Volkan Uzun

I am upgrading my desktop at work with 8gb of memory of 1tb of disk, so i decided to install a new operating system on it. I don't want to wait for Windows 7, so i decided to install windows vista.

Of course before formatting my machine, and installing everything again, i prepared a list of tools that i need to install.
Here is the list, it is scary that it is a giant set :)

Operating System: Windows Vista 64 bit business edition, drivers, service packs
Office Tools: Office 2007
Development Tools:

• Visual Studio Team Suite Edition 2008
• NUnit
• NAnt
• Cruise.NET
• Resharper
• Sql Server 2005 & 2008
• MySQL
• Eclipse with php extensions
• Fiddler
• Ssh Client
• Dreamweaver
• Photoshop
• Azure Tools
• MVC Release Candidate
• Silverlight Devleopment Tools
• Mono for Windows
• Castle Project
• Temcity
• Codesmith 5.0
• tortoise SVN
• AnkhSvn
• Redgate belt
• Microsoft Ajax Control Toolkit
• Jetbrains Dot Trace
• Expression blend
• dbVisualizer
• Oracle .NET provider
• Tree Surgeon

• Opera
• Safari
• Internet Explorer
• firefox
• Chrome
• IE Web Developer Toolkit
• Firebug
• DragonFly
• Digsby
• Thwirl
• live writer
• live mesh
• coreFTP
• Messenger

• Vpn Client
• Meeting Maker
• Launchy
• Google Desktop search
• CA eTrust
• Debug Wink
• Pdf Reader
• Flash player
• Silverlight
• Winrar
• cdburner xp

Any other tools ? dont know, i will give myself 1 day to remember other tools i might be using :)

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Today was a usual day for me, came to office, grabbed my tea, ran Visual Studio 2008, open the project i was working on, checked out latest edition, and compiled. Nothing special until i started modifying the master page in the project. I added some script tags to include JavaScript files, and a new css link, then i opened one of the aspx page, and got the error: "Page has one or more controls that do not correspond with controls in the Master Page". The master page was correct, the child pages were correct, but then where was the problem? Immediately i googled this error, after seeing so many suggestions (Google results are slowly becoming junk unfortunately), i figured out that this is a bug with Visual Studio. Solution is very simple :) however i still don't know what kind of bug could be in the program to cause this? Basically change the:

<link  ..=".." />, <title... />, <script... />tags into <link...></link>, <title...></title>, <script...></script>
and the project will work again. Have fun

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Yesterday i decided to relax at home yesterday, i am not a tv person, so usually there is nothing on tv that can entertain me, but i have youtube :). I like darbuka (a small drum like instrument) a lot, i cant play it but i love listening it. I opened up youtube.com and searched for darbuka.Here is a small list that i like listening, have fun:

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I was reading about NHibernate in the last 3-4 days.  When i heard that LINQ2SQL will not be supported anymore, i was looking for a good ORM tool, and i decided to give a try to NHibernate. I just went to its website and downloaded version 2.0.1. I decided to write a very simple insert operation using NHibernate so i opened up many websites talking about NHibernate tutorials and tried to copy the code. I got so many errors :) that one time i decided to give up. One major problem i had was the configuration settings, unfortunately NHibernate wasn't throwing good error message so it took me sometime to figure out that configuration settings for NHibernate 2.0.0.1 is different than older versions, so here is a sample configuration file i have in my app.config that works :)

<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section name="hibernate-configuration"
        type="NHibernate.Cfg.ConfigurationSectionHandler,NHibernate"/>

    </configSections>

    <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2">
        <session-factory>
            <property name="connection.provider">
                NHibernate.Connection.DriverConnectionProvider
            </property>
            <property name="dialect">
                NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2005Dialect
            </property>
            <property name="connection.driver_class">
                NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver
            </property>
            <property name="connection.connection_string">
                Data Source=acm48_89\SQL;Integrated Security=True; initial catalog=StudentsDB
            </property>
        </session-factory>
    </hibernate-configuration>
</configuration>

After i set this up, i got my second error :), which was basically telling me that NHibernate can’t find the property in my class. My class was partially like this:

public class Student
   {
       public int SID { get; set; }
       public string FirstName{ get; set; }
       public string LastName { get; set; }

…

and my mapping xml was:

<class name="Student" table="Students">
       <id name="SID" access="field" column="SID">
           <generator class="native"/>
       </id>
       <property name="FirstName" access="field" column="FName"/>
       <property name=”LastName access=”field” column=”LName”/>
  </class>

NHibernate was telling me that it can’t find any of these properties :), so i tried to read the documentation and it was really boring, and for some reason i don't remember, i decided to remove access=”field” section from the mapping and xml, and boom, this error message disappeared and i got my third error message :) which  this time was more self explanatory: The properties has to be virtual.. This was easy fix for me as i read that, to support lazy loading, you have to mark you fields as virtual. I didn't want to have lazy loading for this simple project, so i added the key to mapping xml to turn off the lazy loading which is simply :lazy="false"

i think i am kind of having fun for now while i am learning NHibernate but i will use code smith to derive my classes and configuration settings once i get familiar doing them manually.

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I am attending this year’s Mix event at Las Vegas. I took so many training classes for Microsoft products, been an active .net developer from some years, and first time attending this type of event :) Before i attended TechEd, or Google Developer’s Conference, and first time MIX thanks to Lynn Langit. I am checking some of the sessions and i am glad to see lots of Silverlight sessions. I don't know why i couldn't see many Silverlight sessions at code camps and i started to think that Microsoft was pushing enough. Now that seeing lots of Silverlight sessions changed my idea.

At work, i might use Silverlight in the future, for now,we use flash to stream the videos, and as long as there is no converter from a flash streaming video to Silverlight streaming video, we wont be jumping to Silverleright directly. So many hours and millions of dollars are already spent to record those videos, nobody can trash them :).

As a developer and most of the time as a person deciding the technology to use for the future projects, i will definitely use Silverlight, as i speak C# but not actionscript :). I already start talking about Silverlight at work to influence people ;).

See you at MIX

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One of my friend had an interview with a company, and he told me it didn't go well as they asked some detail questions in C#. I asked him to tell me a few of the questions. One question was interesting i guess, cause i think it is so simple that nobody will ask in the interviews. Of course guess what? my friend didn't give the right answer :).

It is a small sample code, asking what is wrong this with code. here is the code:

string name=”john Doe”;
if(name.Length)
{
Console.WriteLine("name is greater than 0 characters");
}

Maybe my friend was very anxious during the interview, as it is very difficult to get a job nowadays (economic crisis really hurt a lot), but i think any decent c# programmer should see the problem right away because it is a compiler time error. It is difficult to catch the runtime errors, but compile time errors? You just need to compile your code a good number of times i guess :) Anyways let’s go back our question. If you read the C# reference for if keyword, you will see that inside the parentheses right after if; you have to write an expression that can be implicitly converted to a bool.  Integer types can’t be converted to bool implicitly, and you have to write an expression that will evaluate a boolean value .

In the code if(name.Length) , the expression name.Length returns an integer not a bool, so if want to fix this code :

string name=”john Doe”;
if(name.Length>0)
{
Console.WriteLine("name is greater than 0 characters");
}

Also checkout String.IsEmptyOrNull()

let the force help you

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