Contents tagged with General Software Development
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Memory Stream Multiplexer–write and read from many threads simultaneously
Here’s an implementation of
MemoryStreamlike buffer manager where one thread can write and many threads can read simultaneously. Each reading thread gets its own reader and can read from the shared stream on its own without blocking write operation or other parallel read operations. It supports blocking Read call so that reader threads can callRead(…)and wait until some data is available, exactly the same way you would expect aStreamto behave. You can use this to read content from network or file in one thread and then get it read by one or more threads simultaneously. Readers do not block writing. As a result, both read and write happens concurrently. Handy for building http proxy where you are downloading a certain file and you have multiple clients asking for the same file at the same time. You can download it in one thread and let one or more client threads read from the same buffer exactly at the same time. You can also use this to read same file on disk from multiple clients at the same time. You can also use this to implement a server side cache where the same buffer is read by multiple clients at the same time. -
ReadLine on Binary Stream
When you are reading data from a binary stream, like NetworkStream or FileStream and you need to read both binary chunks as well as read one text line at a time, you are on your own as BinaryReader nor Stream supports ReadLine. You can use StreamReader to do ReadLine, but it does not allow you to read chunks of bytes. The Read(byte[], int, int) is not there on StreamReader.
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Browse internet faster and save power using a smart HOSTS file
Internet is full of flash ads nowadays that make page load slower, render slower and consumes more CPU, thus power. If you can browse without having any flash ads or in fact any ads loaded and without any of the tracking scripts - you can browse much faster, scroll through pages much smoother and have more hours from your battery. Nowadays, most websites use scripts from various analytics sites that track your browsing habit, use IFRAME to load tracking and social networking widgets. All of these add considerable delay to page loading and make browser consume more CPU and bandwidth. If you can turn all of them off, browsing internet feels a lot smoother, faster and you get more work hours while running on battery.
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How to make screencasts in optimized animated GIF for free
I have been using animated GIFs to show short screencasts in my blogs and articles. Animated GIF is supported by all browsers and supports virtually any website in the world where even Flash is blocked. A picture is worth a thousand words, and an animation is worth a thousand multiplied by [frames in animation] words. So, I have been looking for a complete free solution to capturing screencasts and then converting it to animated GIF and then heavily compressing it.
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Exporting normalized relational data from database to flat file format
Sometimes you need to export relational normalized data into flat files where a single row comes from various tables. For example, say you want to export all customer records along with their work and home address, and primary phone number in a single row. But the address and contact information are coming from different tables and there can be multiple rows in those table for a single customer. Sometimes there can be no row available in address/phone table for a customer. In such a case, neither INNER JOIN, nor LEFT JOIN/OUTER JOIN will work. How do you do it?
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User story is worthless, Behavior is what we need
User Story is suitable for describing what user needs but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can’t write code from user stories because you have no clue on what what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can’t test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of “Context” and “Cause and Effect”, and the imprecise way of saying “As a...I want... so that...” leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there’s no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story.
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Keep website and webservices warm with zero coding
If you want to keep your websites or webservices warm and save user from seeing the long warm up time after an application pool recycle, or IIS restart or new code deployment or even windows restart, you can use the tinyget command line tool, that comes with IIS Resource Kit, to hit the site and services and keep them warm. Here’s how:
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Step by Step screencasts to do Behavior Driven Development on WCF and UI using xUnit
I am trying to encourage my team to get into Behavior Driven Development (BDD). So, I made two quick video tutorials to show how BDD can be done from early requirement collection stage to late integration tests. It explains breaking user stories into behaviors, and then developers and test engineers taking the behavior specs and writing a WCF service and unit test for it, in parallel, and then eventually integrating the WCF service and doing the integration tests. It introduces how mocking is done using the Moq library. Moreover, it shows a way how you can write test once and do both unit and integration tests at the flip of a config setting.
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Rescue overdue offshore projects and convince management to use automated tests
I have published two articles on codeproject recently. One is a story where an offshore project was two months overdue, my friend who runs it was paying the team from his own pocket and he was drowning in ever increasing number of change requests and how we brainstormed together to come out of that situation.
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Open Source WPF UML Design tool
PlantUmlEditor is my new free open source UML designer project built using WPF and .NET 3.5. If you have used plantuml before, you know that you can quickly create sophisitcated UML diagrams without struggling with a designer. Especially those who use Visio to draw UML diagrams (God forbid!), you will be at heaven. This is a super fast way to get your diagrams up and ready for show. You can *write* UML diagrams in plain English, following a simple syntax and get diagrams generated on-the-fly.