Martin Kulov's Blog

Labels: Rants

Labels: Debugging, Events

For a third year in a row DevReach 2008 is going to be the most popular, technical and fun conference to attend. The line up of speakers is just outstanding and I am not going to name them here since I have to write them all :). Check out the speakers and sessions pages. There are total of 40 sessions divided in 4 tracks: Presentation, Business, Data and 'Architecture and Practices'. Do not miss the fun and of course the opportunity to learn from world's best speakers. Register now and save 20% until 15^th September for only 80 euro.

Labels: DevReach, Events

Tomislav Bronzin and Andrej Radinger, two great guys from INETA Europe Board, are delivering a very deep technical training on mobile technologies in Zagreb next month. The conference is called Mobility Day 2008 and it is all about empowering your mobile experience. It does not matter if you are developer, IT professional or manager, the conference will fit all your needs. It is organized in three tracks – Business, Development and ITPro covering various aspects of mobile application development and integration. Tomislav and Andrej have immense knowledge in this area and I would highly recommend attending there.

The conference itself is on 9^th of September in Zagreb which is not so far from Sofia. Imagine also taking the weekend before to visit the wonderful Croatian coasts … :) Priceless (as a commercial says :))

For more information visit Mobility Day 2008 web site.

UPDATE: The link to the site is corrected now! Sorry about that.

Labels: Events

Tomorrow I am going to attend a Risk Management Course in Sofia organized by RammSoft. The course will not only show Risk Management theory but we are going also to participate in a sample project in which we will try to identify the risks, evaluate their probability and after that a discussion on how to avoid them. I love when the practice is much more than the theory, so I am glad that I registered to this course. Also I must also add that I personally know Mike from RammSoft from a long time ago and I am pretty sure that the course will be executed well and will provide me with good value.

What is this risk management about? Risk management is not something new in the area of Software Development Lifecycle process. It is basically trying to identify the possible risks so you can be proactive in the way you manage your project so that eventually you will lower the probability of their occurrence. If after all the risk appears, your decisions taken earlier can isolate the impact of the risk so you do not threaten the whole project. In today's demands, clients ask for shorter and faster deliveries. In such small time frame, if something delays your project for a week or two, you are in huge trouble. Although small projects are much easier to plan, the risks that may happen in such a short time are often the factors that makes small projects so hard to deliver on time.

Why should you, as a software developer, care about this? There are many risks in a software project that require very deep technical knowledge. It is probably only you in the whole team that is aware of them. Knowing how to handle such issues, or at least how to identify them, will help you do better job and will benefit to the whole team.

Labels: Events

Yesterday I bumped into a strange Operation Aborted error. I really did not where to start looking for this error. I tried running the web site with first chance exceptions [1][2][3] turned on, running a script debugger and HTML validator but without any luck. Seems that the error is IE app related and you have to debug the IE process itself in order to find it. I did not want to go into that muddy waters so I run a more deeper search in google and I found the reason.

One of our third party components was generating HTML on the fly while the DOM is still being created. In short the problem is that scripts that are not direct child of BODY cannot modify the BODY element while the DOM is still being created.

You can find detailed explanation on the great Infinities Loop blog and in BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted" (KB 927917).

One possible solution is to put a setTimeout call for about 0.5s which calls your script at the time when (hopefully) DOM will be ready. I would not recommend this approach in general though.

For some reason the script which was marked with DEFER attribute, obviously was not deferred until the page is loaded. The problem was detected while running IE7.

[1] First and second chance exception handling (KB 105675)

[2] How to Stop on First Chance Exceptions - Visual Studio .NET 2003

[3] Demystifying first-chance exceptions (Part 1)

Labels: Debugging, Tools and Tips

One of the servers I support was missing its performance counters. I wanted to run perfmon to see how the server is performing and instead of text names of all performance counter, I saw only numbers listed under Performance Object list.

A quick look in google gave a solution to this problem. All you have to do is to run this command in %windir%\system32:

lodctr /R

You can read more about it in How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values (KB 300956).

It worked for me on Win2003 64bit Intel machine.

Labels: Tools and Tips, Windows 2003

Bulgarian team won the The Engineering Excellence Achievement Award in Imagine Cup 2008. Boryana Miloshevska, Dobromira Ivanova, Martin Damyanov and Yordan Pavlov from Technical University of Sofia won the prestigious award with their forest fire detection software solution. The minister of science and culture congratulated the winners himself and gave high recognition of their work.

