Last month a good friend of mine (Frumi) asked me for help in one of his courses - .Net Project.
I explained him everything I could (and thought that would be needed for first project): about how to write a better code, working with delegates, implementing OOP methodology, re-factoring your code etc.
When I started to get into the project main idea I asked for a short brief about project requirements.
So, Frumi thought that it would be easier to show me a working example, as he said: "that's how he wanted our project to look like.".
I thought, why won't we use here the Reflector? not to copy the project! just to help my friend (and his other friends) to understand this one.
So, I show them the Reflector and they like this tool, they even stop asking me questions about .Net.
after a week or two, my friend came to me and ask for help, because he won't be able to submit this work at time and he and his friends tried to copy the code and compile, but it didn't work out.
So, I Google up this one: File Disassembler by Denis Bauer.
This is a great Add-in for all of you lazy students, Disassemble everything (files, dlls, methods etc.) into a file.
Installation guide:
All you have to do is to download and connect between the DLL and the Reflector
(in the reflector menu: View -> Add-ins).
My private opinion:
Don't use it for such things, not because it is inappropriate and not fair against the other students, IMHO, you will never be a good programmer if you don't have the passion to write everything on your own, that is the only way to learn new stuff.
After almost 6 hours of downloads, 3 hours of installations, my laptop which is only 1700Mhz (Sonoma), 512MB RAM, holds the latest version of the WinFX beta2.
So here are some tips for you guys:
Many people ask me about the differences between Team System and Visual Studio, and what is Team Suite. When I start my explanation and including informative data such as the Team foundation I can see their eyes roll inside their holes, and their face start changing colors.
Here I'll give short introduction to this subject.
First, I'll start with the Team System - there is no such product, stop using this name, I like to call this a framework or package.
You can see in their product information center: there is no susch product!
The 3-Team Editions:
- Team Edition for Software Developers- includes code analysis, performance tools, code coverage, unit testing, Microsoft says that it also include the Visio and UML modeling, I didn't find such thing yet.
- Team Edition for Software Architects - includes Application designer, Modeling tools, full synchronization between code and design elements, this edition not include neither code profiler/analyzer nor unit testing, web testing.
- Team Edition for Software Testers - includes tools for testing and manage the result, you can connect between the test, failure and the code that reproduce this, this edition not include application designer, but the strange one is that this one not include the code profiler and code analyzer.
The all three includes of course the Visual Studio (Professional) with all the programming languages inside.
After we explain the core editions of Visual Studio 2005, lets mix it all together to one package called Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.
Pay attention to the colors, this colors indicate the original colors from Microsoft products.
There is still one product we didn't talk about, the Team Foundation Server (TFS), this one includes management tools, full integration with the client products (all roles of Team Suite). TFS is a server side product which combine together all the relevant data of your projects, such as bugs, code, testings, performance data.
Remember the Team system? now I can explain to you why I call this one framework, when you are working in a company and you have both programmer testers and you want full integration you will probably need the Team Suite and the Team Foundation Server this two products called Visual Studio Team System, but still you will buy them separately.
I had a strange problem trying to use the SQL Server 2005 Express, (this is the built in DB that come with the VS2005 installation).
The Problem & MS solution:
I need to install on my laptop a local DB, but I don't want to install the full version of SQL Server 2005. Microsoft gave us a great tool which you already installed in your VS2005 installation the: SQL Server 2005 Express.
There are still things to fix:
There is only one problem with this cool tool, you cannot connect to this DB, create new one or even do something useful with this tool.
So you are trying the first idea on your mind, in VS server explorer -> add new DB, choosing you compute name as the Server Name(in combo box, it is already there so it must work, isn't it?).
Only one server-name for you man!
Giving meaningful, descriptive name to your DB (e.g. DB1).
New DB name is now available
But you can't, it won't recognize the SQL Server 2005 Express.
My Solution:
In the Server name you will have to write: .\SQLExpress.
Everything else that I've tried failed, such as: MyCompuerName, SQLExpress, local.
Try it yourself.
Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to be in the C#/C++ user group at Microsoft.
Oren Ellenbogen, for the first time as a presenter, gave us some tips/samples, new tools and a great show about generics&delegates.
Why the lecture was so good?
