2 ways to make estimations in the software world.

I've watched a presentation held by Joel Semeniuck. As his LinkedIn profile states, he is currently "Executive VP at Telerik", anyway, this post is not about Joel himself but about estimating how much does it take to complete a given software project.

I was thinking about this over and over again.
Actually - each time I gave an estimation while I was at Telerik - my team lead used to double it in order to get somewhat accurate estimation.
And I was pretty ashamed in the beginning. I always push as much as possible in order go be a great software developer, I stay night, I work weekends, whatever it takes. And still I can hardly meet my deadlines.
(Note: I wasn't working night / weekends @Telerik, this is a generalization of my whole life as a software developer.)

Why would that be? I am trying so hard and still no result.
(to be honest - there are lots of cases that I was able to meet deadlines, but they were about things I already knew how to do step by step so they don't count. Or do they?).

And it's the bolded sentence above that got me thinking.
And I came up with yet another software development law. Maybe it only applies to me so it is not actually a law that will cover the whole software development industry, but let me first say it and then I'll discuss it:

"You can estimate a software project using two algorithms - the algorithm that all Windowses prior Vista used to estimate file copy time and the way all Windowses including Vista and later use to estimate the time it will take to copy a file."

First of all what's the difference?
In Windowses prior Vista the way explorer will tell you how much time will it take to copy file / files would be somewhat random, then it starts to fluctuate during the copy progress. Ever started with 2 minutes, gone to 10 minutes? Well that's what I'm talking about.
In Windowses starting from Vista - the system will be much more acurate, except for one thing - it will not tell you how long will take to calculate how long would it take to copy the files. So you first wait for Windows to do some estimations by chunking the data it has to deal with. And then it will be more accurate in saying how long will you wait.
(Note: I probably miss a lot from their algorithms but this is the end user impression it leaves).

So basically if you start estimating like older Windowses - you will be looking at one large chunk of work and you will be able to estimate that chunk roughly.
If you give your estimation the way Vista and newer Windowses work - you will have much more acurate estimation as you would have chunked all the data upfront. And there will be much less room for errors. So in the ideal case you will have to split the big chunk into really really small tasks you know you can do in an hour.
The bad thing using the second approach is that when asked "What's your estimate on this?" you will need to say "Gee, I don't know, I will first need to take my time to estimate it, I'll then be more acurate.", "How much time would you need to estimate this?", "Gee I don't know. You'll have to wait for me.".

So to summarize:
Estimating like old Windows: "It will take 2 months and it may go up to 10 months. I may be able to complete it in 2 weeks though."

Estimating like new Windows: "Come back later. Or better - I'll call you when I have an estimation. I know you have a decision to take but I can't do anything about it yet.".

I am leaving you decide which one to use :). Maybe a mix of both?

P.S. If you think about it - this applies to known projects. Add some third party black box integration and you will fluctuate the same way windows fluctuates when it downloads a file - it tries to take into account a variable that is changing randomly - the speed of your internet connection. For such projects you can go from 1 hour to 1 year or even to work 1 year and understand that the project cannot be completed (well guess what - although Windows states it will get your file in 1 hour, it doesn't tell you what will happen if you decide to disable your internet adapter).

Convert string to a known type (using its default converter)

I was in a need to get a type, instantiate it and then fill its properties (I'm currently doing an engine that will give me an instant CRUD UI).

So what I basically needed was to be able to fill a new object instance out of a Hashtable (the key is the name of the property and the value is its string representation).

I wanted to be able to convert that string value into the type it needs to be.
Here is some code to help you get it:

foreach(string strPropertyName in htValues.Keys)
{
PropertyInfo pi = entity.GetType()
.GetProperties()
.ToList()
.FirstOrDefault(property => property.Name == strPropertyName);
}
(this is kind of pretotype so don't blame me if you don't like the code :).

In the above code I am iterating in the keys of the hashtable, so if I have an user object it will strPropertyName will hold "FirstName", then "LastName".
So far so good, I am able to fill the object and send it to the EntityFramework for DB Persistance.

The problem was when the strPropertyName was holding "BirthDate" as it is a DateTime and the EntityFramework or the Reflection (not quite sure which one) was crying it can't Convert the string to the respective type for me.

