If you’d like to help those affected visit Red Cross’ web-site

It has been a while since my last post. Many things has changed – I have took on a new challenge changing the job and moving back to California. And wasn’t it a great decision!

With new job I have moved away from Delphi. In fact, I probably now do more in PHP then in Delphi. Yet, it is a C# which is main Dev language for me now.

Do I regret using Delphi for many years? No. It was a great ride. But, at some point it is coming to what is more relevant for the projects you are taking on.

So, what do I do? Silverlight/WCF/WPF/SQL Server/Reporting Services even developing for iPad/iPhone/Mac - anything what delivers what I need for projects at hand.

Being in more management role then ever before, I still remain a developer inside and like to explore all new things.

PDC2010 was great. Do you love this HTML5/Silverlight controversy, don’t you?

Year comes to the end and as I look back, I recognize all the greatness of past moments.

Past experience give us means of moving forward in life and I want to praise not just one but my last 5 years. They gave me more “food for thoughts” then ever. How to be a great leader and how not to be a not-so-great one. It is always nice to look at someone else for inspiration. These years taught me a great deal about leadership and what it means to be an effective leader. We see a lot discussions on rule of thumb on how to be a great leader, but it is bad leader examples which make us empowered with experience in life.

So let’s be better, make our life and life of people around us better as well. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Accordingly to a new addition to the Mac-v-PC adv. war – Linux – “WE are Linux” – yes.

Personalization in the look at the computers promoted for last few years by Apple, Microsoft, and then followed by Dell and others with “personalize your computer” campaigns now suggested to be replaced with big “communitification“  a-la Linux.

What is a freedom? Ability to be you through the lens of the Big Brothers or ability to be you as part of the Open (Source) World of WE?

Is it a freedom when someone tells you that “you are free to be me”? Does Linux community need to go into war with others, even if it is just advertisements, to prove itself?

I did not like it when Apple said “you are the sad PC and I am the coolest Mac”…

Microsoft had managed not to mention Apple…

What now? Now we have a new addition – a Linux’s freedom – The big “O”

Did it worth it? What is in it for Linux?

Talk rumored in 1998 and surfaced once again in 2002 will continue - IBM was in final talks to acquire Sun… It was suspected that some news would be announced by Monday 04/06/2009

http://www.betanews.com/article/IBMs-acquisition-of-Sun-Down-to-the-details/1238698365
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/technology/business-computing/03blue.html

and they did – it fell apart… offer has been rejected

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aijKk7Ur2M0c&refer=news

Will we see negotiation saga continued or would be there another bidder? Or…

In rumors of Sun’s CEO could be replaced, so memorable statement was issued: “As a policy Sun does not comment on rumors or speculation. What we can say is that Sun is committed to its leadership team, growth strategy and building value for its shareholders”. Yahoo anyone?

It is not doom and gloom for Sun, but it all went against market expectations… and what is in there for IBM really?

• Cannot overrun a competitor, buy it
• No more patent wars over Java -> IBM JDK to consume final parts of Sun JDK
• Java push via existing customer base
• Solaris to replace AIX? Is there market left for Solaris? IBM will keep the goodies and Solaris to go away?
• NetBeans or Eclipse? Rational or Sun Studio? -> Eclipse+Rational with NetBeans flavor?
• + IBM JavaFX
• + IBM X86 virtualization

All good and nice, but remember the Lotus story? Died silently… what would follow? Java? mySQL? New Google DB engine to emerge built by ex Sun employees? Another era of mainframe computers with Java only present on enterprise level?

I am not pro-Java person, but this is the milestone not to miss!

When I moved from CA, this was first thing we started to look for and unfortunately had to travel two hours to Chicago until TJ opened local store. Talking about loyalty

Only if visited TJ on the constant basis for a few years you may get an irony of some verses, but, otherwise, it is very good informal commercial and consider informal style of the TJ, they should use it officially.

Two thumbs up. Enjoy

Wow! Well, what do you expect from the guy who made this

or these.

What is Assert or Assertion?

By its definition Assert:

• state categorically
• affirm: to declare or affirm solemnly and formally as true
• insist: assert to be true
• In Computing (wiki): “an assert is a predicate (i.e., a true–false statement) placed in a program to indicate that the developer thinks that the predicate is always true at that place”

In general, using assert in the code proven to be useful in many situations because it “checks for a condition and outputs the call stack if the condition is false” and it could help to debug some strange situations in the code.

Assert is your friend

This method is for programmers to use. But what happen often when something is convenient, it started to be used excessively. Why it is happening?

Let’s look at the declaration of Assert in C# (3.x). There are two versions of the Assert(): Debug.Assert() and Trace.Assert(), both in System.Diagnostics namespace.

