November 2007 - Posts

• "Important" Vista update is out there

  You thought about SP1?, wrong! Yes, new Hold Em Poker game is out for grab! Here are some breaking news snapshot. :) Have fun. Ariel Posted Nov 28 2007, 04:35 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with 4 comment(s) תגים:Shiny, Vista

• Home again Post

  So this will be a short personal post. I came back from South America a short time ago, and remained quite. So first I invite you to see my pictures at flickr. Photographing is a great hobby of mine, and like programming is a winner balance between technology and art. I hope you will enjoy my photographing. Second, I've started working for Sela, as a consultant, till now mainly in Team System but I'm looking forward of expanding to other directions. So stay tuned. Last note, Yesterday at the DevAcademy I really enjoyed my live-blogging and of course ,my first participation in the famous BloggerDinner (or should I say after party), thanks all for welcoming me. Ariel P.S : As a teaser some pictures from my South America collection (I also invite you to view other sets). find the blogger competition, where is the blogger in this photo? Posted Nov 28 2007, 12:58 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with 3 comment(s) תגים:Shiny, ArielAndDinaDoAmerica, Sela, DevAcademy2

• Live Blogging : DevAcademy2 : Part 4 Eliaz's Lecture about Architects role.

  Last lecture. Alots of words has been written about Team System for Architercts. mmm... Wait, are you kidding? Is someone really using this? in real life? (not just in The Matrix :)) I don't know, I've been lecturing about Team System for some time now, and except for a few words I don't alot the say about that. So it's really interesting to hear someone talks about it for more than five minutes. I got to say that still the DSLs which come out of the box looks promising but it's hard to tell how organizations will adapt them. From all the editions in VSTS, this is greatest enigma to me. I'm thinking real hard about the next questions: What are the real life scenarios of those diagrams (or if is not enough for you, custom DSL languages)? What points in the ALM process do I need to definitely recommend a customer, you really should need a diagram here, and if you go pass the learning curve you will benefit greatly. Either by lack of knowledge on my behalf or because I don't take it into account in my thinking I've never got to this point. I really interested to hear about your real time experience with those diagrams. Suppose we are certain we want to integrate those features in our ALM, how to integrate this into the customer process? other editions are really easy to integrate, Developers always like new features, Testers appreciate the connectivity with the developers over test results, DBA's are in a vacuum so they don't really have a choice here. From Eliaz's lecture DSL engine looks pretty cool and improves alot since the last time I checked it out. All new IDE features, still the usibility questions arises but I guess one need to think out of the box, because a solution for a problem which requires DSL really don't come naturally to me Got any insights about all those questions and issues arised, please share. Last words, Oslo is going to be big, need to gather as much information about that as possible. Ariel Posted Nov 27 2007, 05:26 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with 1 comment(s) תגים:DevAcademy2

• Live Blogging : DevAcademy 2. Part 3 : Guy's Lecture about Performance analysis.

  Starting from the end, it was a pretty good lecture, focused and lights a somewhat dark corner in VS ide. I got to the tell truth here, I'm developing for a long time, but never in a mindset of performance on top. Maybe it's because of bad education or lazy habits, or I'm not that a good programmer. Long ago I was a developer of an ASP.net site, I remember how I tried to add instrumentation counters to our server side code. I got to tell you it didn't work so well, It simply didn't catch up in my team. Nobody followed suite. Now, with Team System around, a more mature IDE is giving us such fruits that it's a waste not to use it, and now no more excuses, profiler is right over here and it can be easily intergreted into our development process. Maybe such nice features will change even an old dog like me who still doesn't write tests so well (I hope you approve of my honesty, it's not so popular to admit something like that, today).   I want to thank Guy for his good lecture. One remark of an improvement about the lecture, I would have wanted to see more about the results of the performance report and show us how are changes in code are reflected in those reports. Thank you Guy. Ariel Posted Nov 27 2007, 04:38 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with no comments תגים:DevAcademy2

• Live Blogging DevAcademy 2 Post 2 : DBDude

  I guess for beginners with DBdude, this was a good lecture. For me, I wanted to know more, and wanted a bit more advanced stuff to learn. I learned to use Data generators but it was fairly simple and not something I can not catch up from a simple demo. DBDude itself I find lacking, when I want to make a schema change I find myself going back to the "stone age" no designer, no intellisense, suddenly I need to remember how the syntax for primary key is written in t-sql.  Why? VS has a built in designer for data connection, a designer for sql queries. I personally prefer to use SQL management studio for my DB editing, even for Sql Express. But for DBDude it's not connected, you cannot use what is already here, and furthermore people how are used for easy-time applications are feeling awkward with that. I hoped to get some answers for that issue, to find something that I missed, because I thought that it's really not reasonable I probably missed something. So it's not Maor's fault, he was more than OK, his lecture was flawless, precised and very well focused. What I also wanted to see, altought it is not so hard, but to see it integreated with Team Build to really close up the development cycle and deployment for the production server. Anyway, that all for now. Ariel   BTW, we need to promote Live Blogging into a sport, see you in the Olympics :) Posted Nov 27 2007, 03:06 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with 3 comment(s) תגים:DevAcademy2

• Live Blogging "Dev Academy 2" : First Post Tamir's Lecture about WPF.

  Well Hello everybody, long time no see. I've been in South America and that why you didn't hear from me for so long time. But this is a long story of other occasion. Today I'm gonna post about my first two lectures I've been too. Optimizing your WPF application / Tamir. Well the lecture was very advanced and that is a good thing, I'm really sick of spinning buttons (Yes even me!). And Tamir really got a good lessons learned to teach us. The feeling I had during was why nobody told me this before. I know the learning curve of WPF is very steep and making newbie mistakes is part of life but still no guidelines to be found. It would be a good idea to write down some or  all of this stuff somewhere. Furthermore I wish to recommend you additional tool which served me quite well which is called Snoop (Omer VK recommend using Woodstock, I don't have experience with this tool). I also felt that not always Tamir explained how come he got to those conclusions, and it felt to me that he wanted to give you a list of do's and dont's which is nice, but I really wanted to learn more. I know there is a harsh time limit but still It felt in lack to me. Anyway the lecture was very very good, and I learned alot. Thank you Tamir for this. See you in the next post   Ariel Posted Nov 27 2007, 02:14 PM by Ariel Ben Horesh with 5 comment(s) תגים:DevAcademy2