Ohad's Blog : TECH

Explanation of Raid levels

Ohad Israeli — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:20:27 GMT

While reordering some of my old hard drives I found this Image which I do not recall did where I get it from… It is funny little one explaining the basics about Raid levels.

Enjoy :-)

Silverlight 4 Training @ CH9

Ohad Israeli — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:16:00 GMT

Channel 9 just published a Silverlight 4 Training which includes hands-on-labs, a video and a whitepaper designed to help you learn about the new features in Silverlight 4 !

The training is focused on three major areas:

Enabling Business Application Development

Empowering Richer Experiences

Moving Beyond the Browser

Silverlight 4 now includes cool features like Printing, WebCam and Microphone support, custom right-click, rich text, HTML support and access to local files with trusted applications.

Check it out over here

Microsoft PDC 09 – The Videos

Ohad Israeli — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:00:00 GMT

PDC videos are starting to show up… keep an eye on http://microsoftpdc.com/Videos

The quality of the videos type WMVHIGH is very good although the files might consume large amount of storage for ones who will try to download them all.

Let the HOME PDC BEGIN !

Any chance to send home PDC attendees also a new tablet ?

Ray speaks live from PDC 09 Conf @ LA

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:45:20 GMT

Cool ! – live streaming !

http://microsoftpdc.com/

Free training on Visual Studio 2010 and C# 4.0

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:06:00 GMT

Did you know that you can train yourself for what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and C# 4.0 (also VB) ?

The Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview is available for more than a week now and it includes lots of slide decks, demos and labs covering the following topics:

Whats New In the .NET Framework 4
Whats New In Visual Studio 2010

Video: Downloading And Installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
Demo: Hello Visual Studio 2010

Common Language Runtime

Demo: System.Threading.Barrier Demo
Demo: System.Threading.CountdownEvent

Managed Languages

What's New In C# 4 and Visual Basic 10
Video: Fixing PIA Pains with Type Equivalence
Demo: Managed Languages 10-in-1
Lab: Introduction To F#
Lab: Visual Studio 2010: Office Programmability
Lab: Visual Studio 2010: Test Driven Development

ASP.NET 4

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
Whats New In ASP.NET AJAX 4
Whats New In ASP.NET Web Forms 4
Web Deployment with Visual Studio 2010
Video: Simplifying Data-Driven Web Applications
Demo: AdventureWorks using AJAX
Demo: ASP.NET AJAX 10-in-1
Lab: ASP.NET AJAX
Lab: Building an Web Application
Lab: Enhancing a Web Application
Lab: Introduction to ASP.NET Web Forms 4.0
Lab: Web Development in Visual Studio 2010

Windows

What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation 4
Lab: Building a Data-Driven Master/Detail Business Form in WPF using Visual Studio 2010
Lab: Taskbar - MFC
Lab: Gestures - MFC
Lab: Multitouch - MFC
Lab: Ribbon – MFC

Windows Workflow

Workflow 4: A First Look
Video: Workflow Web Services
Lab: Introduction to Workflow 4.0
Lab: WCF Service Discovery using .NET Framework 4.0

Windows Communication Foundation

Lab: WCF Service Discovery using .NET Framework 4.0

Silverlight

Introduction to .NET RIA Services

Data Access

Whats New In Entity Framework 4
Whats New In ADONET Data Services 1.5
Introduction to Project "Velocity"
Video: Server-Driven Paging with ADO.NET Data Services
Demo: Project Velocity
Lab: Introduction to ADO.NET Data Services
Lab: Introduction To Project "Velocity"

Parallel Computing

Parallel Computing for Managed Developers
Demo: ContosoAutomotive Demo
Demo: BabyNames
Demo: Parallel.For Loop
Demo: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)
Demo: System.Threading.Tasks
Lab: Parallel Extensions: Building Multicore Applications with .NET

Extensibility

Introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework
Video: MEF Preview 7
Demo: Demos for "Intro to Mef" Presentation
Lab: Introduction To Managed Extensibility Framework

Application Lifecycle Management

Download the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview

Channel 9 also hosting lots of VS 2010 & .NET 4.0 Training classes

What’s new in Visual C# 4.0 ? – Part 3 - Dynamic ExpendoObject

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:46:00 GMT

This is the third post of what’s new in Visual Studio C# 4.0.