Here is how I solved the problem:
// Create a new Instance of the given type.
object entity = Activator.CreateInstance(this.EntityType);
// Iterate through all the properties.
foreach(string strPropertyName in htValues.Keys)
{
// Get the property with that name:
PropertyInfo pi = entity.GetType()
.GetProperties()
.ToList()
.FirstOrDefault(property => property.Name == strPropertyName);
// Get the default type converter for the given property type:
TypeConverter converter = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(pi.PropertyType);
// Set the value by converting non-values to the given type
// and setting null where it is a null value.
pi.SetValue(entity, htValues[pi.Name] == null ? null : converter.ConvertFromString(htValues[pi.Name].ToString()), new object[] { });
}

Basically the thing you (and I!) need to remember is that the TypeDescriptor class has a GetConverter() method that takes a type and returns a TypeConvertor for that type.

Now in order to be able to convert from string to that type you just need to call .ConvertFromString(string value) of the TypeConverter returned by the TypeDescriptor.

Hope this helps someone out there. To me it seems it can give you a great deal of abstraction and I (for some reason) believe this is heavilly used in nowadays OR/M's.

Serializing object to JSON returns empty string?

Consider the following code:

string JSONObject = string.Empty;
DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(this.GetType());
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    serializer.WriteObject(ms, this);
    // Donchev - we need to reset because the write has gone to the end of the stream
    // and the StreamReader.ReadToEnd() won't seek to the beginning of the stream again.
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms))
    {
        JSONObject = sr.ReadToEnd();
        sr.Close();
        sr.Dispose();
    }
    ms.Close();
    ms.Dispose();
}
return JSONObject;

It seems perfectly correct but have a few problems.

And the first one is very important – it is based on wrong assumption and it is returning empty string because of that.

I will let you tackle it for a while to see if you can find where the problem is.

Ready?

If not – I’ll tell you – the problem is that when I wrote this code, I was expecting the ReadToEnd() method of the StreamReader class to auto reset the stream to its beginning, it sounds for some reason to me that this method it is saying - “Read the whole thing.”.

Unfortunately this assumption evaluated to false.

The method actually says - “Read from where you are to the end of the thing.”.

So before calling JSONObject = sr.ReadToEnd();

I needed to simply call:

ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

In order to reset the pointer to the beginning of the stream.

Voilla!

The other question I asked myself is why the pointer is at the end of the stream (after the string is empty and not some portion of the stream, it should be at the end).

The answer – the serializer.WriteObject() method is probably not resetting it to be at the beginning after it completes its job.

Not quite sure who is responsible for resetting the stream – the caller or the callee, we can have a long discussion about this.

Anyway – just wanted to share this with you. I know it is very old thing but I am trying to write for much of the things that made an impression on me.

Limit Microsoft SQL server memory usage

I had to work with a fairly large database on my PC.
It became very unresponsive so I checked what's going on.
I clicked on the Performance tab in Windows Task Manager and noticed that the RAM was more then 7 GB (too much for a personal computer, don't you think?).

I realized that 4 of those 7 GBs were used by the MSSQL server.
I went to management studio, right clicked the server and choosed options.

Then I clicked on the Memory page and saw that MSSQL Server was allowed to take up to 2048 TB of memory (couldn't even imagine that):

I limited the server to 1 GB and my PC was healthy again (the queries I do may take a bit longer but at least my ALT + TAB key combination is working again :).




Simple thing that improved my experience a lot.

How does your manager make a coffee?

I had an architectural problem yesterday.
I was working on a methods and managers I won't disclose but will analogy instead.



Imagine you have a coffee manager. Let's name it CoffeeManager.
In my case not only I had coffee manager but also I had a SugarManager, a CupManager etc.

In order to take a coffee without sugar in a plastic cup I should do something like:

Sugar sugarObject = SugarManager.GetSugar(Sugar.None);
Cup plasticCup = CupManager.GetCup(Cups.PlasticCup);
Coffee shortCoffee = CoffeeManager.GetCoffee(sugarObject, plasticCup);

And this happens at the very frontend of the project (in ascx for example).
And not only it happens that way but the managers are spread in few different projects.

So in the frontend I need to call few different managers, get some results from them and pass those results to the manager that should be doing my job.

