IT-Tech,Dev thoughts

Automated application configuration with XML and .NET 2.0

2005-11-24T15:09:00.000+01:00

Have you tried classes from System.Configuration namespace in you Visual Studio 2005 project? Well you should. If you haven't simply start a new Windows Application Project and see what is hidden in "Properties" branch in you solution tree window. Double click on Settings entry and using UI tool for binding configuration entries you'll notice how easy is to add a new application/user scope configuration keys for your new application.

How to use them in your project from code side?

Well, simply see how Settings.Designer.cs class looks like to comprehend some basics.

You did? Perfect. Now in sample form you just got add some controls to show your configuration entries. For example TextBox for a string entry and how to fill it with real data you might ask.
Simply! Following code fragment should help you how to figure it out:

[
textboxSample.Text = Properties.Settings.Default.YourKeyEntry;
]

If you want to save a modified (in runtime) value of that configuration key simply reverse the order and add a line of code like below:

[
Properties.Settings.Default.YourKeyEntry = textboxSample.Text;
Properties.Settings.Default.Save();
]

It will save all the "User" scope entries to the XML file. "Application" scope entries are read only as static values in definitions (see MSDN for more details).

As you see building application wide configurations is very easy with .NET and Visual Studio .NET right?

Driven by Design

2005-11-18T21:16:00.000+01:00

Security driven design
Architecture driven design
Goal driven design/architecture

How many X driven Ys do you have at your development processes. Do you make some methodologies matrix just to map it all into a single yet complex process that gives you a confidence that your software is reliable, components reusable, process well established and product secured?

Singularity news

2005-11-18T20:20:00.000+01:00

I've found that a lot of you already figured out that Microsoft's Research works on something quite different to Windows in area of operating systems. Micro kernel codenamed "Singularity" is already described in one technological report at MSR, and if you still missed that information just start looking from this URL:

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1882174,00.asp

Intrigued?

Hope to finally break up this period of silence and reactivate this blog again

2005-11-18T19:50:00.000+01:00

Hello again.

I'm glad to see that some persons enjoyed this little stuff gathered within blog. Regardless of promises I gave here and to myself mostly I was in total failure to keep it up to date to this period but now it seems that it's going to change, but let's summarize it a little bit:

PAST:
This blog's initial purpose was to show up a living process of learning latest Visual Studio .NET (2005), which is as a status not actuall anymore because to master it as quickly as possible and being fascinated as much as possible every day with every core namespace I could touch I forgot somehow on this status. I forgot to feedback my own learning experiences here. Second reason of that failure was that my little bit off-topic daily job related to Axapta implementations took me busy enough to forget for some period about this site and my own ambitions to find my way with similar developers who want to share some even basic experiences just in common sense of improovement.

PRESENTS:
Well, my current state of art is that I'm more familiar with the complete toolset and beyond. I just started cooperating closely with Polish Microsoft in area of TSC (Technical Support Coordination) in my own EMEA area and this responsibility puts me into a different position. There is still place to learning as every new day can me a real chellenge but actually it's is a real-life chellenge with real-life development processes and technological problems that're slowly becoming my everyday's world. It's even more fascinating and enthusiastic and that idea I'd like somehow (filtering of course all what's confidental) share here as a new basic status of this site. So...

FUTURE:

I'd like of course continue blogging but (at least I hope it becomes like that and your feedback only can tell me that) a level up in context of professionalism. I'd like to discuss development contexts, application blocks and areas of common programming in latest Windows enviroment that you can find problemous and intriguing in your everyday's jobs, homebrew and other hobbistic approach toward programming. With that I'd like to keep your feedback as active as I'd like to keep this site with new postings just to start some unique relationship of developers who's got a tremendous software solutions for their development cycles that can enable a new level of imagination according to what you do at your own desk with a PC set up and keyboard ready to code another line. :)

FEEDBACK REQUEST:

Well I'm currently planning to build up some agenda or my inner subjects list to post on here. If you have anything on mind that can be interesting for you related to what's been already written hear and what can I cover in relation to MS development related technologies, I'd like to read it in your comments ASAP.