At the former posts we covered optional parameters, Named Parameters at this post we will cover C# Dynamics and ExpandoObject

dynamic & ExpendoObject

C# 1.0 introduced us to the managed world (based on Microsoft perception)

C# 2.0 brought us Genetic types.

C# 3.0 introduced us to new concept – LINQ

C# 4.0 highlight is all about Dynamic Types

Say for example that you have the need to create an object on the spot and use it in a local scope, without dynamic type you had to define a class and then create the object. you could do it at runtime using reflection emit, code dom etc…now its much simpler !

All you have to do it to create an object of the type dynamic and using a special builder called ExpandoObject you can now define your object on the fly and use it.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dynamic person = new ExpandoObject(); 
            person.Firstname="ohad";
            person.Lastname = "israeli";
            Console.WriteLine(person.Firstname); 
            Console.WriteLine(person.Lastname);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

You may say… wow this is cool.. well wait and see some more cool stuff..

Now lets add to this example and say that you would like to add a functionality to this object, what about adding person.Fullname in order to join the first and last name of the person and return it back.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dynamic person = new ExpandoObject(); 
            person.Firstname="ohad";
            person.Lastname = "israeli";
            person.Fullname = new Func<string>(delegate() { return person.Firstname + " " + person.Lastname; });
            Console.WriteLine(person.Firstname); 
            Console.WriteLine(person.Lastname);
            Console.WriteLine(person.Fullname());
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

As you can see we can point the new object properties to lambda expressions such as Func<string> and define on the spot a function that will return the full name of the person.

Note that on line 12 you need to call the function and not use it as property – person.Fullname()

What will happen if you forget the () by the end of the function name ? (note the change on line 12)

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dynamic person = new ExpandoObject(); 
            person.Firstname="ohad";
            person.Lastname = "israeli";
            person.Fullname = new Func<string>(delegate() { return person.Firstname + " " + person.Lastname; });
            Console.WriteLine(person.Firstname); 
            Console.WriteLine(person.Lastname);
            Console.WriteLine(person.Fullname);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

The result will be the lambda expression itself instead of the result of the lamba expression:

ohad
israeli
System.Func`1[System.String]

You can also add methods and not just functions using the Action expression: (note line 9)

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dynamic person = new ExpandoObject(); 
            person.Firstname="ohad";
            person.Lastname = "israeli";
            person.Fullname = new Func<string>(delegate() { return person.Firstname + " " + person.Lastname; });
            person.CallOhad = new Action(() => { Console.WriteLine("Hi Ohad are you there ?"); });
            Console.WriteLine(person.Firstname); 
            Console.WriteLine(person.Lastname);
            Console.WriteLine(person.Fullname());
            
            person.CallOhad();
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

In conclusion dynamic types are cool but and there is a big but !

They are hard to debug and some of their functionality is only being tested at runtime this is why it is very important that whenever you use dynamic types test, test, and do some more testing using unit test of your code.

If you follow the following code you will notice that each of the calls to the properties in lines 11,12,13 begins with a small letter instead of uppercase. This code will compile without any errors but of course the code will fail at runtime as the properties / function names are all uppercase.

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            dynamic person = new ExpandoObject(); 
            person.Firstname="ohad";
            person.Lastname = "israeli";
            person.Fullname = new Func<string>(delegate() { return person.Firstname + " " + person.Lastname; });
            person.CallOhad = new Action(() => { Console.WriteLine("Hi Ohad are you there ?"); });
            Console.WriteLine(person.firstname); 
            Console.WriteLine(person.lastname);
            Console.WriteLine(person.fullname());
            
            person.CallOhad();
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

What's new in Visual C# 4.0 ? - Part 2 - Names Parameters

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:25:00 GMT

This is the second post of what’s new in Visual Studio C# 4.0.

At the former post we reviewed the feature of optional parameters at this post we will concentrate on Named Parameters.

Named Parameters

Lets assume you are writing the following procedure :

public static void SaySomething(string name, string msg)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0} !\n{1}", name,msg));
        }

When you want to call it from your code you are using something like:

Code Snippet

static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething("Ohad","What's up?");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

What’s the problem ?

Although you will have intellisense while you are coding it for the reader of the code its unclear what is the first parameter and what is the second parameter.

This is where Named Parameters gets into the picture. Using named parameter the code becomes much more readable to one who haven’t wrote it.

