2nd Day at PDC 07 , Stephen Forte to the rescue!

Thanks to stephen forte for putting some life back into PDC 07!, I feel the problem here is maturity of professionals. Our industry is still young and people are still new to concepts like application architecture and management processes required to deliver a successful solution. As such, the local presenters either dont have the presentation skills or the required experience to engage the audience in an interesting case study.

Otherwise the mismanagement from the PC Hotel management was slightly better than the first day, you can download all the slides for topics presented by stephen from here

My personal favorites were database design patterns and Scalable applications. I really wish Clement Vasters would come and visit sometime. I took some of his sessions at PDC 05', they were a real mind opener.

Regex Fundamentals

I went over this site over the weekend to brush up my skills on regular expressions, this is probably the one of the best and only site you'll need, it has basics, quick starts and detailed internal working of the regex engines

For people new to Regular Expressions or regex, it provides a powerful functionality to match patterns in text, it might seem confusing at first but once you get the hang of it its not that hard (but I think the testing data would take some thought!)

as I work on .NET, the framework provides you classes in the namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions

http://www.regular-expressions.info/


I'll try to post some examples later

First day at pakistan developers conference 2007

As some of you might know, PDC 2007 is happening in karachi on 19th and 20th June, today happens to be the first day of the event. Frankly, i was looking forward to some of the topics mentioned in the agenda here

My first was PDC 2005, which was really quite good with speakers like Rafal Lucaweicki and Clemens Vasters, at that time VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 was to be released, so there was tons to learn from it. The list of speakers was amazing none the less and there were topics on domain specific modeling, sql server reporting services and even Avalon. It was truly inspiring, after that I kept following blogs of some of the technical leaders in the market.

Unfortunately, that was probably the last good PDC there ever was, I get the feeling that PDC has been going downhill ever since, the number of professional speakers are minimized and so is the list of topics.

Today I attended the first day at PDC 07 arranged at PC hotel, It started off by waiting for the chief guest IT Minister Leghari to arrive, which in keeping with tradations here at pakistan arrived a full hour late. eventually he arrived and the ceremony was kicked off with a speech from the minister and plaque award ceremony.

Plaques were given to all sorts of people, including a guy who wrote the new urdu dictionary and a bunch of other people who's achievements were not explained and other irrelevants from the developers conference. Probably IT minister thought it would be a good idea to get rid of all pending plaque presentations at the PDC 07 event, may it be relevant to the developer conference or not

Finally we got to the tea break an hour late, on our way back we were handed an updated schedule. On close examination of the schedule, the session on Architecture "decoupling business logic from services" which I was planning to take was removed from schedule without any explanation!

we decided to take Goksin Bakirs presentation on developing with windows Vista enchancements, the presentation was nice but it was an overview level, pretty much of which I already knew

then we had the (mis)managed lunch. One of my friends had to go on a hunger strike lol!, cuz he had'nt filled his plate enough the first time, after the food as gone the waiters refused to fill it up. By the time people moved to desert, all the spoons had disappeared

after that we took the second session on "using LINQ to retrieve business data" by Zia khan. Zia khan is more of a business entrepreneur than a tech guy, but he gave enough of an overview to get started. Again there wernt any live sessions or demo's , just some architecture slides and some code in slides. You would be better off by downloading a quickstart tutorial on LINQ

the last session we took was "using the right technology : Bizztalk, SQL Server, Sharepoint etc" by Naveed bajwa, the guy was a pretty horizontal tech guy, but the presentation could use some work. He explained some basics and discussed certain scenarios and asked the audience what technology can be used under the scenarios. Unfortunately, the scenarios were bland 2 liner requirements statement and without depth except the last one. It was hardly a topic for PDC, he could have been better off by writing a 2 page article on it

I really hope that tomorrows sessions are better, otherwise if we keep getting useless topics and inexperienced MVP speakers, PDC 07 would be loosing the last of its professional audience. Ever wonder why we have a Professional Developers Conference in the world all over and here its called Pakistan Developer Conference ??

The cheat sheet page

Jack daniel's website has a cheat sheet section, consisting of printable summarized commonly used methods for a number of tools and technologies including html, MySql, regular expressions and more.

I was looking for something on regular expressions when I came across this

click here to access his cheat sheet section

These are handy printouts that would help in any situation, I usually use one for javascript reference which can be found here its from the book Javascript Bible, it has save me many hours of unproductive searching

Karachi load shading reaches new heights

Karachi load shading has reached new heights, KESC is proabably in Guinness Book of world records by now for the longest load shading hours, yesterday we had load shading for about 7 hours. This is really bringing things to halt.


Checkout this image posted on karachi metblog
Good thing our office has its own power supply

Reverse Ajax

A couple of months back, i had posted simple AJAX tutorials on how to initiate simple AJAX calls and get the response from the server. Today I stumbled upon an article on reverse AJAX, click here to view the original post.

Reverse AJAX is actually an implementation (seems more of a marketing buzz word to me) rather than a technology. In case of AJAX it is the browser that initiates the request, but what if the server needs to inform the browser of something ?

Suppose there are 6 clients (browsers) connected to a server viewing the same financial record, if one of the clients updates the record then how do the other connected clients get informed that the record has been updated ? this is a typical problem that a reverse AJAX solution can be used to target.

There are generally 3 methods that can be used for implementation of Reverse AJAX, the details can be read on the original link that I posted earlier

1) COMET or SLOW LOAD

• COMET was coined by Alex Russell , its a technique to keep keep alive HTTP connections

• Bryce Nesbitt's example on slow loading, it uses an frames to keep the connection open

2) Polling

• the browser polls the server after some specified intervals to check if something new has happened

3) PiggyBack

• piggy backing means that whenever a browser requests an operation, you send back the notification with the result of that request, hence piggy backing on the response

I have not used any of the above mentioned techniques but in my opinion a small framework can be built that sends an asynchronous call to the server and listens for the response, the server would only resonse if some event has occured. This would be similar to slow load technique but at least you wont have to use frames with it

I'll try it out if I can get the time, I'm currently preparing for an MCTS exam due in July... so lets see

Indexes in SQL Server

Here's a great article on the ins and outs and do's and dont's of indexing in SQL Server, its a beginner level article but explains pretty much there is to know about indexing.

http://www.odetocode.com/Articles/70.aspx

The above mentioned article focuses on SQL Server 2000, for a comparison with SQL Sever 2005 indexes, click here , on the whole it adds a new type of index for xml datatype that it supports and enhances on previous things, nothing dramatically new.

Links section added

Ive added a new links section to my blog, Most them are those which I visit regularly for updates and news (there are others concerning posts :) ).

My favorites have to be the Architecture resource and patterns and practices links, a really good resource if you are a Microsoft developer, but still good enough on general principles of modeling applications etc. I would really recommend the architecture journal which is available form the architecture resource link, it provides a good insight into whats happening in the architecture world, do's and dont's and opinions of many valued professionals in the field

I'm currently involved with e-commerce development, I came across a really good blog for a company which does research and analysis in e-commerce technology. Its a good blog, providing updates on other news and updates in the development frameworks for e-commerce...

Ive added this to the links section as well, by name of next generation shopping...