take care

Came back after holiday

2005-08-17T12:01:00.000+02:00

Two weeks of holiday period just ended to me. Funny and strange experience is to see computer keyboard after a little pause ;-)

Misunderstanding

2005-07-22T16:27:00.000+02:00

This day got a name of "Misunderstanding" because of two things.
First was final testing of one project on customer side and it's likely from the stress of both sides where bug reports were shown where no bug was just bad configuration but I always hate the moment when each side tries to move the responsibility to oppositite team just not willing to check anything. I did it today and same did my customer and we stucked for a moment because intuitively I didn't see problem on my side and he didn't want to check his settings but blamed for illusionary bugs. Finally proved what's wrong but I'll get hearth attack someday.
Second reason for that name of the day is a conversation with one development team leader who tried to prove me that his players should know everything by memory and handling problems like name of an object or whole API coverage instantiously and I tried to tell him my statement that there is no shame in looking for documentation and help at "every needed moment" basis because the problem is not the function name that is gone from memory for a moment but the business problem we try to solve by our software solution. Seeh.. it's sad still to see so many persons who keep themselves at position where people should be just a memory with neverending memory and type their stupid programs without real knowledge what are they doing but how to add another line simply. Not my way buddies.. not my way ;P

functional (business) and development specification confict on flexible systems

2005-07-20T11:07:00.000+02:00

Well.. Again I've got strong focus on specification verification I get from functional consutants who usually think that the business functionality they want is always as easy to modificate as system looks like from user interface perspective. Mostly and most terrible thing is that they imagine it's just copy&paste task to do which makes me really mad if with that their approach I have to modificate strongly ledger posting engine in so complex system like Axapta is. Verification, verification and close fight to help them realize how some elements are frigile and how aware they should be while inventing new "super-hiper-duper" enhancements to the modules. Arghh... glad I won one battle here and still can keep responsibility on the stable status of the implementation. Grr.. funny is that ppl with deep experience and expertice in the system so easily forget what problems with similar approach they had in the past, but yes that's where programmers belong to build the bridge between "impossible" and "infinite". Hah! Continual dwelling deep in Axapta 3.0 SP4 so sadly not much time to continue my research at .NET 2.0 areas which irritates me slowly.

back to the basics

2005-07-11T22:03:00.000+02:00

Well I found Visual Studio.Net very intuitive since my first contact with it. I'm amazed that some basics still are troublemaking so here is one tutorial just to enhance curiosity of my friends asking questions. Let's pick up custom controls, for example a TextBox which has value change triggered by an event notifier handler by another object. Problem silly because TextBox has such an event itself but this little tutorial can show how simple you can handle custom controls basing on the Forms rich framework and delegative communication model between objects.

First we open up a new windows application object and draw on it a simple TextBox Control we want to use as a base. It works without any problem so let customize it a little bit.

Lets create a new empty class and name it CustomTextbox. After it we should add simple inheritance to System.Windows.Forms.TextBox. Then Add a Notifier class as a property like I did in below screenshot:

As you see to that notifier we add a local method handling it's base Notify event. That handler gets value stored by notifier and puts to a textbox Text property. To make it fully working we have to precise how does really our notifier look like. This can be explained by below screenshots:

as you see changing the value triggers event from interface. Now the only thing that left to us is to design our testing form with two textboxes. First is original one and second bases on our inherited version. It is same simple to place both controls as far as we can notice our customized control on toolbox like in below screenshot:

Final thing is to use Basic Text Box eventhandler for TextChanged event and rewrite its Text value to our notifier class to see that second control with have the same Text Property filled automatically. The only code to see it working is:

and here is fully functional Visual Studio 2005 project covering this tutorial: [download]

great article about power point presentations

2005-07-05T16:27:00.000+02:00

whoah, I started dwelling for interesting technical/business oriented blogs over net and found one really cool. Here is must_be read article about presentations I found there:
FIVE RULES FOR POWER POINT PRESENTATIONS
Author explains simple rules but as I remind my office and people who usually are responsible for presentations so often forget the real point indeed. Read it!