I also need to handle all the problems that may rise in the managers so I get a lot of code in the frontend just to get something that in my opinion for that particular case should be returned calling a single method and auto handled in the manager.

I think the front end shouldn't care about business operations that much, also as I said the managers were in different assemblies so I ended up adding few references to the frontend project.

I refactored the code so the CoffeeManager can do this job internally (drawback is that the matrix of all combinations of sugar and cup should be added as a methods in the CofeeManager, but I can live with that).

How do you unit test encryption?

I wrote two extenders to be used on the string type.
So you can say "test".Encrypt() and "encrpyptedtest".Decrypt().

I was wondering how to unit test this thing.
The first approach which was really obvious was to encrypt the string and then decrypt it, if you get the string before you do those two actions on it - the encryption is correct.

The question in this approach is : What do you test? do you test the encryption or the decryption?
You can get a false positive result this way. For example if the Encrypt method returns the same string without changing it and the Decrypt method returns the same string without changing it - the test will be passed (the string after encrypt -> decrypt will be the same as it was before).

The other approach is to hardcode encrypted and decrypted string, then pass the decrypted string to the Encrypt() method and see if the result matches the encrypted string.
Then pass the encrypted string to the Decrypt test method and see if it matches the decrypted string.
The question here is "What happens if someone change either the key or the initialization vector for the encryption?".
The test will fail as the strings no longer match (unless you are very very lucky to hit some collision case :), but the methods are valid and they work correctly.

For now - I will use the second method. I will hardcode an encrypted / decrypted pair as well as the key and the IV used for the encryption / decryption.
I will first check if the key and the vector match the one that were used to generate the pair and if they don't - the test will be inconclusive so the guy who changed either the key or the vector can easilly find the problem and resolve it.

Anyway I am really interested in how would you do such a task?

Introduction to programming with C#

As Vesko Kolev stated in his blog - a new bulgarian book about C# programming is in progress.
I decided to take part because it seems very interesting. I haven't much experience in publishing so it will be very beneficial for me to work on this.
Actually I was author in a software magazine few years ago (as far as I remember I was about 17 years old so it must have been about 6 years ago). It should help me as I took the first chapter - introduction to programming where I will show the readers how to install Visual Studio 2010, how to start their first project and how to write their first program, some diagrams of the .NET framework 4.0 will also be included in this chapter.

We decided not to include any advanced features in this book, just core programming language, no extensions, no lambda expressions, no var, no automatic properties, no nothing.
This is because this book targets potential software developers and not software developers. It should show the developer how to code, how to think etc. We decided that if a man / lady without any software experience may think that auto property won't take memory after it doesn't involve variables (at least visualy :).
That is why we do only core things.

Wish us luck. We would really love to expand bulgarian software development community with few more people :). After all if even one guy / gal of all the people that will potentiall read the book becomes an expert - our mission would be completed (we are dreaming for more impact ofcourse :).

As Svetlin Nakov and Vesko Kolev said - telerik is sponsor for this book so it should be published easilly than their prеvious book - "Introduction to programming with Java" and would probably joy some more marketing efforts.

That was it about the book.
Now about my motivation to join the project no matter my personal engagements and all the work I have at telerik and at the university.
The first reason is that I am a self - taught (almost) developer.
I never had degree that will help me find my work, join some society of developers that will help me when I hit a difficult problem.
There wasn't even internet in my hometown. A friend of mine gave me a book on programming with Delphi (that Sams 21 days brick :).
The Delphi help also helped me and I also downloaded html files to read later when I was at school.

Then I applied for a job in the city where I was studying (Veliko Tyrnovo).
It was all my collegues that helped me improve my skills.
I don't feel as a worldwide recognised expert or something but getting to the intermediate level from nowhere is achievement to me.
So reason #1 to join this book is to give something back.

Another reason is that I would like to see how a book is written, are there different proccesses than in the software development. It has something to do with the blog posts I guess :)
So reason #2 is to steal some knowledge :)

And some kind of nostalgy would be the last reason to join :).As I said, I was an editor in a software magazine, it was very nice thing to do. The article, then the readers asking for some more information. I miss this a bit :)
Reason #3 - to feel the old days when I was an editor :)

The specified service has been marked for deletion error message when removing a service

If you receive this message while trying to delete a windows service - check if the Services.msc application is open.