I am happy to say that I was Boryana's and Yordan's trainer for 5 months .NET course just couple of years ago.

This is the press release from Microsoft Bulgaria with pictures (in Bulgarian).

Labels: ImagineCup

My good friend Dean Vitner started a great idea that grow up very fast and turned into really valuable one. He wanted to gather some speakers to present in depth and professional sessions without any marketing and basic overview topics. The idea got accepted very well by Microsoft Croatia and they decided to supported. Now for its first time Kulendayz is a multi track conference with speakers from USA, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia which is really amazing. I also like the idea of getting speakers from Balkan region. We are all working more and less on the same kind of project constraints and we have the same kind of project approach and attitude. This makes session content even more relative to all attendees. The conference will be held tomorrow, 20 June, at a very nice town called Osijek so if you are in the area please join us. I will be presenting a session on Crash Dump Analysis in ASP.NET applications.

I think that these kind of topic is what most people what to hear today. There is so much information in the Internet about what is coming and what it can most likely do for us, that people really need to know how exactly these things will work for them. They need to know what are the benefits and limitations when you really start to use the technologies. The worst case scenario for you as a developer, architect or project manager will be to trust on a new cutting edge technology and in the middle of the project to realize that because of its constraints it can not fit your needs. It usually happens to careless and mindless people, who find out a solution after all with a lot of struggle, and eventually become MVPs in that technology :)

This concept is also the laying ground for DevReach also. I first though that it will be great if people really see how is the technology looking in real life implementation. It was something that was missing and definitely something that people are eager to learn about it. This year, for a third time in a row, DevReach will be even bigger and greater. Keeping the same quality of content and passionate speakers, we will also make sessions even more relative to people problems by increasing sessions level and attracting more speakers from the

Now we only have to see who will win the football game now (Croatia vs Turkey) :)

Last week it was the MVP Summit 2008 at Seattle. I had a chance to attend it also this year. Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie were answering questions during the keynote and we had a great three days with the VSTS product group. Many things to come in Rosario so make sure that you keep in touch what is coming out in the next releases.

Here are some fresh ones. April Rosario CTP is the longest expected one (more info below). Note the significant push in the architecture tools as also the new build system based on Windows Workflow and the improved historical debugger and test tools available in the previous CTP. There are some very useful video tutorials that you must checkout after downloading the release.

TFS Power Tools March 2008 is also released (more info below). There is a very cool tool called TFSServerManager for monitoring current status of the TFS server. Also the Process Template Editor is now working with custom controls.

April Rosario CTP now available!

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/11/april-rosario-ctp-now-available.aspx

Architecture Edition

• Exploring the existing code structure
• Designing process flow as activities
• Designing user interactions with systems
• Designing system functionality as components
• Visualizing and designing types in systems
• Visualizing and designing interaction sequences in systems

Development Edition

• Simplify Code Analysis rule selection with rule sets
• Find and fix a bug using the historical debugger
• Identify the test impact of code changes
• Find a bug on a separate machine using the standalone debugger

Database Edition

• Building and using an off-line representation of your operational database as a “sandbox” development environment.
• Using Data Generation to custom-build data for testing your database application.
• Making and unit-testing schema and code changes in an off-line environment.
• Performing static code analysis of your programmability objects.

Test Edition

• Planning a testing effort
• Executing manual test cases
• Verify the fix
• Automate a manual test and add validation.

Team Foundation Server

• Managing an Agile schedule
• Easier reporting from Excel
• Managing features with the CMMI Process
• A new Add Files to Source Control wizard and support for drag and drop from Windows Explorer to Source Control Explorer
• An enhanced, non-modal conflict resolution experience, integrated into the pending changes tool window
• A new history view that shows labels applied to a file as well as how changes were merged across branches
• A new automated build system built on Windows Workflow Foundation, featuring dynamic build machine allocation from a machine pool and distributed build functionality
• Rollback for a check in (currently only available at the command line)
• Many Source Control Explorer usability enhancements

March 2008 TFS Power Tools now available

http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2008/04/21/march-2008-tfs-power-tools-now-available.aspx

Labels: Rosario, TFS