Axapta SP4 released <- reason that makes me busy

2005-07-05T15:45:00.000+02:00

Well, I promised to put a little outlook for the below diagram about the n-tier architecture but first I have to handle the latest Service Pack for Microsoft Business Solutions Axapta with EE (eastern europe) localization for my current customer for implementation and that's keeping me little busy these days. I have to admit that Axapta is a great application but polish localization if far to be awesome. I can undestand that global product development is an important thing, but with the revolution of SP3 now it comes SP4 where I have to look for specific business solution I want to use in Poland in Czech Republic configuration keys. That's kinda confusing, but as promised soon N-tier architecture design tutorial - part one.

Initial feedback

2005-07-03T01:36:00.000+02:00

I've got an initial feedback from my friends I shared the URL for this blog. Thanks for that but in further time I suggest to include it in form of comments. I'd love to see here some kind of discussion as far as I'm still considering myself as a learning person. ;)
First was about the quality of screenshots I include here. To the second one: here is url for PDF document including diagram instead of poor JPG here: http://discordia.pl/~hollow/blog/N-tier%20Architecture%20Schema.pdf
Second response was about the idea of flamewars. Yeah I know that flames are not about arguments but arguing itself. I forgot to say that I love nonsense flames :) So flame me, flame each other just to keep the discussion living. If we stop discuss and/or flame even it should be considered dead (I mean the subject) which I'd not like to see :>

Going sleep actually so happy coding to all of you who still have strength for. I'm not going to put a single line of code until I get a real rest ;)

People usually focus on their code and are little aware about design

2005-07-02T21:11:00.000+02:00

More and more I spend my time and my life at this job more and more I'm aware that I knew little every "yesterday". As design was always to me a good classes structure and logice through last two years of consultancy I've got a new level of design awareness ability. So here I go again with Visual Studio.Net 2005 and SQL-Server 2005 babbling because maybe last time I was not clear on about I'm talking. Here is a little diagram showing something that I s'pose isn't anything new to any design geek and anybody who at least did some 3-tier stuff in his life or met any modern ERP system. If you code in VS.Net or doing Java with Eclipse the method is not so important as far as you're able to precisely separate your components into layers and within layers onto subcomponents and then try to design classes hierarchy upon many architecture points considered before like security, availability, scalability, performance. On top of these goes communication model and first thoughts about certain encapsulations and everything follows a little diagram everybody should have in mind like I do... at least try. Let's see what hides my little threshold of imagination:

Now it's time to explain it.. According to my own availability it will take time.. so.. It seems Im gonna continue blogging soon..

Day Zero

2005-07-02T02:03:00.000+02:00

Day Zero is over for circa 2 hours. Time to go sleep, take a deep breath and conclude thoughts for another day. This day I finished up with initial testing of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 with a simple coding and design tricks just to feel the enviroment and tried to map it on my old code responsible for Universal Database Modelling on 3-tier enviroment concept. Not much done, more's been updated at the level of ideas. I'm still impressed with the way Microsoft's development tools are progressing. I started up Windows programming with Visual Studio 5 and C++ using GDI/DX for my simple graphics application switching from DOS and Watcom+32bit pmode assembly, then found MFC and COM and Visual Basic 6 and then left it all behind for a while to come back to Visual Studio.Net 2003 and C#. Now I see it's still the same quality brand of development tools I found during my first days of Windows platform programming whatever purpose is that. Now gonna sleep and then try to read more about a few issues I recently got on mind about testing (because I found VS2005 has support for automated testing bundled into the IDE but today I'm tired too much to dwell deep onto that)

On software architecture

2005-07-01T23:28:00.000+02:00

Years ago I thought that a good software architecture from developer's side is a well designed code, good classes hierarchy and clean approach everyday how to add a new functionality without biting my own tongue on decision if that line line code had been good enough not to destroy all the concept half of year ago when I'd never reveal the initial thought I had at the beginning.
Actually more and more I am confident that a good architecture is most concerned about decisions and analysis itself without touching the code itself (at least initialy). Process gets to be even more and more complex according to nowadays projects I'm happy to be involved to and to be honest more and more fascinating because simply coding can be boring but when I add to it a real power of long-term decisions and if I can proove that I am aware of them - I'm one hundred percent more happy and proud of the single line of code ever put in IDE's editor before and later.

