monthly piece:

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. "What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

In summary, I think that any technology that helps present, streamline, and make information accessible is good. However, what are the side effects? Good question, but now my attention is distracted and I must move on to something else.

Programming: A Social Activity

I have been listening to a weekly podcast, Stackoverflow with Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. Podcast 15 features a question that asks what the most effective code review methods are. On the podcast site, the show notes state,

Joel and I both agree: one of the most effective coding practices you can adopt on your team is interactive, sit-down-with-your-coworker code review. 90% of the things you will learn have nothing to do with the code. I believe programming is a far more social activity than most realize. If you write code, and nobody but you ever sees that code — did you really extract all the benefit from writing that code?

HEAR, HEAR!

Notepad2: A light-weight ABAP external editor

(a.k.a. Look Dr. Raghavan, no SAP environment!)

OK. It has been awhile since I have posted anything. Reason: I am heavily involved in church and family, working full-time, and going to school part-time. Enough said. Anyway, I have been taking a few SAP classes this summer as part of the Business Informatics graduate program I am in at NKU. One of the classes is an ABAP programming class.

I have to admit that after being skeptical at first, I like ABAP and its development environment. However, while still in the course, I want an external editor that I could use that color codes the syntax to make it easier to read and edit. Granted I will not be able to debug the code but it is nice to have an editor to drop code into, as I do not have to login to SAP, for a quick look.

My favorite light-weight editor is Notepad2 from Florian Balmer. Since it is open source, and I saw where others have added different language-syntax highlighting capabilities, I thought I would give it a go.

First, I downloaded the Notepad2 source from Flo’s Freeware Page and opened the C++ project in Visual Studio 2005. Then, after bombing on my first build, I read the readme file which stated to include the source from the editor that inspired notepad2, Scintilla and tweak one of the source files. After another bomb on the rebuild I set the project property to NOT embed the manifest. Then, it built.

Next, I wanted to get an ABAP lexer working for Notepad2. A quick look on Google and I found another build of Scintilla, SciTE Ru-Board Edition. Now is when the fun begins. What I essentially did was to dig into the SciTE Ru-Board source code, grab what I thought was the needed to implement the Notepad2 ABAP lexer, and then attempt a rebuild. With each attempted build I find various sections that I needed to modify within the Scintilla source code. Finally after about a dozen attempts, I had the Notepad2 project building.

Then, I wanted to update the Notepad2 Styles header and program files (Styles.h and Styles.c ) so that the color coding will work for ABAP files in Notepad2. Once this was completed, I had a light-weight ABAP editor that provided syntax highlighting for files with an ".abap" or ."abp" extension.

Finally, if you pull down the Notepad2 source from Flo’s Freeware Page, do a "diff" on the /src/Styles.c and /src/Styles.h files to see the updates. Also, to see where the Scintilla source was modified diffs should be done comparing the following files: /include/PropSet.h, /include/SciLexer.h, /src/KeyWords.cxx, /src/PropSet.cxx, and /src/StyleContext.h. I also added the /src/LexABAP.cxx file to the Scintilla source (thanks to VladVro [one of the SciTE Ru-Board Edition project owners]) as that is needed by Notepad2.

NOTE: The Visual Studio 2005 Notepad2 project and binary downloads were updated 9/18/2008 with more Object Oriented ABAP keywords.
Click here to get the Visual Studio 2005 Notepad2 project.
Click here to get the binary Notepad2 files.

NOTE: By the way, I added Scott Hanselman’s Ruby lexer to this project for Ruby file edits.

JavaScript HashMap

Okay, this is not new nor exciting but I was looking to create something like a Java HashMap or a C# Dictionary object in JavaScript. What I did find was that you can use a JavaScript Array to function as a hashmap or dictionary object. I would then use it to iterate through to do some quick client-side validation for a web page. Here is the code:

function formFieldArray(){
   var myArray = new Array(10);
   myArray['myname'] = "Name";
   myArray['myaddress'] = "Address";
   myArray['mycity'] = "City";
   myArray['mystate'] = "State";
   myArray['myzip'] = "Zip Code";
   myArray['myPhone'] = "Phone Number";
   myArray['myEmail'] = "Email Address";
   myArray['cardname'] = "Name as it appears on the Card";
   myArray['cardNumber'] = "Card Number";
   myArray['expDate'] = "Expiration Date";
   myArray['cardCode'] = "Card Security Code";

   return myArray;
}

function validateForm(){
   var theFormFieldArray = formFieldArray();  
 
   //iterate thru array and clear values
   for (key in theFormFieldArray) {
     if(eval('document.myForm.' + key + '.value.length == 0')){
       alert('Please enter the value for the ' + theFormFieldArray[key] + ' field.');
       eval('document.myForm.' + key + '.focus()');
       return false;
     }
   }

   document.myForm.action = "yourNextPage.php";
   document.myForm.submit();
}

Want to be influenced?

Caught this interesting post by Valdis Krebs on social networks and how ideas are spread within them. There has been much discussion about the "influential elite" and how, if they champion an idea, it is more probable that it will grow and gain acceptance. However, this post points to the thought that it is not so much the influencing elite who control what ideas gain intellectual and social traction, but rather the willingness to be influenced by those adjacent, in the social network graph, to the elite.

Narrative Thinking

I was doing a few days coding for a client and informed them that I only had a few more free days before starting back into a new term at grad school and that I would probably not get much done given I was still learning the e-commerce package that they were using. But in order to provide them with a deliverable I decided to record my steps and thoughts in a document in narrative form for their future information and use.

There is much discussion about narrative verses symbolic code and moving computer languages more toward a natural language. Such is the discussion about Domain Specific Languages. However, when I say narrative form I am not speaking of actually writing code but rather simple prose mixed with code as needed, to record thought processes, research findings, and general steps in a discovery process.

Here is an example layout of what I did:

Saturday, January 05, 2008
Login Test
Current Steps Planned:
I would describe the steps/tasks that I planned on taking for this date. It could include a list of items, a brief description of what is planned, etc.

Actual steps:

1. Here I would describe actual steps that I took, thoughts in the process, rationale for decisions, etc.
2. I added a check to the Customer.Authenticate method.

if (customer.ID[0].Status != Customer.Validated){
throw new CustomerException(CustomerExceptionType.NotValidated, "Customer Not Validated");
}

3. This resulted in an error when attempting to login with the userid and password.
4. ......
   

Next Steps:
Here I would describe the steps/tasks that I planned on taking the time.

What I found was this forced me to be more precise in my thinking which naturally resulted in a more precise research and coding process. I have always known that writing makes one organize their thoughts more orderly in order to communicate more clearly. However, I must say I enjoyed the controlling aspect of thinking in a narrative format. It somewhat reminded me of the Test Driven Development in which you are controlled by getting the current test you are working on to pass with the simplest code. You do not have the opportunity to thrash around or run down this rabbit trail or that. You record your processes, organizing and analyzing your thoughts as you go, making sure you are focused and productive.