Code Snippet

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething(name: "Ohad", msg: "What's up?");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
        public static void SaySomething(string name, string msg)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0} !\n{1}", name,msg));
        }
    }

Named parameters are specially useful whenever you have multiple optional parameters of the same type. Without using named parameter how would the compiler know if the parameter which is being passed by line 5 is the name or the message.

Code Snippet

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething(name: "Ohad");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
        public static void SaySomething(string name = "Tirza", string msg = "Hi There")
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0} !\n{1}", name,msg));
        }
    }

What's new in Visual C# 4.0 ? - Part 1 - Optional parameters

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:53:00 GMT

This is the first blog from a series of blog post which I'm planning to do on whet’s new in Visual C# 4.0

Optional parameters

Optional parameters is a new feature in C# 4.0 which will let you set a default value for an argument of a method. In case that the collie of the method will omit the argument the default value will take its place.

So instead of writing the following code:

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething();
            SaySomething("Ohad");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
        public static void SaySomething()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Hi !");
        }
        public static void SaySomething(string name)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0}!",name));
        }
    }

You will only have to write:

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething();
            SaySomething("Ohad");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
        public static void SaySomething(string name = "")
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0}!",name));
        }
    }

The statement name = “” at line 11 does the trick of the optional parameter with passing and empty string as the optional parameter.

Note that some of the reader of this post my think that its better to use string.Empty instead of double quote “” as it normally do but :

Code Snippet

class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            SaySomething();
            SaySomething("Ohad");
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
        public static void SaySomething(string name = string.Empty)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Hi {0}!",name));
        }
    }

using string,Empty will result with a compilation error:

“Default parameter value for 'name' must be a compile-time constant”

And as it string.Empty is not a literal.

Download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (No need for MSDN)

Ohad Israeli — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:46:00 GMT

As for today you can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 even if you don’t have access to MSDN.

Just follow the links below and download your favorite version.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio Extensibility

.NET Framework

Team Foundation Server

Test Products

Express

Visual Studio 2010 Training Sources

Ohad Israeli — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:39:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Training Kit

The October preview of the Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Training Kit which has content that had been tested with Beta 2 is ready for download.

Download: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit

Training Course on Channel 9

Channel 9 launches an online learning center that will play host to developer focused training courses created by developers for developers. The videos and labs, with links to extensive training kits, will get you started on hands-on-learning with VS 2010 & .NET 4.0.

Browse: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course

How to Download and Install Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

In this episode of 10-4, Brian Keller takes us through downloading and installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server Beta 2. This time-compressed video will take you through all of the key things you need to know to get up and running quickly with beta 2.

Watch: Brian’s 10-4 Episode on Channel9

IDCC Conference – What a conference we had !

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:20:14 GMT

Yesterday we had the first Israeli Developer Community Conference and what a conference it was… The conference which is all about community work, sessions, topics, speakers, organizers managed to get close to 400 developers whom enjoyed sessions by:

Udi Dahan Alon Fliess Oren Eini (Ayenda)

Noam King Ariel Ben Horesh Dan Amiga

Roy Osherove Sasha Goldshtein Shlomo Goldberg Ariel Raunstien

Some of the sessions were fully packed and people haven't been able to enter them, this is exactly why we decided to record the sessions and the recordings will be available hopefully by the end of the week at the IDCC conference site: www.idcc.co.il (The sessions were delivered in Hebrew)

We did learned from the conference about the preference of the audience, more and more people were interested in pure architecture sessions, sessions like:

Reliability, Availability, and Scalability – How to have your cake, and eat it too

Building Scalable Systems

Beautiful teams and code leaders

but on the other hand… sessions on the latest technologies got also the focus, sessions like What's new in C# 4.0

This really makes me wonder why we had less participant in ALT.NET Israel as ALT.NET Israel did had a focus on pure architecture issues and less on the latest technologies.

We will take it under consideration for the next conference as the community conference is truly about delivering the sessions that community would like to hear about.

Following are some pictures from the conference taken by Guy Burstein:

Ken Egosi & Ohad Israeli – The conference organizers

IDCC – 3 days to go… 39 seats left !