You will need to restart in order to delete the service, but you will know to first close the Services.msc application the next time PRIOR uninstalling the service (using installutil /u service_exe_name).

Hope this helps someone outthere...

Edit : I found another scenario when this can happen and it seems to be more .NET specific and common to software developers - if your service creates some worker threads, Windows will attempt to kill the main thread, the main thread will attempt to kill the main thread but the worker threads if not marked as BackgroundThreads via the IsBackgroundThread property will remain. The GC will wait for them to reach a safe point so they can be terminated and the service will most probably be only marked for deletion, requiring you to restart windows.

Please note - if you are using the ThreadPool class you will probably not hit this problem as the ThreadPool internal threads are automatically marked as background threads.

Edit 2: Another case when you will receive The specified service has been marked for deletion error message is when you try to uninstall service which wasn't stopped first or it was marked as unstopable.
This is done if you have this.CanStop = false in your service code.
Windows knows this service shouldn't be stopped and it will only mark it for deletion but will not delete it right away.
Be careful with CanStop property.

Limiting your Internet connection speed with Fiddler.

In some cases you may need to limit your connection for testing purposes.
This is / should be extremely easy using Fiddler.
Here is a simple walkthrough on how to do this:

1. Go to Fiddler site and download Fiddler latest version (http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/)
2. Install it and start it.
3. Click on Rules -> Customize Rules:

4. An instance of notepad should open. Find the line that says something like "oSession["request-trickle-delay"]":

This setting tells Fiddler how much milliseconds should halt the request. (not quite sure how a request halt will help you though)
5. Find the line that says "oSession["response-trickle-delay"]" and change it:


Save the file.
You should have a connection limitation.
Now, when you want your connections slowed down, you will need to check the following option:

6. Rules -> Performance -> Simulate Modem Speeds (should be checked):


Please do not forget to switch off fiddler when you don't need it as you may find yourself wondering why is your connection significantly slower than usual ;).
Hope it helps someone out there.

W3C Zoom CSS property. I really want this feature included!!!

Lot's of people are discussing this.
And the designers are often saying something like:
"I cannot imagine a scenario where you will need to use the Zoom CSS property."
To the readers that haven't yet hit this problem - the CSS Zoom property seems to be proprietary and to be working for IE (I think version 6 and above).

To all those designers - there ARE scenarios where you will want to let the user zoom everything proportionally without using the browser buttons / sliders / shortcuts, but with CSS / JS only.
I will give you few examples:

1. I needed to create an overview control of page. It should represent the page in a smaller percentage and, upon scroll, the page should scroll proportinally. I can have a div with the same DOM tree (or even an IFrame loading the same page or something). In this case I URGENTLY need the CSS Zoom property.
2. Telerik radReporting - the ReportViewer has a dropdown to let the user choose a zoom level to preview the page (web based and not after clicking print preview or something). Actually the Print Preview browser command isn't an option as the report viewer may be on the page with other controls and the user SHOULD BE ABLE to zoom in and out only the portion of the page where the report is (it is an IFrame with the data rendered as HTML, I believe). In telerik case - there seems to be some browser detection and when the browser isn't capable of zooming in / out - the dropdown with the zooming levels is simply hidden (they have no other choice unfortunatelly and I support them for this decision).

Now, as you may expect - in my scenario I cannot simply hide the overview control as the page heavilly depends on it.
Should I now have my revenge now? I've seen all those messages accross the web telling you that there are better browsers to use than IE.
Should I now display a message like:
"Sorry, your browser isn't capable of zooming in and out, only IE supports this, so please switch to IE."

I really hate those browser wars and if you really want to know my opinion - yes, IE may be harder to design. It may be messing up the containers, it may not be passing the ACID N test.
But it is the only browser that is suitable for my scenario (at least from my search in IE all the posts were following the same line - "zoom is IE proprietary, it won't work under other browsers").
Why are all other browsers sleeping then?


P.S. I have found something like -moz-zoom or something but wasn't able to make it work under FireFox (if it works under Firefox it should also probably work under Google Chrome as they are using the same engine I think).
P.P.S. - haven't tested but I think the zoom CSS property should also be available under Opera as they (as far as I know) use the IE core.