Dynamic and Domain Specific Languages in a Language Tiered Structure?

In a recent post I linked to a paper that I composed for a graduate class on Dynamic Languages in software development. Today, at InfoQ there was an interesting review of a post by JRuby developer Ola Bini. In a similar view to n-tier layered architecture, Bini describes language types of static, dynamic, and domain specific in a layered fashion.

For example, in an n-tiered layered architecture you would have a presentation tier on top of a business logic tier which is over a data layer. Bini states:

The first layer is what I called the stable layer. It's not a very large part of the application in terms of functionality. But it's the part that everything else builds on top off, and is as such a very important part of it. This layer is the layer where static type safety will really help. Currently, Java is really the only choice for this layer.

This layer corresponds to the data layer mentioned above.

The next tier Bini mentions is the dynamic language layer:

This is where maybe half the application code resides. The language types here are predominantly dynamic, strongly typed languages running on the JVM, like JRuby, Rhino and Jython. This is also the layer where I have spent most of my time lately, with JRuby and so on. It's a nice and productive place to be, and obviously, with my fascination for JVM languages, I believe that it's the interplay between this layer and the stable layer that is really powerful.

In my paper that I referenced above, I discussed that Groovy has great potential given it is designed for the JVM. Here I see this corresponding to the business logic layer.

The last tier mentioned is the Domain Specific Language (DSL) layer. For a discussion on that, go here. Bini states:

The third layer is the domain layer. It should be implemented in DSL's, one or many depending on the needs of the system. In most cases it's probably enough to implement it as an internal DSL within the dynamic layer, and in those cases the second and third layer are not as easily distinguishable.

Finally, in my view, this tier corresponds to the presentation layer. In a similar manner, the business logic and presentation tiers in many applications are often tightly coupled and "are not as easily distinguishable" as they should be. In any event, Bini’s post is an interesting perspective on the use and place for both dynamic and DSL languages.

MIT’s new Open Courseware (OWC) web site

I was listening to IT Conversations earlier this week while jogging and heard the mention of MIT’s new Open Courseware (OWC) web site. After checking it out I found that OCW is a free publication of course materials used at MIT. The site provides access to course lecture notes and audio and video files, labs, and resources on a variety of subjects.

Of late, I have been diving into the business aspects of development. I must say to my shame I should have had this perspective much earlier in my career. Do not misunderstand me, I have always developed to solve a business need, but I am looking further up the value chain to explore how software applications in particular and technology in general can enhance innovation. With that said, I find OWC’s link to the Sloan School of Management providing helpful resources. For example, the reading list from the Management Information Systems: Generating Business Value from Information Technology provides a list of resources to read. One of the resources listed is an article from Harvard Business Review, October 2002, entitled Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn't Make. A quote from the article states:

Our center runs a seminar called "IT for the Non-IT Executive," and the refrain among the more than 1,000 senior managers who have taken the course runs something like this: "What can I do? I don't understand IT well enough to manage it in detail. And my IT people - although they work hard - don't seem to understand the very real business problems I face."

I want to better understand real business problems and more effectively utilize software to solve them.

Finally, while this does not present an MIT education, it does provide supplemental materials for one’s academic and professional pursuits.

Dynamic Languages and Increasing the Quality of Software and Velocity in the Software Development Lifecycle

This last semester in my Systems Analysis and Design graduate class, we were assigned to present the results of a brief research project. We were to decide the topic and then provide a written paper and presentation.

My project was entitled Dynamic Languages and Increasing the Quality of Software and Velocity in the Software Development Lifecycle. Within this project I attempted to see if the current literature showed empirical evidence that dynamic languages, particularly Ruby and Groovy, shorted the development lifecycle and increased the quality of the software application.

Click here for the paper from the project.

General Unification Theorem Proof Concerning Functional Dependencies in Relational Databases

For a problem that was to be solved in my database systems graduate class this last semester, we were asked to prove a theorem by Hugh Darwen that is known as the General Unification Theorem concerning Functional Dependencies within Relational Databases.

Click here to see the proof.

Selenium IDE HTML Compare Pattern

I was needing to test sorting for a web-based application UI this last week. What I needed to do was check that a listbox control’s account numbers were sorted in ascending order. What quickly emerged was a pattern of steps when using Selenium IDE HTML scripts to compare values.

First, get the string values to compare. Then, compare the values. You may need to parse the value as a float via the JavaScript parseFloat() function if working with decimals such as currency. If you use the eval() function (see below), you are good on comparing numbers such as integers. Finally, verify the expected outcome of the comparison.

As stated above the first thing is to get the values to compare:

<!-- get the first account number in the listcontrol -->
<tr>
            <td>storeEval</td>
            <td>var Account1 = ""; var
accountOptionList =
selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().document.getElementsByName('accountList');Account1
= accountOptionList.item(0)[1].value</td>
            <td>Account1</td>
</tr>

<!-- get the second account number in the listcontrol -->
<tr>
            <td>storeEval</td>
            <td>var Account2 = ""; var
accountOptionList =
selenium.browserbot.getCurrentWindow().document.getElementsByName('accountList');Account1
= accountOptionList.item(0)[2].value</td>
            <td>Account2</td>
</tr>

Next, compare the values and place the comparison value into a variable:

<tr>
            <td>storeEval</td>
            <td>var isLess = false; isLess =
eval(${Account1} &lt; ${ Account2});</td>
            <td>isLess</td>
</tr>

Finally, verify that the comparison value evaluated as expected (that
the first numeric value is less than the second if sorted correctly):

<tr>
            <td>verifyExpression</td>
            <td>${isLess}</td>
            <td>true</td>
</tr>

JQuery Demos

Considering that most JavaScript development deals with Document Object Model (DOM) Element collections, JQuery provides a framework that results in cleaner and more concise code.

For the documentation go here. I have some basic demos here that cover very basic AJAX and drag and drop functionality.

JavaScript Functions in Selenium IDE HTML Tests

I wanted to run a JavaScript function in my Selenium IDE HTML test. Specifically, I wanted to remove any currency symbols and commas from currency values. Here is the best way that I have found to do it.

First, declare the JavaScript function.

<tr>
<td>storeEval</td>
<td>
function(input) {var output =""; output = input.replace",","");
return output.replace("$","");}
</td>
<td>replaceText</td>
</tr>

To call the replaceText function do something like this:

<tr>
<td>storeEval</td>
<td>var parsedTotal = 0; parsedTotal =
parseFloat(storedVars['replaceText']('${Amount}')).toFixed(2);
</td>
<td>parsedTotal</td>
</tr>

Now I can use the parsedTotal value later in the test:

<tr>
<td>verifyExpression</td>
<td>${parsedTotal}</td>
<td>SomeValueHere</td>
</tr>

Adobe's Integrated Runtime - Heavenly

Back in August I attended an event sponsored by Adobe that highlighted their new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) product. The new runtime looks great but what was of particular interest at this event was the venue in which the event was held.