So I started diagramming

2005-07-01T23:02:00.000+02:00

Damn.. I lost initial version of this post during edition. Anyway, I started diagramming ;)
I like very much some maybe little though still big enhancements Visual Studio 2005 gave me.
This little diagram made in a few mins shows up my almost two years philosophy and paradigm of rich client business applications development.

Not much to be amazed at, but the tool that enables me to do one more thing withing a single enviroment. Borland Together - I still love you in my old VS 2003 edition but beware I'm afraid Microsoft is doing a damn good job with intergration their development/authoring/editing tools into a single and complete solution. Back to Borland.. a single sentece according to one article I thoung somewhere in the garbage of internet - sorry to see you all so late every time something new is on the market, less and less space for good development tools as far as tools like Visual Studio 2005 seems to just so perfect since the initial moment after installation.

Prioritaires

2005-07-01T19:20:00.000+02:00

Actually came home from office with all the stuff gathered today plus a book (Riddlemaster from Hed) and Silent Hill 4 and now is the time to use the skill gained old time ago - prioritizing. It's known to me that I have to focus myself on as much things as possible to really give myself feeling of being "in touch". But too many is always too bad so a standard queue is always neccessary in such a moment. In background SQL Server 2005 Developer's Edition Evaluation is at it's install process. I'm cheering at the dvd box with one of few game titles that can ever gain my interest and on the left weFly247.net dvd waits for the drive to be freed to give me for this evening a good presentation layer to the things I'll propably first learn after Visual Studio 2005 installation. Then when I'll be exhausted enough I'll try to frighten myself to "death" playing SH4 and then sleep with a book to kill my eyes finally :) tommorrow we will see what conclussion I'll be able to give and contribute at this blog.

IT-World without user/developer flame war need

2005-07-01T15:51:00.000+02:00

All installation is in progress and in background as usually I do when my machine is busy I started listening .NET Rocks auditions (current is labeled by the number #116). Lot of interesting conversation have been made there. And one thought's come to my mind. Flames on platforms and technologies between users. We all know them: Windows vs. Linux, DirectX vs OpenGL, .NET vs Java, VB.NET vs C# and so on, which is IMHO useless and I've got another argument onto that.
That argument's name is interoperability. All platforms at least can be good choice when we start considering a platform. Problem is when life goes on and we approach another platform and the most important thing is not if our platform is better or not but if we can interoperate between them. Last time I had such a project between DCOM components and J2EE world in wide network enviroment between two business systems responsible for seperate tasks but one had to join the information from both to show it's reports correctly. I had to stay with DCOM at one side and get the information from these components then use COM2Java bridge from IBM and on java side stream it through RMI protocole to the J2ee system that used it to construct it's reports. It wasn't a very big project from the lines of code side but a real chellenge to see all these so different technologies and "objects" involved working together. Since that I've started believing in interoperability and still with my own prefferences and never ending sttrugle between Java and .NET I see how nonsense is flaming each other as far as we can interoperate between platforms. So good platform to me is not that which is better than other platforms (which of course can be a point either) but that which can freely interoperate with other or gives you tools to help do that interoperability task we usually have to make in our daily developer's life.

Visual Studio 2005 beta 2

2005-07-01T15:32:00.000+02:00

Whoah, I just got my DVD-box with the latest beta version od Microsoft's Visual Studio. I'm amazed with the speed they sent me that package. I ordered it a few days ago, yesterday I got a mail that the package'd been sent and today amazingly slow polish Post delivered it to me. Opening the box made even more happy and enthusiastic because 4 DVDs include for example SQL Server 2005 (Yukon) 1 year evaluation version of their latest developer's edition preview. Now I'll start I think describe my new layer of experiences Im planning to get with .NET.
My last year was a continual fight between two platforms (Java and .NET) as for application server architectures for rich client (I'm not intereseted actually at web client) and after discovering RMI and .NET remoting I'm continually dwelling both technology bases at my purposes which I suppose I'll describe later. Now I'm going to install it all and test.