Ohad Israeli — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:12:00 GMT

3 days ago when i wrote that we left with 42 seats for the Israeli Developers Community Conference at the time of the former post we still had one track and 5 sessions… in less than 24 hr we managed to fill the seats and we were facing a decision point if to move to move the conference to a bigger hall e.g. renting a 2nd hall and opening a 2nd track or ti close the registration… this was the point where Sela University entered as sponsors for the conference which helped us a lot in finance the 2nd hall… now we are again at the same point but with a different angle … 39 seats left for the conference and we will not open a 3rd track this time…

Hurry up and register if you haven't done so and i know some of you were still waiting, we will have to close the registration as soon as we will fill the capacity of both of the halls and we do expect to fill it up quickly.

Click here to register

Following is the list of sessions that will be presented over the conference, for the full agenda take a look at www.idcc.co.il/sessions

Udi Dahan

Reliability, Availability, and Scalability – How to have your cake, and eat it too

Architects love the word “scalability”. We talk about transactions per second and page views per day and on and on.

Of course, none of that scalability means anything if the system is down or if data gets lost or corrupted. Finding the right balance between reliability, availability, and scalability for the various parts of a system is critical to avoid unnecessarily costly solutions. This presentation will show a set of patterns that strikes this balance, their connection to supporting technologies, and their applicability across many enterprise domains.
You can have it all.

Alon Fliess

Dive into the Internals of Windows

Do you really know how things work? What happen when you make a system call? What is going inside? In this lecture we will dive into the kernel of the Windows Operating System family. We will see the architecture of the system and understand the role of each Executive and Kernel component. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to understand the system behavior and write much better code. About the lecturer: Alon Fliess is the CTO of Sela and a C++ MVP. For years Alon delivers the Windows Internal class at Sela.

Oren Eini

Building Scalable Systems

We aren't building single user systems anymore. If fact, we are building systems that needs to handle hundreds of thousands or millions of users. The methods that we used to build low scalability applications are not applicable when we want our applications to scale. In this session, we will talk about scalability hinderances, designing for scalability and look into some of the constraints that building scalable systems place on us.

Noam King

Do it right - Building a Complete Site with ASP.NET MVC FW

Building web sites can be an easy task, but building a Good web site is a whole different story unless you use ASP.NET MVC. In this session we'll step into the world of building web applications with the new ASP.NET MVC framework, and build one from the ground up. We'll use layers, routing, ajax, security,TDD and much more.. To do it - the right way !

Ariel Ben Horesh

Patterns of a successful application

In this session will introduce several important patterns that all together build up a successful client side application. Patterns : 1. IoC and Dependency Injection 2. MVVM (for WPF / Silverlight) 3. Extensibility and composition using MEF 4. Communication using Events aggregations (Prism)

Dan Amiga

ASP.NET Core Internals

This session is all about really understanding the internals of the ASP.NET platform and cruising it’s (highly usable) dark corners. I’ve carefully selected the topics to suit all developers so that even if you are not inheriting from System.Web.UI.Page all day you’d be very interested in how you can leverage the platform to answer non functional system requirements such as: scaling, concurrency, session handling, monitoring & hosting. Advanced web developers will have better understanding of how & why their code works (or doesn’t work), and better yet understand how to make their applications better.

Roy Osherove

Beautiful teams and code leaders

In this talk we'll explore some techniques, tactics and strategies for building, maintaining and driving a better software team and the people behind it. what does it take to lead people, to drive them? what does it mean to be in a constant state of productivity? how do you create a super effective and creative team,even if you don't have an all-star team to begin with? what tools, best practices and techniques can and should a team use to deliver great software? from automated builds to managing people - we'll try to cover some hard lessons, in a fun way.

Sasha Goldshtein

.NET Application Performance: Best Practices and Tales from the Field

Writing high-performance applications begins in the architecture and design phase, but quite as important are the best practices of memory management, resource allocation, working with unsafe code and other tricks that make all the difference. Armed with tales from the field, Sasha Goldshtein will show you how these practices affect application performance, how application performance can be measured, and how common performance problems can be diagnosed and resolved.

Shlomo Goldberg

What's new in C# 4.0

C# 4.0 has given us, developers, many new features in the language, which can help us to write the code in a simple and efficient way. Today's lecture will give you the knowledge in C# 4.0 new features, the "behind the scene" understanding of what happens whan we're using those features, and how we can broaden the capabilities of those features.