It was at the Bell Event Centre at the Verdin Bell & Clock Museum in downtown Cincinnati. The museum is an old church. What was cool was the majestic atmosphere that the building provided for Adobe’s informative outing. Moreover, as I sat there listening to the content of the presentation and looking up at the interior structure of the church, I could not resist the irony of the situation given the evangelism (of glad tidings for all developers) that was taking place.



As the faithful, seekers of inspiration, and the skeptical gathered the Adobe AIR clergy (team) was prepared to deliver a message of hope. The sermons (presentations) consisted of building an AIR application with Adobe Flex, HTML and JavaScript, and utilizing JavaScript frameworks in AIR applications.

The content was inspiring (informative) and Adobe’s integrated runtime shows much promise (potential). In addition to the miraculous (cool) features such as ability for JavaScript developers to utilize ActionScript objects via script bridging, the sermons (presentations) contained the occasional rebuke (pokes) at Microsoft for their heretical ways (.Net platform), at which the congregation (those in attendance) responded with various utterances of “amen” (chuckles and head nods).

Although I left the service (event) unconverted from my agnosticism (the belief that no one technology can meet every business need), I was inspired to look to the holy city (Adobe) for more revelation (documentation) to see how AIR could potentially be the way (an answer to a business need).

Confession: You know I have to admit that I had fun with this one.

HTML ListBox Quick Item Select JavaScript

It has been awhile given that I have been busy at work and also started a graduate business informatics program. Anywho, a customer recently requested a way to select an HTML Listbox control and key in an account number and have that number be selected as they were entering the perspective number.

A coworker and I came up with the following. The referenced JavaScript file is here.

The trick here was utilizing the onkeyup event. The entered text is appended to a string that is compared to the listbox content. If there is a match, it is added to an array of matched items. On each onkeyup event, the first matched element in the array is selected in the listbox control. If the listbox loses focus, then entered string is set to an empty string.

Polyglot Programming?

Neal Ford argues for understanding and utilizing various languages based on business need. a.k.a. Use the right tool for the job!

When discussing using multiple languages many would say, "That's crazy talk!" However, Ford points out that we are already polyglot programming. We are using Java, XML, SQL, and JavaScript. Moreover, the learning of different languages help us think more broad about business problems.

Will have more coming on dynamic languages such as Groovy, which runs on the JVM. In a recent post I show a test drive of pre-alpha release of IronRuby (Ruby on the .Net CLR).

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas.
Harold Abelson

Test Drive with IronRuby and System.Windows.Forms

Per Scott Guthrie’s blog I was inspired to take a look at IronRuby. Even though it is in pre-alpha, I could not resist given the appeal of Ruby with the rich libraries available in the .Net framework.

After building the IronRuby solution, I took the rbx.exe, along with the related assemblies, and dropped them into a new folder. Here is a look at the folder content.




I then created a file named example.ir.




Next, I ran the IronRuby exe with the new file.




This resulted in the window below.




After clicking the Click Me button:




On a side note, the shot above of the example.ir file is from Notepad2. The syntax highlighting, even with an .ir extension, is from changing the custom scheme in Notepad2. Look at a previous post to see how to change the schemes for syntax highlighting. If you want a build of Notepad2 with Ruby syntax highlighting, go to Scott Hanselman's blog for the build and source code.

Notepad 2 for MXML and ActionScript 3

I was looking for a way to get color coding, for my favorite lightweight code editor for Windows, Notepad2, for Flex 2’s MXML files when I came upon Josh Tynjala’s blog entry on how to enable color coding support for ActionScript 3 files.

Since MXML files are XML they can use the same color coding syntax information. Here’s what you need to do to enable support for MXML files (or any other file type for that matter).

1. Click on the View menu and choose Customize Schemes….
2. Choose the XML Document type.
3. In the input that contains xml;xsl;svg;xul;xsd;xslt;axl;rdf;vcproj;manifest, add ;mxml to the end. Note the semi-colon.
4. Open an *.mxml file to see the wonderful color coding.

CAPTCHA (a.k.a Are you man or machine?) to reCAPTCHA

We have all been to sites where we have to type in a word or phrase that demonstrates that we are not a spider or spam bot but a human attempting to access a page or purchase an item. When you look at the word or phrase it looks like a warped rendering with distorted letters. The program that provides the fuzzy looking words is called CAPTCHA. According to recaptcha.net, “The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo.”

I always understood the funky phrase or word was to stop Optical Character Recognition systems from deciphering them, submitting the words back, and falsely validating itself to as a human being. While it does that, recaptcha.net wants to use that few seconds of human effort of typing in the words into a textbox for noble purposes.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

To help with this go to http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html. Moreover there is an API at http://recaptcha.net/apidocs/captcha/.

Hey, in about 30 seconds I helped digitized five words!

There's a new, well kinda new, user group in town

The XP Cincinnati group has now "polymorphed" into the Agile Round Table. Check it out!

The Selenium storEval Method in Action

I was creating Selenium tests for the module on a J2EE app at work and noted that the requirements wanted the beginning and end dates in the search text boxes to be the current date. I then thought, "Hmmm, these tests will be run on various dates. How can I get the current date to validate that the current date, in a specified format, is entered into the beginning and end date textbox entries for a search query?"

A little digging on the OpenQA site in the reference for Selenium and I found the storEval method. According to the reference this method, "Gets the result of evaluating the specified JavaScript snippet. The snippet may have multiple lines, but only the result of the last line will be returned." That was just what I needed.

Here is where the method is used in the test that is stored in an HTML file:

<tr>
<td>storeEval</td>
<td>var d = new Date(); var mday = d.getDate();
var mmonth = d.getMonth() + 1; var myear; if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft
Internet Explorer') {myear = d.getYear();} else {myear = d.getYear() + 1900;}
if (mday.toString().length == 1) { mday = '0' + mday; } if
(mmonth.toString().length == 1) { mmonth = '0' + mmonth; } todaysDate = mmonth
+ '/' + mday + '/' + myear;</td>
<td>todaysDate</td>
</tr>
<tr>

Note that the todaysDate variable above is passed the formatted current date. I then use it later in the test to assert that this is what is entered into the beginning and end date text boxes.

<tr>
<td>verifyValue</td>
<td>searchBeginDate</td>
<td>${todaysDate}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>verifyValue</td>
<td>searchEndDate</td>
<td>${todaysDate}</td>
</tr>

Selenium IDE with an XPath Locator

We are beginning to use the Selenium IDE at work to do some UI based testing. One thing that I wanted to test is the sorting of columns in a table.

