April 2003 - Posts

• MVC pattern in .net

  I was going through the book Design Patterns in VB.Net, basically i was intrested in the MVC pattern, i've been thinking about implementing something like that but the pattern presented in the book was in VB.Net ewwww.. and it didn't look too robust either. So that's another thing to do on the huge backlog of things to do :)   Posted Apr 16 2003, 09:53 PM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• Log4net is neat

  After going through the log4net manual and adding some logging statements to my code, i must say that i am quite impressed with the overall design and ease of use of the framework. I am going to use log4net into production code now and i am also thinking about discontinuing the use of Microsoft Exception Management Application Block since i can get all that functionality using log4net. Posted Apr 16 2003, 09:51 PM by Sijin Joseph with 1 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• Build woes continue

  Spent the whole day doing R&D for possible automated build options. It seems NAnt based solutions like Hippo.Net, Draco.Net etc. are good but it will require the effort of porting the vs.net sln build files to NAnt scripts. Slingshot for some reason didn't work on my system . I think i need to devote some more time to this but the current deadline does not permit such luxuries. I've got tons of documentation and tools downloaded, hope i can go through them on the weekend. I did find a lot of material on build options though. Also looked at FinalBuilder, seems nice but i am looking for somethign that's free. So finally i modified BuildIt a bit and will be using that until i can get some time to hack out a customized solution or get the hang of using NAnt. One other thing i realized while reading through some sites was that it might be better if i move all my unit tests into a seperate project and then i can include that as a post build step. Currently i am reading the Log4net manual, have to instrument a previous version of the application to do some debugging. Debugging distributed applications is such a pain. Posted Apr 16 2003, 08:01 PM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• VS.Net build woes

  After last weeks euphoria of getting BuildIt working, i noticed some shortcomings in it, basically it uses VS.Net automation to build projects, but it fails to build solutions which i can build from the IDE, so i am back looking for a nice clean build tool for .Net, right now i am  setting up CVS access to NAntContrib and also have Draco.Net downloaded, let's see how it goes.   Posted Apr 14 2003, 07:45 PM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s)

• Essential .Net - Don Box and Chris Sells Rock!!!

  Just finished reading Essential .Net volume 1 by Don Box and Chris Sells, i must say the book blew me away just like Essential COM did. The level of detail and insight into the CLR was amazing. Don Box is truly lord of the geeks. The chapter on interception and contexts was truly superb, and so was the material on reflection. On a related topic Applied .Net framework Programming by Jeffery ritcher is also a great book about .Net internals, can't wait for Vol 2 of Essential .Net to be released in India.   Posted Apr 14 2003, 06:06 PM by Sijin Joseph with 3 comment(s)

• Off for trekking

  I am off for a one week trek into the himalaya mountains tomorrow morning, my first real adventure :D :D The only thing that worries me is how to do the morning thing in the jungle....hehehe. Posted Apr 05 2003, 11:13 AM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Personal

• Centralized remoting

  Although the current implementation of remoting is great and offers great flexibility but it becomes a big pain when the number of objects invlolved is large, updating each config file whenever the location of any object that it uses changes can be very tedious work, i wonder if there is some work in progress to have something like the naming service in java. I think i will need to implement something like that because we have around 10 remote objects which use each other so synchronizing config files slows down development a  lot , it would be better to develop a service that knows the locations of remote objects of various types, Basically it would be a  Type --> Url mapping. All remote objects would register themselves when their host starts up and de-register when the host shuts down and then to get an instance of a paticular object i would just have to use this "Object locator" service, infact i could even implement some knind of load balancing on this component. Posted Apr 05 2003, 11:09 AM by Sijin Joseph with no comments Filed under: .Net

• Configure Multiple locations for remote objects.

  I faced this problem once while working on a distributed application using .Net remoting, basically i wanted to implement some kind of load - balancing, so i figured that i could have the server objects running on different machines and the urls for all server machines in the config file. The problem is if you have multiple urls for the same type in the config file and do RemotingConfiguration.Configure() then it throws an excpetion saying that you are trying to redirect and already registered type. So i wrote this small class that reads the configuration file and parses it and allows you to get the list of WellKnown as well as Activated client types, you can then just directly activate the object without registering it. I was initially planning on posting the code directly to the blog but it seems to be a bit too long to post directly to a blog, maybe Scott can provide some space where i can upload some of my files :) :) otherwise i will have to look for some site that allows me to post code snippets. Google here i come.   Posted Apr 05 2003, 11:03 AM by Sijin Joseph with no comments Filed under: Source

• Got BuildIt working..

  Finally got around to configuring the build script for BuildIt (Nice build tool for VS.Net). It works great, builds both ldebug and release versions by automatically checking out the source from VSS and archives previous builds and lets you maintain a consisten version number across all assemblies in your solution. I must say Team Development Guide is a must read for anyone working with VS.Net. Posted Apr 04 2003, 04:56 PM by Sijin Joseph with 2 comment(s) Filed under: .Net

• RSS Bandit

  I just love MSDN, found another great article on a news aggregator with source code, i know syndirella is there too, but still this is nice :):) Desktop News Aggregator aka RSS Bandit Posted Apr 02 2003, 02:53 PM by Sijin Joseph with 1 comment(s)