Talk about Technologies, Software Architecture and Management

IBM to buy SUN – end of the era?

Updated on 04/07/2009 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 Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

For Trader Joe’s fans

As a long time customer of Trader Joe’s I just love this 🙂 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.

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

CrystalReports: getting engine version

When working on the new web-site which uses CrystalReports engine to display some reports, it is useful to know what version is used. Yes, we usually know what version of engine we have on development machine because of the level of the control we have. With production environment, it may be not so obvious because it can be deployed by others. And at some point something may happen to the machine and environment was restored from the backup. In all cases considered, to know what Run-time do we have at the moment without actually go and look at assemblies, may be very useful and quick check to determine the problem. Since we are using .Net, it can be done easily Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

Crystal Reports Extension Methods Library

After using Crystal Reports for many years what always strikes me is that some of the methods available via API are not generic enough and require unnecessary repeated coding for simple things. Lately all my development, when in comes to reports, is based on Crystal Reports 2008  engine within ASP.Net/C# environment. While there are many improvements in the functionality available to developers, there are still things which could be done easier. So what do we do to make our job easier? We develop set of special classes, wrappers and libraries which would simplify work with Crystal Reports API. But disadvantage of introducing yet another helper class, is that it is another helper class. We are loosing simple inheritance of the new functionality in API and Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

File locks or when garbage collection goes bad

With introduction of garbage collection (System.GC name space) in .Net, life of the Windows programmer become easy – no need to worry about releasing objects, code become simpler, etc. In “old” time one would need to use Interfaces to achieve similar functionality and it does have some advantage even over GC – immediate garbage collection or release of allocated resources/objects. When writing code in .Net some of us take many things for granted and not always keep in mind that many operations are performed in the context of the unmanaged code or in the “old way”… File operations or legacy code wrappers are perfect example. Just because library is available as managed code, it does not mean that everything has ability to “self-heal”. For example in Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago

MCTS Training Kit Exam Prep and the error “Library not registered 8002801d” on Vista

Shoe master without shoes… Training kit which suppose to teach you about how software should be created fails with simple registration error. One would think that with thousands if not million copies sold of various training materials software used/provided would be flawless. As it turned out, it is not true. Yes, as programmers, we all know that deployment is a tough task and requires careful testing in all possible environments, especially when it comes to a “new” Operating System like Vista… hm, not too new already… I am going through SQL Server 2005 Exam 70-431 and was kind of surprised to find out that after instalation of the Exam Prep program, it would not start with simple registration error Run-Time Error -2147319779 (8002801d) Read more

By Serguei Dosyukov, ago