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X - Factor in SOA

Read my new article on the X - Factor in SOA

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 3:12 PM 1 Comments

Software Patent

I never liked much of the software patenting. Software patenting on a product that can be created with the existing tools or simply even clever ideas does not augur well for the software community and future of unchallenged growth in software technologies. Here is an interesting article on it.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 4:52 PM 0 Comments

Spyware menace.

Most people get spyware on their machine while browsing to innocuous sites. Somebody should start compiling the sites that give these spywares as well as sites that have a link to these sites. This way we can start putting these sites under the restricted list and so if we browse into them accidentantly there could be no spyware installed on the machines.
Everybody hates spyware on their machine then why do these sites try to push it on the computers which literally make the computer unusable. The fact I don’t understand is this is marketing revenue but if nobody likes it what is the benefit. This should be banned but instead of waiting for laws I believe we should publicize such harmful sites and they should be on the restricted list of all users. The list compilation can be on a wikipedia where it can be modified to add new entries and no deletion should be allowed.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 10:32 AM 4 Comments

Model Driven Architecture

Model Driven Architecture focuses on the functionality and behavior of an application without the immediate concern for the technology to be used. This separates the need for repeating the architecting process when new technologies appear. Therefore the functionality and behavior are modeled only once. This is a good fit for distributed applications in supporting various technologies. Hence there would a Platform Independent Model and then one or many Platform specific models. You can read more of it here.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 3:51 PM 0 Comments

Web Parts -- What is it ?

Web parts is a Microsoft ASP.NET server control that displays specific set of data. There are many ready to use web parts which can be easily added, removed or edited. Custom web parts can also be built to provide additional functionality. With ASP.NET 2.0 there are web part controls that can be easily used. These are some of the well integrated features in ASP.NET 2.0. Play with it and have fun learning it.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 1:55 PM 0 Comments

Bye Bye NUnit.

Visual Studio Team System has its own unit test which is the same concept as NUnit test. The feature I liked in it was the capability to generate the test class and the test code. Another feature I liked was it adds as well as retrieved the test data from the database easily.
It has the code coverage feature that details the percentage of the code that was executed. It also highlights, by means of colors which code was run and which was not when the test was done.
These test codes are also not included in the production release assemblies.
It has several good features and looks like an improvement over NUnit. It’s well integrated with the Team system.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 10:26 AM 0 Comments

Misnomer about HttpHandler

When an aspx page is created it is automatically creating an end point reference or a handler. To act as a handler within the pipeline a class must implement the IHttpHandler. Therefore custom handlers can be created using this interface.
You can create a file with ashx extension. The benefit of using this extension is then you don’t need to register the new extension as well as no specific configuration entries.
Either way the issue comes when an installer package is created. The ashx file or any other extension chosen to be the handler is not seen. This is not needed in the deployment if you have compiled it into an assembly. Many developers try to forcefully include the ashx file into the virtual directory assuming it’s needed. Technically it is compiled into the assembly and hence not needed. The questions are -: What if I am giving the location such as http://myServer/myVirtualDir/myHandler.ashx specifically as an endpoint reference? If the ashx file is not part of the deployment package, how can the location be provided?
These are typical questions and my answer is you don’t need the file ashx to be physically present in the virtual directory if you have the compiled assembly. You can still reference it and when request goes to the IIS it knows to get to it.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 8:55 AM 0 Comments

Buzz about smart clients.

There is big buzz about smart clients. The definition states that smart clients provide a rich user experience by using the local resource as well as connecting to distributed systems intelligently. Taking away the superlatives like rich and intelligent it simply means that the client application would use the local resources when the remote system is unavailable and so would work disconnected and provide the same user experience as when it was connected to the remote computer. Interestingly there is an application block from Microsoft that provided the capability of checking if the remote system is available.
Simply said smart clients use the good of both a web application as well as a regular windows application.
To know more about it go here.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 9:06 AM 0 Comments

Schematron

Schematron is another schema language. It can be embedded within the XSD using the appinfo elements within the XML Schema document. Constraints can be expressed using assert elements. Schematron will extract the directives from the XSD document and create a schema which will be then used to validate the instance document.
Its easy to use and I found it more as an extension to the XML schema itself. It is useful in areas where the XML Schema is lacking.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 1:40 PM 29 Comments

Nasty VS.NET error.

When opening VS.NET after a new install some user would get errors and VS.NET would try to install and eventually fail.

If you look into the event log an error such as this is seen.

Detection of product '{E05F0409-0E9A-48A1-AC04-E35E3033604A}', feature 'Visual_Studio_.NET_Ent_Architect' failed during request for component '{FD153241-37EC-11D2-8892-00A0C981B015}'

The problem is because of some office components not properly registered.

To resolve the issue the following registry addition can be done.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common]
"UserData"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\UserInfo]
"UserInitials"=hex:00,00
"UserName"=hex:00,00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\Custom Dictionaries]
"1"="CUSTOM.DIC"

This should solve the issue.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 3:31 PM 0 Comments

Windows Vista.

Windows Vista is here. If you haven’t heard of it then its Longhorn with the release name being Windows Vista which would be the replacement to Windows XP. There are several interesting features if you have not already explored them have a look at the beta version. I am waiting for XAML (pronounced shaml ). This is going to be a major change how the UI's going to be henceforth. To know more about it read here.

Here is a humorous link to the name change of Windows Vista.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 9:01 AM 0 Comments