Here is how I did it.

Dreaming in Code Book Review

Just finished Scott Rosenberg's book entitled, Dreaming in Code. The subtitle: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software summarizes this interesting work.

Unlike other tech related books this was composed by a journalist that kept the book moving and informative, all the while viewing software development from an entertaining, fresh perspective.

I highly recommend this book for not only software developers, but for those who work with them. Project managers, software testers, program managers and the like will benefit from the view point of a man who watched the unfolding of the Chandler open source project for a three year period.

As the book details, software is hard:

Why is good software so hard to make? Since no one seems to have a definitive answer even now, at the start of the twenty-first century, fifty years deep into the computer era, I offer, by way of exploration, the tale of the making of one piece of software -- a story about a group of people setting their shoulders once more to the boulder of code and heaving it up the hill, stymied by obstacles old and new, struggling to make something useful and rich and lasting.

Ubuntu Desktop in Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007

I pulled down Microsoft's VPC 2007, which is free, a few weeks ago and have been using it on my Windows XP workstation and laptop. I even have a VPC machine with Vista and Office 2007.

I setup the VPC machine with Vista and then created a copy of the VPC to test drive. This enables me to play with it, and even break it with no issues. If I mess it up I just make another copy of my master VPC and go at it again. This is great for development and testing.

I even got the Ubuntu Desktop on a VPC machine thanks to a blog post from Arcane entitled Installing Ubuntu 6.10 on Virtual PC 2007 Step by Step.

OpenID - open, decentralized, free

I was listening to Scott Hanselman's podcast where he featured OpenID - an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

In a previous show he discussed identity and Microsoft's CardSpace and in this podcast, mentioned that Microsoft is collaborating with OpenID.

All I can say is get your's today!! Open, decentralized, free--why not!

NSpec: .Net's Behavior Driven Development Tool

I had stated in a previous post about the advantageous of Behavior Driven Development with Ruby and RSpec. Here I am looking at NSpec, an open source tool from Tigris.

Go here to find out more about NSpec.

Setting up menu items in Ubuntu's Edgy Eft build

Have I said lately that I really like Ubuntu!?! What a great Linux distro that makes it easy enough so that the Linux novice can now use Linux on the desktop.

Anyway, I have a brief article on how to setup a menu item in the Edgy Eft build of Ubuntu.

An Open Source Team

As I have moved from the .Net team (yet I still have .Net apps I am modifying in my own small business) to the J2EE team at work (day job), I have been busy learning more about the commercial financial software we sell and the inner workings of J2EE.

One thing I am thankful for is a group of co-workers who do not hold their knowledge close to themselves but are ready and willing to share and teach. When I have a question, they are helpful and provide the needed information. Moreover, they have an array of tips and tricks that they provide.

That is the core of a successful team. When members understand that by sharing information, they open themselves up to receive more knowledge. It has been my experience that the more knowledge I share the more I learn.

A GoDaddy Ready MySql.Data.dll for .Net 2.0

In a previous post, I discussed how to build a MySql assembly to use with .Net 2.0 hosting on GoDaddy.com.

A blog reader, Bill Clark, recently asked me if I could post the assembly that I created for others to use.

Here you go.

The file includes the compiled (specifically for GoDaddy) MySql.Data.dll assembly that you will reference. Also included in the zip is ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.dll assembly that is referenced by the MySql.Data.dll assembly.

Dynamic vs. Compiled Languages

I was doing my usual run this morning listening to my IPod shuffle when on came a particular podcast that I enjoy called Hanselminutes. The host of the show, Scott Hanselman typically has great discussions on all things ASP.Net and sundry other topics.

This show dealt with a discussion on Dynamic vs. Compiled Languages with a particular emphasis on the advantages of Ruby.

The show also details the values of Test-Driven Development and the next rev of C# with more potential dynamic language features.

Is Untested Code the Dark Matter of Software?

According to Cedric Beust's blog, untested code is the dark matter of software. I like this analogy. Just what is dark matter? Wikipedia states:

In cosmology, dark matter refers to matter particles, of unknown composition, that do not emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation (light) to be detected directly, but whose presence may be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter such as stars and galaxies.

I find it interesting that just like untested software, dark matter has observational evidences such as gravitational effects on galactic motion but we really do not fully know what it is. Our calculations detect its presence, but due to obvious limitations, we lack the current ability to conduct extensive empirical investigations. Similarly, in software development, (not because we can't do extensive test but because we won't) we will run limited tests on a module and observe a small scope of expected behaviors. In essence, like the observable effects of dark matter on stellar objects, we infer that the software is coded correctly because of its observable outcomes. However, if not properly tested with the array of possible circumstances the module may not function as planned.

I understand that the limitations for software programming are different than cosmological research. Shear distance and inconclusive understandings of gravitation hinder a fuller understanding of dark matter. With software development, customer expectations, unmitigated risks, and changing requirements can hinder proper developer testing and confidence. However, if we really want to, unlike the astrophysicist, we have the ability to test and empirically understand most of the potential effects of the software we write.

What do you think would become of an astronomer who had the opportunity to more closely research dark matter and did not because of time pressures at best, and laziness at worst? Now that matter is dark.

Microsoft's Port 25 - their Open Source Software Lab

I came across this site today. Of interest is an interview with Tim O'Reilly at OSCON 2006.

My hope is that Microsoft will support cross-platform efforts in the open source community. I am already fond of DotNetNuke, NUnit, and other open source tools that are, at least in part, supported my Microsoft for the Windows platforms. We shall see if they support Mono and the like.

Moving from Windows XP Pro to Ubuntu

I decided to take the plunge with Ubuntu on my old laptop that had Windows XP Pro installed. First I pulled down the Desktop CD of Ubuntu 6.06 ISO and burned it to a CD. Ubuntu fits on one CD-Rom disk, nice. Then after setting the BIOS settings to boot off the CD-Rom/DVD drive I inserted the CD with the Ubuntu 6.06 ISO.

After booting from the Ubuntu CD, you can test drive it to see if you want to install it on your hard disk. If so, there is a handy install icon. Select the icon, answer a few standard questions for language, timezone, userID, and password and it will install.

Then, I inserted my Linksys WPC11 wireless NIC and Ubuntu recognized it lickety split. I added my WEP settings info via the Administrator|Network tool and I was browsing.

I have to say that this was the most trouble-free install of any linux distribution I have seen. Then, with the help of the Urban Puddle blog, I was able to get Ruby, Rails, and MySql installed.

See my messing with Interactive Ruby (IRB) below on my new Ubuntu install.



Also of note was that Ubuntu was able to browse to my Windows server shares as Server Message Block (SMB) shares. I did not even have to mess with SAMBA. Sweet!!!

