21 June 2007

Anti-development methodologies

Software industry is growing constantly and development methodologies are following the same trend. Internet is full with shiny articles describing each methodology and all the benefit. Most of the people I'm talking are bored when they hear stuff like this. If you are like them, don't miss this article. A friend of mine just send me the link. Also, check out the comments. All of them are about dummy development practices. Some of the titles are cynical, but there is a lot of truth in each line.
Enjoy!

27 April 2007

BrainStorm Rocks

Yesterday was a great day. My team called BrainStorm won the local round of Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2007 competition in the area of software design.
Our project with the code name Bookvar will compete in the finals this year in Seoul, Korea. This was possible, because of the remarkable team I'm part of. Right now I can't find appropriate words to describe them, but as one of the jury said: "I had the chance to watch these young motivated and smart people". It's a great pleasure to work with each one of them.
Although we managed to win the local round, there is still much work to be done. Lucky for us, the finals are after 3 months.
Check out this post from Ruslan Trifonov if you want to see some pictures from the event. Ruslan was member of the jury.

13 March 2007

Grand Prix Racing Online

Last week I was chatting with an old friend of mine - Vladimir Alexandrov. I was surprised to find out that he is driving the Grand Prix Racing Online site. Basically this is a F1 on-line simulator. If you are a F1 fan you will appreciate what Vladimir and his team is doing. The site is completely free and guess what - no advertisements are present.
There are some interesting issues about the implementation and hosting, but because of security I can not share them.
Good luck Vlado, and continue with the great job.

12 March 2007

NHibernate and triggers

Recently I was asked from a college of mine, about the following exception in application based on SQL Server 2005 and NHibernate :
[NHibernate.AdoNet.TooManyRowsAffectedException] {"Unexpected row count: 2; expected: 1"} NHibernate.AdoNet.TooManyRowsAffectedException

After a quick investigation the problem was obvious - the exception raises when a row from a table is updated and the row has fired a trigger which executes an update statement.
I have faced with this problem since early beta of NHibernate (0.8.4 as far as I can remember). Till now the only solution I have found is to use SET NOCOUNT to stop the message that shows the number of rows affected by a Transact-SQL statement from being returned as part of the results.
Just place SET NOCOUNT ON before the UPDATE statement inside the trigger and then after the UPDATE statement place SET NOCOUNT OFF. This will solve the problem.

ASP.NET Web Part editor in pop-up dialog

Last hour I was wondering how to host a ASP.NET Web Part editor control inside a pop-up dialog. I was lucky to find this implementation. It is based on some tricks, but resolves the problem.