Assembly Info usefulness

Most of our project we leave the assemblyinfo file empty, this is a very bad practice, if someone is going to use our assembly as a COM object they need to understand who is the provider.

So look at this artcile,

http://www.artima.com/intv/principles4.html

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000141.html

I understood the real use of it only today.

Problems with chm files

This is so pathetic, i got lot of chm files on my hard drive (useful stuff) but all these days, when i click them i used to get this 404 page, at that time i used to click other chm files and they worked fine.

Recently i felt like banging myself on the wall when i came to notice this in the properties.

When you download a chm from the web, XP automatically blocks it (isnt this ridiculous).

So you have to right click on the file and say unblock to show its contents.

This was frustrating, if i had known this earlier i wouldnt have missed many chm files.

Internet Explorer 7.0 Vs Fire Fox 2.0

Browser Battles still continue, now it is whether the 800 pound gorilla IE 7.0 or the zilla from Mozilla :)

This months Information Week carried an excellent article comparing both the browsers.

Here is the gist of the same,

Eight major browser features which are important to businesses,

1) Remote management
IE allows remote management of browser where as Fire fox needs explicit plug-ins

2) Tabbed browsing
IE 7 added it but firefox already had it.

3) Security
IE had lot of security holes which are plugged but fire fox never had these issues.

4) Search
search bars can now be added inside IE7 but fire fox already has this.

5) Feeds
Support for RSS, Atom feeds is provided new for IE but firefox already had it

6) Standards
IE trying to comply with W3C, CSS & DOM

7) Printing
Good feature is IE tries to shrink the web page and print it, fire fox doesnt

8) Saves / restore
When browser crashes firefox remembers and restores session, IE doesnt

Now i leave it to you to decide which one to use. :)

Dont ask me what i use ;)

CAPTCHA project

CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

We all would have seen lot of sites which show an image which is disturbed and has some text in it and we need to read and enter that text in to a textbox so that we can avoid automatic spam bots or automated testing tools entering the page.

This is a project of Carnegie Mellon university and they hold the copyrights for it.

http://www.captcha.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

http://www.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/

ALADDIN is the algorithmic adaptation dissemination and integration team at CMU their papers are great :)

Virtualization is going to hit you soon

Well Apple is talking about it, microsoft is talking abt it, all Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies are using it.

Soon virtualization is going to hit every developer,

We all have heard about VMWare, Microsoft Virtual PC (we are talking about giants), but this small company is rocking too, they have a 50$ product for virtualization and it rocks.
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/

I spoke with my pal who works for VMWare, some of the features he is talking about make me open my mouth.

VMotion - http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/vc/vmotion.html

Ok so here is my version of "VMotion for Dummies"

So you are in this super duper Server of yours, you installed VMWare and you have 10 virtual machines, suddenly your raid card or network card smokes out, so what do you do !!!!!!!!

Go nuts and drive ppl around you nuts. :) No here is what you do.

If you are smart enough you setup a VMWare Garden (ha ha ha that rings a bell, like IIS Web Farm), and you install VMotion, so if anything to hardware failure happens, the VMotion kicks in and it moves the virtual machine from one VM Ware server to another VMWare server.

Wow, where do these guys get such ideas from and the interesting of all is, when VM is moving it still servers.

So at last in this world 100% uptime is guaranteeed.

hey scripting guy

I had a need today to play with some VB Script, i was amazed to see the number of samples provided by microsoft,

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/default.mspx

This book has a lot of samples, what surprises me is, one team example scripting team @ MS is doing this but why not teams like Message Queue team or other teams !!!!!!!!

May be Institutionalization is tough there tooo :)

GC Memory leask

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2004/12/10/279612.aspx

Exterminate Agents

An interesting site which explains what db2 agents are and how to kill them

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/db2/library/techarticle/dm-0504poon2/

Command Prompt CSharp Compilation

Here is the string for compiling the .cs files c:\bin>csc /t:library fileName.cs.

Sql Server number of tables, procedures etc

Use db1
select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'U' and status > 0
select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'P' and status > 0
Use db2
select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'U' and status > 0
select count(*) from sysobjects where xtype = 'P' and status > 0

Here xtype can also be
Object type. Can be one of these object types:
C = CHECK constraint
D = Default or DEFAULT constraint
F = FOREIGN KEY constraint
L = Log
FN = Scalar function
IF = Inlined table-function
P = Stored procedure
PK = PRIMARY KEY constraint (type is K)
RF = Replication filter stored procedure
S = System table
TF = Table function
TR = Trigger
U = User table
UQ = UNIQUE constraint (type is K)
V = View
X = Extended stored procedure