If you are hosting ASP.Net 2.0 on GoDaddy and using the MySql .Net Connector for MySql please read

First download the Connector/NET 1.0 installer from the MySql site (do not get the source code only download as it is buggy. The installer download contains the source also.)

After installing the MySql .Net Connector, in VS 2005 Add an Existing Project to your solution by browsing to C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Connector Net 1.0\src\ MySql.Data.csproj file.

After adding the project, open the MySql project and add the following to the AssemblyInfo.cs file in the perspective locations:

using System.Security; //added for GoDaddy Host
[assembly: AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers()] //added for GoDaddy Host

Build the project and then either reference the MySql project or browse to the new MySql.Data.dll assembly directly.

Special thanks to a post from Alek at GoDaddy’s Support team on Microsoft’s Asp.Net Forum site. Apparently, as of June 22, 2006 GoDaddy.com, "has updated the custom medium trust configuration to allow the MySql.Data.Dll to work in a medium trust environment for the .Net 2.0 development environment." He then goes on to instruct you to set the AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attribute in the AssemblyInfo file. Also thanks to others for pointing out the referencing the System.Security namespace in the AssemblyInfo file.

UPDATE: By request I have posted the compiled MySql.Data.DLL Assembly. Get it here.

The value of multiple input

I was waiting for the app I was working on to build as I was listening to an old Led Zepplin tune and started thinking, what has the great bassist/keyboard player John Paul Jones been up to? A quick Google on John Paul Jones and I found his personal site at johnpauljones.com. A quick look at the photos and I was surprised to see John in a picture with Nickel Creek band member Chris Thile, at a mandolin symposium (See the image below).



For the unacquainted, Nickel Creek is a progressive, blue grass group that many would not even label as blue grass. Any way I always read of the various blues and other world music that was the influence of Led Zepplin. I also know John Paul Jones played mandolin at least on Led’s fourth album song, Going to California. The point of this post is to be aware of the value of various influences. One should resist the temptation to limit oneself to only what is comfortable. I then thought of the literary influences that were listed by futurist Alvin Toffler in a recent C-Span interview. He spoke of a array of topics on which he regularly reads. Moreover, he explicitly stated that one needs to expand the genre and subject matter of what one reads to get a better, holistic view.

How does this apply to technology and business in general and software development in particular? One general application is that inputs of various topics helps one to better anticipate the ebb and flow of the information technology market and adjust one’s direction accordingly. Secondly, and more specifically, a broader understanding of things makes one more able to understand the various business domains for which one will have to write software solutions. Finally, the understanding of various programming languages enables one to develop a broader knowledge base by applying the concepts, idioms, and problem-solving patterns of one language to another, potentially combining the strengths of two or more languages to a solution.

Learning the Ruby Array via Specifications with RSpec

Now that I am having fun messing with executable specs let me review how RSpec helped me to better understand and use the Ruby Array.

See the code and the outcome of running the executable spec.

RSpec and the Empty Executable Spec

One great side effect of utilizing the agile approach to software design is the first thinking about, at lease as well as one can given the available information, the desired end result. This is typically started a failing test in the Test Drive Development (TDD) camp. However, the more I am exposed on RSpec the more I like the idea of design that is driven by specifications that are fulfilled in short, iterative cycles. Therefore, instead of having a "failing test" one would have an "empty executable specification." (If you could not already tell, I am not attempting to coin a new phrase. The expression "empty executable specification" is neither clever nor catchy. To be honest, I really do not know what else to call it.) In fact, it is the use of existing terms in TDD that do not really communicate the great results of TDD.

Click here for more.

Hegel's (or rather Jim Weirich's) Ruby Dialectic: the synthesis of Design by Contract and Behavior Driven Development

At a great Extreme Programmers User’s Group meeting here in Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Weirich gave a thought provoking presentation on the experimentation of utilizing the semantics of a Behavior Driven Design (BDD) and the more traditional Design by Contact (DbC) with the Ruby rSpec tool. Having come out of the VB/ASP/COM/.Net world and now working on the J2EE team at US Bank, I appreciate the semantic qualities that various languages possess and more importantly the "idioms" they teach. I agree with the classic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the language(s) you use can either aid or hinder your ability to form thoughts and even solve problems.

With that said, the potential of Jim’s experiment with BDD and DbC is rich in its bringing together two divergent methodologies into a potentially better one. The question that the experiment is attempting to answer, from my understanding of the presentation, is can the thesis of DbC and its emphasis on getting the specifications completed upfront, pre and post conditions, and assertions combined with the antithesis of BDD’s executable specifications (a.k.a unit tests in Test Driven Devlopment) and short iterations produce synthesis of the two--a clearly understood contract (or set of contracts) between customer and developer that is the requirement for a short, iterative BDD’s executable specification(s)? Moreover, are there any unanticipated results that will emerge from the experiment that can be immediately useful or spawn more questions? One might state this is similar to an "alchemist experiment to see what comes to the top of the mixture of the two elements."

In summary, after showing us his Ruby framework to support Design by Contract, Jim explicitly stated that the experiment’s result(s) are not intended to replace Test Driven Development, BDD or DbC. However, in my view, it could produce a client initiated contract that can be solved in a few iterations with BDD. Or, sticking with the previous alchemist analogy, Jim's experiment could provide some proverbial "gold from silver and copper."

Testing .Net Properties with FIT

Just got a comment on .Net and FIT from a blog reader. This caused me to remember that I submitted a proposed patch to source forge, artifact 1255429, which deals with using properties instead of member variables. The patch was submitted to source forge in August of 2005. Nothing as of this post has been done, that I am aware of, so I thought I would put it out for public consumption and comment.

In more detail, fixtures deriving from RowFixture have instantiated classes with public variables, instead of exposing the instantiated object’s members via public properties. With these modifications you can write fixtures directly against objects under test, which are typically the actual application classes, exposing properties instead of variables to the RowFixtures. This enables the .Net developer to avoid writing additional code beyond the fixture and the actual application objects under test.

Here it is.

Re-writing and copying HTML files with Ruby Refactoring

I submitted a previous post on re-writing and copying HTML files with Ruby. I could not let that rather large and unruly script go as is and had to refactor, a.k.a. extract, much of the script code out into a ruby class.

Here are the goodies.

Php 4 Quick and Dirty Model and View Separation Example

I was coding a site in Php and needed to display announcements and needed a quick and simple way to do this. Moreover, I wanted to keep the design in the good ole MVC pattern.

See how I, at least somewhat, did this here.

Re-writing and copying HTML files with Ruby

A personal goal of mine is to read through the Bible this year on a daily basis. To assist me in this I have an HTML file for each month of the year with links that call a JavaScript function passing the text-section value and then putting the value into a URL QueryString and opening a new window with the loaded URL. This worked OK but because the JavaScript opens a new window, the daily links were not showing with the visited style that I set in the CSS file. Here is where Ruby came in.