1. The simplicity of the PPT:
It has the exact amount of data for keep yourself concentrate at the main issue: the samples.
Some great pictures to wake the sleepy programmers.
2. Oren did a great job with the examples:
Three different ideas that consistently repeated in different ways, help you concentrate and see the cost vs. benefit of the main pattern.
3. Live refactoring for proving your benefits and giving a short summarize about what we've learned.
4. As a dessert, two awesome libraries extending the concept of generics&delegates.
There are still some things to be fixed (or, Tips for your next lecture):
1) People like to ask questions, sometimes because they don't listen, sometimes because they want to prove that they are wiser than the pope and sometimes because they curious and hungry for new information.
As a lecturer you should know when to answer and when to cut it off, of course do it, always, with your charmy smile.
2) When he showed his first samples (which was on purpose long&clumsy) the crowd start staring and asking questions. When you are showing a process (walking step by step) of something you should say it, because people can't read your mind and they start thinking: oh, this code is even worse and they continue with: why do I came to this lecture, where is my wife right now and why the code I wrote today didn't compile.
Oren: I am waiting to hear you next time, it was really great, informative and productive.
To all my readers: pay attention to this guy because he has extremely precious ideas, and he knows a lot of tricks that you can't even dream about them.
Oren already put the presentation & code samples in his weblog, take a look...
He also promised to put the movie, so you could enjoy it too.
Updated:
Here are two other posts talking about the lecture: Roy Osherove & Ken Egozi
BTW, I saw that Roy put link to my blog in his Israeli .Net bloggers section, it is a great honor to be on this list. Thanks.
History
In our application we created a special (user friendly) window for showing messages to the user. The window will get its data, text, buttons through the args parameter.
We will open this window using the messageBox function (this method lies in one of our JS files).
Challenge
Everyone knows the annoying default alert of ValidationSummary in ASP.NET.
Our messageBox still couldn't rid from the alert that the WebUIValidation.js is popping up on validation error.
Why? Because in this JS, Microsoft simply write alert(msg).
Solution
Today we wrote those simple lines:
window.alert = function specailAlert(msg) {
messageBox("title", msg, button_ok, info_icon);
}
This will cause the JS parser to call our function any time the origin window.alert is running. So from now on, when the ValidationSummary will write alert("some useful message"), our method will replace the ugly gray box with our user friendly window.
Other Pictures and some useful links...
Here are some pictures from the Tech-Ed party...
What a programmer need more than sun, pretty women, good food and great lecturer talking about the great new features in vista, IE7, .net 2005, C# 3.0 and Orcas.
The Cocktail party at the first night was a great beginning for the real thing THE (Microsoft)party, I slept only 3 hours at every night.
Right now I need a drink or two, so I am going out for a party, when I'll come back I'll post here some pictures and impressions from the new Microsoft tools.
BTW,
I would like to thank to my team leader, Avi, which gave me the opportunity to be there, thanks again.
In one of my code reviews I saw this piece of code (those two methods are in the same class), IMO, and I believe that most of you will agree with me, this usage of exception is unnecessary.
private void CheckPrivileges()
{
// check user privileges
// for authorized user won't do anything.
// if not authorized:
throw new UserNotPrivException("user name", "action not allowed");
}
public void DoSomething()
{
try
{
CheckPrivileges();
// Continue your logic for authorized users.
}
catch (UserNotPrivException)
{
// showing message box which
// says that user has no permissions
ShowMessageBox ("User X has no privileges for this place.");
}
}
Why ?
- The Exception mechanism is slow
- A lot try&catch makes the code harder to read
- Why throw exception if you won't use it? and also throwing it between two methods in the same class?
I would have done it like this:
private bool IsUserPrivileged()
{
// check user privileges
// for authorized user - return true
// if not authorized - return false
}
public void DoSomething()
{
if (!IsUserPrivileged())
{
// showing message box which
// says that user has no permissions
ShowMessageBox("User X has no privileges for this place.");
return;
}
// Continue your logic for authorized users
}
If you want to check between those two (privileged or not) you can use the bool.
Moreover, when you are not really need the exception data.
Honestly,
I wrote this post before Tech-Ed, but didn't have enough time to publish it, in Tech-Ed, I talked with some other programmers that agreed with my opinion, but I still would like to hear your opinion,
what do you think about it?
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