P.P.P.S - if anyone know how can we ask W3C to reconsider this for at least the next revision of CSS I would be glad to give my vote. I also advice telerik to do the same. Not only the reporting will work in all browsers but they may be able to do some other great controls using this property.

Really annoying ...

Nice tool to help you build IE ready sites

I found accidently this tool:



It can help you make your site run smoother under all versions of IE.
It's name is DebugBar go to the official site here.

Nice little tool to help me with twitter.

I created a small twitter software what it does is to check each hour if I am listening to Winamp, get the song if possible and write it in twitter for me and the people who are eventually interested in what I am listening.
Here is the deal:



You can download it from here:
TWamp - Nice little twitter software

You can follow me on twitter from the following url:
My twitter profile

Please note: TWamp isn't very user friendly. You need to get along with it in order to use it ;).

Two new automated blogs

I've been very busy this month. All the exams (for microsoft certification, in the faculty and so on), my extended work day (from 9 to 20 as I was absent

from work for about a month and need to do some extra work to catch my collegues), some ongoing projects I was stupid enough to take and so on...

However, I've found some time to start two new blogs which I consider more as experiment than real blogs:

Sql Exceptions

and :


.NET Exceptions



Both blogs currently contain about 40 posts with Sql and .NET Exceptions which you may find helpful after time. I am saying after time as I plan to automate those blogs so the information there is posted by software and not by myself.

Also users are welcome to post comments. Soon I will publish special format of posts which you can use in order to give your opinion on specific exception and this exception will be automatically published in the post.

Unfortunatelly there is a limitation - Blogger allow me to only publish about 40 posts daily so I wasn't able to create posts about all the exceptions in SQL and .NET Framework.

I will batch post each day (may miss some of the days like weekends for example ;) so in few weeks both blogs will be up to date.

On the asp.net official site for the very first time!

Well, a lot of people don't consider showing someone on the official asp.net site a big deal. There is a box "Community recognition program" where the most active members as well as yesterday's most active members are shown. I had 102 points for the previous day so I appeared. It really isn't big deal, but I consider it a big start, because it gave me motivation to continue to contribute. It is not about the recognition. In asp.net site you can find a lot of friends also. It is great to help someone and then see something like : "Dude, you're

awesome, you pointed me in the right direction." or "Dude, you saved me a lot of hours" and so on. There are a lot of things I would like to learn about asp.net and I think this forum is a great place to start. Just post a question and in most cases in few minutes some of the experts there will answer you.

Here is a screenshot I will keep close to my heart :D

Touchless SDK : Very interesting and promising technology each of you guys should play with :)

I came on this yesterday, I was bored because all the projects I am working on are to some degree "standard". No dev chalenge. I wanted to create, to do something interesting. So I started to browse CodePlex and found this SDK. Overview : Touchless SDK is a software development kit to help developers create applications which can be controlled without the standard peripheral devices (mouse, keyboard and so on). It enable you to create a applications which are controlled without the need to touch anything at all, just gestures in the air. How is this done? Well, I think there was a lot of research on this topic. We already have programs to detect motion from your video camera, why not try to extract information from those motions? This is

exactly what Touchless does. It captures an info from your camera and if it finds something that is known to be marker - it raises events, to which you can subscribe and do something.
The better news is that Touchless is Open Source project and can be obtained from CodePlex for free.
You can also whach a video on Touchless:





I downloaded this SDK and in less than a minute I made a small program which let's you move your cursor with fingers (I still can't find a good enough way to left and right click ;).
I hope I will have enough time this week to post this simple project so you can get deeper with Touchless as it seems promising technology to me.

Limitations:
Well every good thing has drawbacks. Don't get it wrong. Touchless isn't the standard in this area. It has problems (however I think after it is open source a lot of people can work on it and improve it).
So what are the limitations?
First of all - Touchless is very very very sensitive to light and to colors. It is because the way it works. In order to work, you need to specify a "marker". Marker is the thing the program looks for. So if you have a red tape on your finger and define it as marker, you will be able to command your computer with it. But if there is a object with the same color on the screen and this object is about the same size, it may be found as another marker.