I thought about just rewriting the HTML but having to create 12 separate files, one for each month, was not what I wanted to do. Why not, as I am learning to use Ruby, use it to parse the existing HTML into a new file, a txt file in this case and then run script to rename the new into the old files, with links that use the traditional target attribute to open a new browser.

Click here to see what I did to parse the existing HTML files into TXT files.

Click here to see the copy of the TXT into HTML files.

What are we thinking?

Okay. So now you have inherited someone else’s code. You typically review the automated tests (if any), available documentation (if any), and then the code itself. It is here that at lease one person in each development group will say, “What were they thinking? This code sucks.” It is at this point that I cringe. Yes, the code may not be the most elegant. But to just simply state, in your self-proclaimed superiority, that the previous programmers were stupid is both unprofessional and short sighted. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that in the name of being nice to overlook and tolerate crappy code. My point here is that there is more than initially meets the eye.

What got me thinking about this was an article that I ran across by Dave Hunt and Andy Thomas entitled, Software Archaeology. In it the authors state:

Archaeologists generally don’t make wisecracks about how stupid a particular culture was (even if they did throw dead bodies into the only good drinking well). In our industry, we generally don’t show such restraint.

As stated above, it has been my experience that in the software development field, we are too quick to criticize. They then go on to write:

But it’s important when reading code to realize that apparently bone-headed decisions that appear to be straight out of a "Dilbert" cartoon seemed perfectly reasonable to the developers at the time. Understanding "what they were thinking" is critical to understanding how and why they wrote the code the way they did. If you discover they misunderstood something, you’ll likely find that mistake in more than one place. But rather than simply "flipping the bozo bit" on the original authors, try to evaluate their strengths as well as weaknesses. You might find lost treasure—buried domain expertise that’s been forgotten.

Therefore instead of just asking, "What were they thinking?” we need to consider “What and how are we thinking?" to get the most out of the code that we sometimes unearth and/or must excavate.

Ego is not your friend

I was listening to Scott Hanselman's podcast called HanselMinutes and noted a statement from the host of the show Carl Franklin, "Ego is not your friend." The context was that as a developer, your ego, if too sensitive or too large, can keep you from learning from the developer community. The ego typically prohibits you from being honest and saying, "I do not understand or know what you are talking about, please explain." This prohibition is manifested in your feeling ashamed to state that you do not know what is presently being discussed or you want to appear that you know more about the topic than you actually do.

It has been my experience that my ego, if not monitored, can cause me to view my present lack of understanding in an incorrect way. The reality is not that I lack the ability to understand the information, but rather I lack exposure to the information. From that aspect, I am now informed about what I need to learn. Moreover, if I do understand a topic better than someone else, this does not mean that my level of intelligence is greater. It simply means that I have been made aware of the topic and have taken the time to learn. Otherwise, my ego could falsely cause me to think that I am more adept than I am in reality and cause me to not consider various aspects of a topic, since I think I understand more than I do in reality.

In summary, either by causing one to think they can not improve or that they have no need to better their understanding, ego is not your friend.

msquaredweb.com now on linux

For those who care, I took the plunge and am now hosting on linux. This is in preparation to eventually move the site to Rails.

I will still have sites on asp.net just to keep my .Net skills current, but since I have moved to the J2EE team at my real job, I thought it best to make this move with msquaredweb.com.

Installing Rails on Windows XP Pro

As a continuation of the previous article on installing Ruby on Windows XP Pro, in this article I review the steps to install Rails on Windows XP Pro.

Installing Ruby on Windows XP Pro

In my readings on Ruby I have yet to run across a step-by-step example of how to install it on Windows XP Pro. Anyway, since I bought a new laptop, I decided to record the steps in the installation of Ruby 1.82-15.

Here are the steps.

Truthiness?? Alrighty then!

In a blog from Brian Marick I saw this: The American Dialect Society voted "truthiness" the 2005 word of the year. It "refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true." On a private level that may be well and good. However, the older I get the more that I am aware that “no man is an island.” In other words, in some small way we affect on another.

Therefore, if you are my family doctor, don’t use that in your medical practice. If you are my employer, do not use “truthiness” when you calculate my pay. If you are a civil engineer, do not go about “preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true” when engineering the bridges I drive over.

Brian goes on to show that in the development of code, more tests are the answer to “preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”, not ignoring the facts.

And yes, when designing software, more tests please, and less "truthiness."

The Scandal of Prediction (a.k.a We think we're purty smart)

Just listened to an interesting program on IT Conversations dealing with the problems of predictability and why the various models and systems of predictors fail by Nassim Nicholas Taleb entitled, The Scandal of Prediction.

What I gathered from the program is that the overall problem with accuracy in predictions and forecasting is systemic arrogance. We fail to acknowledge what we do not know and inflate the little we do know. We should not stop attempting to utilize our forecast models and systems , but let us do it with an honest look at the vast amount of knowledge we are yet to discover.

An interesting note is that Taleb refers to the concept of Yesterdays Weather with which agile developers should be familiar. Simply put, this concept is based on the understanding that there is a 70% chance that today’s weather patterns will be a repeat of yesterdays. Statistically, we know this but still we employ vast machinery to "predict" what the weather will be like in the future. Admittedly, there is more value in the use of models and formulas the further out one attempts to predict. In any event, I humbly predict (without any meteorological training or know how) a 70% chance that tomorrows weather is like today’s.

Learning Ruby

The Cincinnati Extreme Programmer’s Group January meeting was treated to a presentation by Jim Weirich, a consultant for Compuware, about Ruby On Rails. I could not make the meeting but watched a recorded video of the presentation and reviewed Jim’s blog concerning the meeting. As I was perusing Jim's blog I came across his link on a talk that he will be giving at the upcoming Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp entitled, "10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby."

I must say that Ruby looks intriguing. In fact, I have registered for the Dayton-Cincinnati Code Camp and am looking forward to Jim's talk. Moreover, I ordered the Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide book. I can not wait to dig in!!

Output Parameters from C# Method

I know that this is “old hat” to many but I am working on an application where I needed a method to return two separate values. I turned to good ole output parameters. I know I could have created two separate methods but the values within the problem domain are always associated. Therefore, it made sense to me to use output parameters with one method.

Here is an example using a NUnit test and the method returning two values via output parameters.

[Test]
public void TestParseAndReturnTwoSeperateStrings()
{
string toParse = "00050000999";
string strOne;
string strTwo;

ParseAndReturnTwoSeperateStrings (toParse, out strOne, out strTwo);

Console.WriteLine("String 1: {0}", strOne);
Console.WriteLine("String 2: {0}", strTwo);

Assert.AreEqual("000", strOne);
Assert.AreEqual("50000999", strTwo);
}

private void ParseAndReturnTwoSeperateStrings (string input,
out string strOne, out string strTwo)
{
strOne = input.Substring(0, 3);
strTwo = input.Substring(3, input.Length - 3);
}

NUnit 2.2.4 Released!!