// Checks for a condition and outputs the call stack
// if the condition is false
[ConditionalAttribute("TRACE")]
public static void Assert(bool condition)
[ConditionalAttribute("TRACE")]
public static void Assert(bool condition, string message)
[ConditionalAttribute("DEBUG")]
public static void Assert(bool condition)
[ConditionalAttribute("DEBUG")]
public static void Assert(bool condition, string message)

As we can see from above code, Assert is to be used for Testing and Debugging and therefore should not be used as a way to present any information to the end-user.

Helping yourself

As useful as it seems, even then Assert infrastructure may not be used to full extend. In the sample declarations above we can see that logic can be invoked with and without providing any additional information.
Imagine how useful is a message “Project raised an Assert in line X” compare to “Project raised an Assert with the Message in line X”.
First option gives you idea where something failed, where second actually tells you what went wrongand where. Let’s use power of the tool-set and provide ourselves with useful information.

Assert is NOT for an end-user

I was asked recently (this seems to be a ongoing discussion) – “Why a programmer should not be using asserts as a regular approach in code conditions validation even when it comes to a production code?”

By default, Assert would show a message box with some information and the current Call Stack. This information, while being helpful to the developer, would not tell much to the user.

With custom TraceListener introduced, message can be hidden from the user and information could be stored, but it is not how it should be used by definition.

If information is expected to be presented to the user in any form, it could be achieved in a form not an exceptional, intended for debugging, situation, but by using regular methods: message box, application log, Windows event log, etc.
Even in the case of component development it is desired to use exceptions (raise/throw) to “bubble” proper message to the error handling layer.

The throw statement is used to signal the occurrence of an anomalous situation (exception) during the program execution.

Assert is a conditional logic

Last, final and probably major concern here is that in Release environment Debug and even Trace functionality would be disabled and therefore, any code/logic which depend on Assert() would be suppressed and all the nice validations became worthless (see declaration above)… and Access Violation errors starting pop up unexpectedly.

There are plenty of 3rd party solutions on the market which would help you include some kind of charting support with your ASP pages and WinForms applications – ChartFX, ComponentArt’s Charting, Dundas Chart - these are just few from many available on the market today.

As it turned out, Microsoft has decided to add out-of-the-box support for Charting as well - <asp:chart runat=”server”/>.
Read about it here - New ASP.NET Charting Control: <asp:chart runat=”server”/> by Scott Guthrie – everything you need to know about the .Net 3.5 framework new addition.

For  additional information also visit Alex Gorev’s blog.

Note 1: Even though caption says it is ASP.Net solution, in the original you would find link to WinForms sample as well.
Note 2: Do not worry about Dundas copyright – “Microsoft acquired Dundas Data Visualization Intellectual Property in April 2007.”

If you visited PDC 2008, then you probably already heard that Microsoft had officially presented a new .Net framework/API which would be available as part of Windows 7.

If you have missed PDC 2008 this year, you can watch it online here

• Developing for Microsoft Surface
• Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications

Not anymore - default or optional parameters would appear in C# of some near future – .Net 4.0 (this is 70+ minutes you have to listen to):

1. dynamic language support and Dynamically Typed Objects
2. concurrent applications, multi-core support, parallel programming
3. befriend C# with VB#
4. default and named parameters
5. Compiler as service, compiler API, code delegate, code text as script
6. more…

Being the father of Delphi and then C#, he could not resist from sharing/exploring further many ideas which we have seen since Delphi 1.0 – VCL, data access, and many other things.

I have always considered C# being a Delphi 2.0 – which Delphi could become if Anders would have an opportunity to extend it at Borland.

Few thoughts:

#1. very nice simplification to the coding practices. Too powerful perhaps? Well, generics were as such when introduced and now we cannot live without it… PHP/Python anyone? Delphi classes from C# without reflection, interfaces or delegation…

#3. Is interesting statement from Microsoft since they did try hard to decommission VB and have not succeeded. I think Borland/CodeGear has tried the same with Delphi and has not succeed with that either. Evolution of the language is inevitable, it has to follow the trend. And I am glad with Prism announced this is something which would be a thing of the past.

#4. default parameters… Finally… a named parameters? mmm… interesting…

#5 as component developer I would love to see this feature in Delphi for dynamic deployment. As a developer I am looking forward for Delphi scripting capabilities…

PS. It is nice to see an acknowledge of his work at Borland in his PDC2008 introduction

Before joining Microsoft in 1996, Hejlsberg was one of the first employees of Borland International Inc. As principal engineer, he was the original author of Turbo Pascal, a revolutionary integrated development environment, and chief architect of its successor, Delphi.

With recent release of 2.3 version, I have updated my installation as well.

Few bug fixes may not worth mentioning, but noticeable change is in slide show plug-in. Starting this version slide show uses Cooliris’s PicLens. You can see a sample here.

Why would I want to mention it?

Aside from being nice piece of software, CoolIris was a place where Danny Thorpe was working for some time.

“Was” because Danny is back at Microsoft (see some notes in his blog above).