The second problem (at least for the sample project I did) is that most web cameras are not sensitive enough. They are (most of them offcourse) with 640 x 480 pixels resolution. If you are about to move your cursor and your screen resolutions is 1280 x 1024 you will be only able to move the cursor 640 pixels horizontally and 480 pixels vertically (this can be software corrected by moving the cursor 3 or 4 pixels on each pixel that comes from the camera but for sensitive operations (resizing, drawing) it will not be good enough.


However I think the things above will be resolved and we will have another great way to use our computers for almost no extra charge.
I do really wish those guys luck and I will definatelly watch how this project goes and even if I can I will help a bit.
I really fell in love with this toy!

One more ASP.NET page optimization ...

I wrote two articles on this topic already. The first was that you can earn few bytes from renaming the "javascript:__doPostBack" to "__dp". Then I noticed that I have problems with this. The problem was that in some cases you need to have the "javascript:" prefix. So my first attempt to do some optimization is considered more unsuccessful than successful. Now I am going to propose another way. It is again based on removing / renaming / moving existing things in the page so they can be a bit more optimized. Let's suppose we have a GridView. We clicked on the "Auto Format" thing and we not only have a GridView, but we have a nice looking grid view. It's great, but it seems to be unefficient. It appears that the GridView will add a

style="" attribute for each row / cell (not quite sure about the exact rules). And it will generate repeating markup, increasing the size of the page and respectivelly - your bandwidth.

I did a small snipet to fix this (not the best solution again but should be kind of starting point).

Here is my code:

     protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
     {
        System.IO.StringWriter stringWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter();
        HtmlTextWriter htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter);

        this.EnsureChildControls();
        base.Render(htmlWriter);
        string html = stringWriter.ToString();

        AnalyzeStyles(html);
        html = RepairStyles(html);

        writer.Write(html);
     }

     private void AnalyzeStyles(string html)
     {
        MatchCollection CSSMatch = Regex.Matches(html, "style=[\"].+?[\"]", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        foreach (Match mCss in CSSMatch)
        {
           if (htDuplicates.ContainsKey(mCss.Value))
           {
             htDuplicates[mCss.Value] = Convert.ToInt32(htDuplicates[mCss.Value]) + 1;
           }
           else
           {
             htDuplicates.Add(mCss.Value, 0);
           }
        }
     }

     private string RepairStyles(string html)
     {
        int classID = 0;
        int pos;

        IDictionaryEnumerator iOccurences = htDuplicates.GetEnumerator();
        this.CSS += "";

        InformaticsWeb.Pages.Optimized master = (InformaticsWeb.Pages.Optimized)this.Master;
        
        pos = Regex.Match(html, "", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Singleline).Index + "".Length;
        
        html = html.Insert(pos, CSS);
        return html;
     }

Please note : AnalyzeStyles adds each of the style="" found on the page (each unique). If it finds secound and third and so on - it increases a counter. The counter is not currently used, but may be later used to decide which of the styles should be converted to CSS classes.

So this code basically takes the page and moves all the style="" attributes in the head section as a CSS classes. I tested and my grid view seems as beautiful as before this code was applied.

Now, does it worth to add this logic?
Well I think you can achieve the same functionality by using Skin files. I am adding this more for reference.
I also did a small excel diagram to show you how much bytes are saved based on the count of the items in the GridView:




Please note that the htDupplicates is a Hashtable, declared as a global variable, so you will need to add it if you want to use this code.

Let me now explain the columns in the excel file shown above.
The “Columns” column displays how much columns does the GridView render. Typically the columns are rendered as a table cells and doesn’t contain any style=”” attributes (at least I couldn’t see any), so this is something you can’t affect. The thing that this optimization affects is the number of rows in your gridview. The more rows you have the more bytes you will get.
The second column displays the number of rows in the grid view.
The third column is the optimized size of the gridview (when the above technique is applied).
The “Size Original” column displays the size for unoptimized page (the same page!).
And the last column shows you the difference before and after.

You can see it in the diagram - for 20 items you have about 842 bytes difference. While for 80 you have about 3,512 (I don’t think there is a live site which displays 80 items at once in a grid view ;).

Code Policies - the first step to get rid of boring code policy violations is made.