Ariel Raunstien

Building a Testing Eco-system - Not Just UnitTests

So UnitTests are important. You have to write them. Let's move on.
But ask yourself, even if you have your code coverage at 100% - do YOU feel confident about your application's customer readiness?
We'll talk a little about how to approach creating a sustainable test eco-system for your project, using regression tests; database tests; random tests; UI tests; integration tests; feature or behaviour tests; deployment tests; CI basics; and how to use the QA to your advantage, and not just make them your punching bag.

IDCC – New Agenda, We added another track !

Ohad Israeli — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:00:50 GMT

The last couple of days we had lots of registrations for the IDCC conference, adding to that Sela University & Microsoft Israel joined forces with APress & Manning Publishing in supporting the Israeli Developer Community Conference allowing us to hire a second hall for the conference and open another track !

If you haven't register yet we still have some seats open !

www.idcc.co.il/register

סדר יום:

מסלולי ההרצאות

08:30-09:00

רישום, התכנסות וכיבוד קל

09:00-10:15

Reliability, Availability, Scalability – How to have your cake, and eat it tooמרצה: אודי דהן תקציר

Dive into the internals of windows

מרצה: אלון פליס תקציר

10:15-10:30

הפסקה

10:30-11:45

Building Scalable Systems

מרצה: אורן עיני תקציר

Do it right – Building a complete site with ASP.NET MVC Framework
מרצה: נועם קינג תקציר

11:45-12:30

הפסקת צהריים, כיבוד קל

12:30-13:45

Patterns of a successful application
מרצה: אריאל בן חורש תקציר

ASP.NET 4.0 Deep Dive

מרצה: דן אמיגה תקציר

13:45-14:00

הפסקה

14:00-15:15

Beautiful teams and code leaders
מרצה: רועי אושרוב תקציר

NET Application Performance: Best Practices and Tales from the Field
מרצה: סשה גולדשטיין תקציר

15:15-15:30

הפסקה

15:30-16:45

What’s new in C# 4.0
מרצה: שלמה גולדברג תקציר

Building a Testing Eco-system - Not Just UnitTests
מרצה: אריאל ראונשטיין תקציר

16:45-17:00

מליאת סיום חלוקת פרסים

IDCC – 7 More Days From Today

Ohad Israeli — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:18:00 GMT

The Israeli Developers Community Conference (idcc) is only 7 days away !

The registration is being filled very quickly and only 42 seats had been left, Hurry up and register for the conference or you will miss the train :-)

IDCC – Conference update

Ohad Israeli — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:40:25 GMT

Hi,

Today (26/08/2009) at 12:00pm (Israel time GMT+2) we will close the voting for the conference lectures… its your time to make a last minute impact on out Israeli Developers Community Conference 2009.

Meanwhile i can tell you that two of the event’s Sponsors Manning & Apress have donated lots of books that we will drill down over the event !

Some FAQ regarding the event:

Q. Where will the event take place ?
A. We are finalizing the move from Microsoft Hertzelia to Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya http://www.idc.ac.il

Q. Why do you move the conference from Microsoft Hertzelia ?
A. We received more the 80 proposals for sessions and we would like to host several parallel tracks.

Q. Does the conference registration cost ?
A. Yes, we will have a minimal fee (around 100nis) per registration in order to cover the hosting, food & drinks over the conference. There is no intention in any way to make a profit out of this community effort by any member of the conference board. In case that we will collect more money then is needed to cover our expenses we declare here that we will spend the extra money on giveaways to be handed out over the conference.

Q. Is it a Microsoft Conference ?
A. NO, the conference is organized by a board of 5 community developers and is not influence in any way by any Microsoft employee or directions from Microsoft. The majority of the sessions that were offered for the conference are based on Microsoft Technologies and its only because no other sessions had been submitted.

* Side note: We have consulted with Microsoft DPE team in order to gain from their experience as conferences organizers. We have not been influenced by any of our decisions nor do we have any Microsoft employee member at the conference board – The conference is truly a community effort.

Q. Can you help us ?
A. We are still looking for sponsors in order to lower the registration fee, If you are working in a company that would like to contribute to this community effort please contact us via this blog (blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/ohad) or via the conference web site (www.idcc.co.il)

Q: Is there a Facebook even of the event ?
A. Yes there is a Facebook event over the following link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=243750810572