Just got an e-mail within the Test Driven Development Yahoo Group from Charlie Poole concerning the release of NUnit 2.2.4:

If you haven't followed the development releases, here are a few highlights of what's new, as compared to NUnit 2.2:

* NUnit 2.2.4 runs under .Net 2.0 and works with VS2005. If you work exclusively with .Net 2.0, you can download a version that is actually built with that framework version, which eliminates dealing with the config file.

* You can run tests built against older versions - 2.0 or later - of NUnit without recompiling. As a bonus, you can run tests built against CSUnit without recompiling.

* A number of new Asserts and Attributes have been added. It is now much easier to create your own custom Asserts while still taking advantage of NUnit's built-in error message formatting.

* An extensibility mechanism allows you to define your own attributes for test fixtures and cases that behave in non-standard ways. [This feature is Still a bit experimental, and will appear in final form in the 2.4 release.

* Documentation is substantially improved and is provided as a set of html files. The packaged documentation includes only version-specific details, with info that may change over time, such as contacts, kept on the web site.

You can read the full release notes at http://nunit.com/testweb/index.php?p=releaseNotes&r=2.2.4. Note that the nunit.org site has not yet been updated to reflect this release.

You can download NUnit 2.2.4 at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10749

A thought experiment, just for fun

I typically, for a brief dose of humor, will go to the Dilbert site some point in my day. As I browsed to the daily comic strip I noted a link to Scott Adam’s free e-book entitled God’s Debris. Here is a part of the introduction:

The central character in God’s Debris knows everything. Literally everything. This presented a challenge to me as a writer. When you consider all of the things that can be known, I don’t know much. My solution was to create smart-sounding answers using the skeptic’s creed:

The simplest explanation is usually right.

My experience tells me that in this complicated world the simplest explanation is usually dead wrong. But I’ve noticed that the simplest explanation usually sounds right and is far more convincing than any complicated explanation could hope to be. That’s good enough for my purposes here.

The simplest-explanation approach turned out to be more provocative than I expected. The simplest explanations for the Big Questions ended up connecting paths that don’t normally get connected. The description of reality in God’s Debris isn’t true, as far as I know, but it’s oddly compelling. Therein lies the thought experiment:

Try to figure out what’s wrong with the simplest explanations.

What I found interesting is that, at least, sounds very much like the "simple design principle" that is advocated, correctly in my view, by the Agile Extreme Programming methodology.

In addition to this, I also found of interest related to software development was a discussion of pattern recognition and usage. In the chapter, Science, the central character states:

Computers and rocket ships are examples of inventions, not of understanding," he said. "All that is needed to build machines is the knowledge that when one thing happens, another thing happens as a result. It’s an accumulation of simple patterns. A dog can learn patterns. There is no 'why' in those examples. We don’t understand why electricity travels. We don’t know why light travels at a constant speed forever. All we can do is observe and record patterns." (P. 22)

In any event, instead of getting my daily fix of humor I got much more, a jolt to my thinking about fundamental questions. That, in my possibly warped view of entertainment, is for more enjoyable. Moreover, perhaps the joke is on me since I do not know nearly as much as I foolishly thought.

Agile Amigo?

Ivar Jacobson, one of the founders of UML, pledged to support Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System with the goal of a more agile approach to design and modeling.

Check this potential Agile Amigo out here. This will be interesting to follow.

Microsoft released guidelines for converting ASP.Net 2002/2003 projects to Visual Studio.Net 2005

Microsoft released guidelines for converting ASP.Net2002/2003 projects to Visual Studio.Net 2005 at Step-By-Step Guide to Converting Web Projects fromVisual Studio .NET 2002/2003 to Visual Studio 2005.

The article states:

The primary benefit of converting a Web application project to Visual Studio 2005 is the ability to use many new features in ASP.NET 2.0 (e.g., master pages,etc.) in your existing application. If you are looking to enhance an existing Web application built using Visual Studio .NET 2003, then upgrading to Visual Studio 2005 is most likely the right decision.

As expected, simple projects will be easier to convert:

For relatively simple Web projects where a Webproject is the only project in your Visual Studio .NET 2003 solution, conversion should be a relatively automatic process requiring little time or problem resolution.

However, not all ASP.Net 2002/2003 project conversions will be easy:

If the application you are converting is of reasonable size and has several Web projects and additional projects, such as class libraries, in a single Visual Studio solution, it is possible to encounter issues during migration. Be prepared to spend the better part of a day completing the entire process. The steps and guidance provided in this article can help an informed user to migrate most applications of medium complexity.

Thank you Web Platform and Tools Team for your honest assessment. I must admit that I am very skeptical when someone says, "it’s really pretty straight forward." Yea....right. In any event, I am looking forward to moving some of my small-sized projects to VS 2005.

Webservice Account Permissions "Gotcha"

For a project, an internal customer wanted to utilize web services for file reading and writing. Both the file write and read services were utilizing a System.IO.FileStream object, invoking the object's Read and Write methods. Since the location that the web services would be reading and writing from is a network share, two domain accounts were setup and given read, and you guessed it, write permissions each respectively to the share.

The “gotcha” that we encountered was that the accounts that the web services were utilizing needed modify permissions on the server <WindowsFolder>/temp folder in order to generate serialization proxies.

Click here to see what was done to remedy the issue.

It's in the wild!!

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 with .Net 2.0 and BizTalk Server 2006 had their official launch today.

Also, DotNetNuke, an Open Source Web Application Framework, is releasing its 3.2 framework, built on the 1.1 .Net, and its 4.0 framework, built on .Net 2.0.

I can see that I am not going to get much sleep.

New from Yahoo! and still in beta - Instant Search

New from Yahoo! and still in beta - Instant Search where results instantly appear for Yahoo! Shortcuts and common searches.

Covariance and Delegates in .Net 2

Click here to view this little nugget in .Net 2 dealing with covariance, an object-oriented principle, and delegates.

Very nice code re-use construct!

Essential ASP.Net 2 Webcasts and Lab Exercises

Fritz Onion has been doing some great webcasts concerning ASP.Net 2.

There are also labs and demo code provided with the slides! There is nothing like actually building something with the code to learn newprogramming constructs and techniques.

Continuous Partial Attention, please?

I typically download podcasts, audio program files in MP3 or WMA format, to listen to as I jog or mow the yard. One podcast feed that I subscribe to is IT Conversations.

A recent podcast dealt with a discussion panel of information overload and how that affects our attention to any one thing at a time.

In a world where information overload is common, attention is a very scarce resource and there is an increasing need to manage it efficiently. In this panel discussion, Steve Gillmor, Glenn Reid, Doreé Duncan Seligmann, David Sifry and Linda Stone talk about the problem of coping with more information than one can handle and the possible solutions.