As I and Vesko (only!) discussed - it is great to follow code policies, and they are saving time. A lot of time. I agree. I really like to have so strict policies at work so I can find for example the ObjectDataSource of some dropdown, without knowing its name. For example i will type "objDsSomething" or "odsSomething" or "ODSSomething". It really saves time. I don't really agree with Vesko's opinion that only in the begining you are violating the code policies. I think even developers who worked on the same project for year will violate its policies (not so often offcourse). The problem is that we are all human beings and we all make mistakes. I decided to do something to help myself get rid of at least the boring code policies - such

as naming conventions.
Here is what I have so far (I started this thing few days ago and I am working on it for about an hour daily after I was all day at work so it may not look very promising but I think it has potential):



When you click on "Validate Current Document" the document which is currently open will be validated against predefined naming conventions. If you violated something you will have this output:



I have few more problems to solve and will be really glad if someone can point me the direction:

1. I need to find a way to add this menu to the context menu for the document and also I would like to add hot key so you can for example validate the document by pression "CTRL + V + D" or something else (this is low priority).
2. I would also like to be able to check the code itself for inadequate assignments, method calls and so on. The CodeModel approach I think, will not allow me to do so.
3. I would like to change those standard icons with custom ;) (low priority).

Currently this thing can fly only for naming conventions.

Code policies?

I was thinking the other day about how much efforts does it take to strictly follow your company code policies. They are saving time for sure, but they are also wasting time. First of all the developer needs to think about the policies all the time. This districts him/her from the real problems. Second - after the task is completed the developer again needs to check if his / her code follows the code policies. Third - if there is a code review - the code reviewer will also need to check if there isn't a problem with those code policies, class by class, member by member. Some of the rules are very very foundamental as for example not to reference the DataAccess Layer from the User Interface Layer. Other are company level rules - such as

naming conventions, using some classes on some places and not using some classes on some places. Also - using your project util classes instead implementing the same functionality in your class.

While some of the things aren't very easy to note in a code, other are obvious. And while some of the things aren't very easy to automate via AddIn or external program, other can be easilly automated.

In my opinion the developer should be focussed develop some more useful functionality, instead thinking about which rule will he / she broke.
Please note that by writing the above sentence I am not saying - "Drop the code policies!", but "Automate the code policies!". If I had some tool to check if I violate a rule while writing code, I will rewrite my code in order to satisfy this rule. But after I don't have I need to think about those rules while developing, which districts me from what I need to achieve.

I would really appreciate if you drop a comment on the following question(s):

"Does the code policy bother you? Does it take from your time? Does it districts you?"

Thanks in advance!

Very simple tool to watch ending Sedo Auctions

Few months ago I was interested in the domain trading business. It was interesting to me as it generated 14.2 million dollars back in 2006. It is based on speculla I think. Something like FOREX but not quite. I registered two domains and placed them on Sedo Auctions. I was also interested on how other domains are going so I decided to write a small tool. It will stay in your tray and will show you the auctions which are about to end the next 24 hours. The following information is gathered about each auction: - Domain for sale - Price - Currency - Time left before the auction is closed - Google PR for each domain The program is available for download from Chameleon Bulgaria I decided to put a banner on this program so my domains

for sale are visible to the users (well, after all I spent some time on this program and I would really like ot have some incomes after all ;).

Here is a direct link to the program page on Chameleon Bulgaria may be found
here

5 minutes C# to build a Zoo with Marker Interfaces.

First of all what is marker interface? A marker interface is an empty interface which defines no fields, but is only there for reference. Let's start with the case study and we will go through the example and explain everything. Case Study : Build a simple Zoo program. You have a Zoo with few animals - those animals are only fishes and birds. As this Zoo is relatively small it has only one employee to feed all the animals with the appropriate food. The fishes eat food which we will refer to as "fishfood" and the birds eat a food which we will refer to as "grains". To accomplish this we may create an interface, which identifies the things that are common for both types of animals in the Zoo. IAnimal.cs using System; using

System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IAnimal
   {
     void Feed(FoodType food);
     bool Hungry
     {
        set;
        get;
     }
   }
}

Ok, we gave the animals the ability to eat, but how will the employee identify what kind of food to feed them with?