In a connected world it is becoming very difficult to filter out the information that really needs our attention from that which is irrelevant to us. The panel discusses the work that they are currently involved in and tries to come up with answers to the problem of overwhelming information, only some of which deserves our attention. They talk about the tools, practices and new technology being developed to effectively use data which matters to the end user.

Part of the discussion dealt with what Linda Stone has termed continuous partial attention:

For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships. We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits. We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges. Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities. We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected. To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

She then states how through the last twenty years we have come to realize that the belief that connectedness is synonymous with living is not necessarily true.

Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc.

I for one will begin to strive to give full attention when talking and relating to not only my loved ones, but friends, neighbors, and co-workers. What higher compliment can we pay to others but attention?

It is all about people

The longer I am in the Information Technology world the more I am convinced that it is all about people. What is more important to a company than human capital? We all know that technology provides both assistance and in some forms, electronic enslavement. The latest gadgets come and go. However, when the dust settles, we the people are still here.

We are all still striving to become. Let the newest software languages and methodologies, the latest portable toys, and the most recent killer apps assist us in being, not just being wired.

ASP.Net 2 Cross-Page Posting - More than Server.Transfer

Cross-Page Posting provides what we had in classic ASP form posting and more. Instead of the form posting back to itself, as we currently have in ASP.Net 1.x, or using the Server.Tranfer method, also in ASP.Net 1.x, we can now post directly to other ASP.NET forms.

For those controls that implement the new (in ASP.Net 2) IButtonControl interface, such as the Button control, the PostBackUrl property (that must be implemented by the control), "Gets or sets the URL of the Web page to post to from the current page when the button control is clicked."

Too cool!!

For more on this go here.

The LINQ Project - Check this out!

Here is a cool announcement that came out of the PDC. According to Microsoft:

The The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

See a demo from Anders Hejlsberg on Channel 9.

Factory Method or Abstract Factory

Since I provided the code examples in C# for the Head First Design Patterns book, I recently got an e-mail from a reader, James Micheals, of the Head First Design Patterns book that sent me this question.

I'm trying to understand the difference between simple factory and factory method. They are the same thing! It's just one is composed while the other is inherited. I could even argue that since we prefer composition over inheritance, simple factory is better than factory method. I don't understand why factory method is better, and I've been tearing my hair out for hours to figure out why.

While I myself am a mere student of patterns here was my reply and thoughts on his question:

James,

You have asked a good question.

The factory method is good to implement alone if you have variations of a particular object that you need to create.

The Head First book uses a pizza store as the example here. The pizza store has a limited variation of pizzas it sells. Therefore, an abstract class is implemented (extended in java) in your subclasses and you are good to go for specific pizza object creation.

The abstract factory is utilized for creating a "family of objects" and therefore often utilizes factory methods within it.

In short, which pattern is used is dependent upon your need. If a simple set of related objects is what you want, then the factory method is your pattern. If you need a more varied set of objects created, the abstract factory pattern provides this via the ability to use a set of interfaces for each desired set of objects.

You stated that composition is favored over inheritance. That is correct, but which pattern is used is dependent upon your need.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Playing with Partial Classes in C#

I was reading a Partial Class Definition on MSDN and thought it looked simple enough and decided to take Partial Classes for a C# run.

Here it is.

Web UI Developers, for now, use the Firefox Browser

I am primarily a Microsoft platform developer. Microsoft makes a great IDE in the form of Visual Studio.Net and has a great language in C#, which is getting better with C# 2.0.

However, I must say, at least until IE 7 becomes more visible and out of beta, that Mozilla’s Firefox browser provides better tools for web developers through Firefox’s extensions for developers.

I especially like the Web Developer extension. Sure beats the Alt+Tab dance between the browser you are viewing your changes with and your CSS editor!

How can we be sure we are singing from the same page of music? – Fit in the key of C#

To build on an earlier posting on the use of Fit with C#, here are examples of Fit fixtures implemented in C#. The fixtures I demonstrate are the ActionFixture, ColumnFixture and RowFixture.

I also briefly discuss the desire to test properties in addition to fields and methods with Fit. I have "tweaked" the source code to provide this. My initial tests work but I would like to further test the code and submit it to other Fit developers as I am sure this has already been considered. My guess is that I may not be implementing the RowFixture subclass correctly. I will provide my source code on this later following more tests and discussion.

UPDATE 7-10-2006: After posting the above info, I submitted a proposed patch to source forge, artifact 1255429, which deals with using properties instead of member variables. The patch was submitted to source forge in August of 2005. Nothing as of this update has been done, that I am aware of, so I thought I would put it out for public consumption and comment.

In more detail, fixtures deriving from RowFixture have instantiated classes with public variables, instead of exposing the instantiated object’s members via public properties. With these modifications you can write fixtures directly against objects under test, which are typically the actual application classes, exposing properties instead of variables to the RowFixtures. This enables the .Net developer to avoid writing additional code beyond the fixture and the actual application objects under test.

The new post: Testing .Net Properties with FIT

Resharper: Sharper indeed

ReSharper provides some needed editing features for Visual Studio.Net.

For example, if you have private local variables and you want to expose those guys via public properties just Alt+Insert (ReSharper > Code > Generate... via the ReSharper menu) in Visual Studio and you get:

As you can see you can also easily generate a constructor, implement interface members, or override members from base classes.

There are many more “niceties” from ReSharper such as automatic indentation within bracket blocks {}. I got real tired of typing the brackets, separating them via hard return, and then tabbing to indent the first line in the block of code.

public void SomeMethod()
{
     //indented code here
}

Instead, when you enter a set of brackets for a block of code, ReSharper will insert your cursor between the brackets. Then, when you hit the Enter key the new line is indented for you! These are just a few of the great features of ReSharper.

I did not mention the Refactoring it provides. ReSharper rocks!!

101 Samples for Visual Studio 2005, in VB.Net and C# -- Nice!

Via a post on the ServerSide.Net site from Paul Ballard, Microsoft has released a compilation of 101 code samples in both Visual Basic.Net and C# for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0.

Samples include base class library samples, data access samples, web development samples, and windows forms samples.

Nice!

I love Virtual PC!!!!

I love Virtual PC! Now I can do something more unique with my older workstations, one with Redhat and the other with Windows 2003 Server, since I now have Virtual PC where I can have several "virtual installs" of operating systems that run on my Windows XP Pro SP2 system!

I have 2 Windows 2003 server virtual installs (one with Fitnesse, PHP5 and the Netbeans IDE running on it and the other with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2) and am installing SUSE Linux 9.3 in a separate install next!

This is most useful when doing development R & D on various OS/platform applications. Did I already say that I love Virtual PC?