Let's first define an enumerator to hold the food types:

Food.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   public enum FoodType
   {
     Grains,
     Fishfood
   }
}

Ok, we have the food types now. In order to split the animals in the Zoo in two separate groups we are going to use the Marker Interface, we will define two interfaces to mark which animal is fish and which is bird.

IBird.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IBird : IAnimal
   {
    
   }
}

Now let's do the same for the fieshes:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   interface IFish : IAnimal
   {
    
   }
}

Now let's have two concrete animals - one for each type:

Heller.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects.Animals
{
   class Heller : IFish
   {
     #region IFish Members
     private bool hungry = false;
     public void Feed(FoodType food)
     {
        if (food != FoodType.Fishfood)
        {
           throw new ArgumentException("Heller is a fish and eats only fishfood.");
        }
        else
        {
           this.hungry = false;
        }
     }

     #endregion

     #region IAnimal Members

     public bool Hungry
     {
        get
        {
           return this.hungry;
        }
        set
        {
           this.hungry = value;
        }
     }

     #endregion
   }
}

Chicken.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects.Animals
{
   class Chicken : IBird
   {

     #region IBird Members
    
     bool hungry = false;

     public void Feed(FoodType food)
     {
        if (food != FoodType.Grains)
        {
           throw new ArgumentException("The chicken only eats grains.");
        }
        else
        {
           this.hungry = false;
        }
     }

     public bool Hungry
     {
        get { return this.hungry; }
        set { this.hungry = value; }
     }

     #endregion
   }
}

Let's have one employee to feed the animals:

ZooEmployee.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   class ZooEmployee
   {
     public delegate void OnAnimalFeeded(string Animal, string FoodType);
     public event OnAnimalFeeded AnimalFeeded;

     public void FeedAnimals(List<IAnimal> animals)
     {
        foreach (IAnimal animal in animals)
        {
           if (animal is IFish)
           {
             animal.Feed(FoodType.Fishfood);
             this.AnimalFeeded(animal.GetType().Name, "fish food");
           }
           if (animal is IBird)
           {
             animal.Feed(FoodType.Grains);
             this.AnimalFeeded(animal.GetType().Name, "grains");
           }
        }
     }
   }
}

NOTE: I added the OnAnimalFeeded delegate and the AnimalFeeded event, so the Zoo employee can report to us when it has feeded an animal.

Let's define the Zoo class:

Zoo.cs

namespace MarkerInterface.Objects
{
   class Zoo
   {
     List<IAnimal> animals = new List<IAnimal>();
     List<ZooEmployee> employees = new List<ZooEmployee>();

     public Zoo()
     {
        animals.Add(new Animals.Chicken());
        animals.Add(new Animals.Heller());

        ZooEmployee employee = new ZooEmployee();
        this.employees.Add(employee);
     }

     public List<IAnimal> Animals
     {
        get { return this.animals; }
     }
     public List<ZooEmployee> Employees
     {
        get { return this.employees; }
     }
   }
}

Now, in the main form of the program we will instantiate the Zoo class, and call its employee to feed all the animals.

On the form I added one button and one RichTextbox. When I click the button the following code will get executed:

        Objects.Zoo zoo = new MarkerInterface.Objects.Zoo();
        zoo.Employees[0].AnimalFeeded += new MarkerInterface.Objects.ZooEmployee.OnAnimalFeeded(Form1_AnimalFeeded);
        zoo.Employees[0].FeedAnimals(zoo.Animals);

What are we doing here - we are simply creating a Zoo, we are using it's first employee (as we said it will always be exactly one emplyee) AnimalFeeded event to report when what animal is feeded and with what food and we are then asking the employee to feed the animals.

The marker interfaces here are used in the ZooEmployee.FeedAnimals() method to help the employee decide which type of food to give to each animal.

As the Chicken inherits from the IBird the employee will feed it with grains. As the Heller inherits from IFish it will be feeded with fish food.

Here is the Form1_AnimalFeeded which is fired each time the employee feeds animals. It will be used to display in the RichTextBox what is our employee doing at the moment:

     void Form1_AnimalFeeded(string Animal, string FoodType)
     {
        this.rtbAnimalsFeeded.AppendText(Animal + " was feeded with " + FoodType + "\n");
     }

Here is how it looks like after it was runed:



Hope you understood it ;).