Tess Ferrandez's Blog

What comes to your mind if the subject is ASP.NET and debugging?

To me it is Tess Ferrandez, ASP.NET Escalation Engineer (Microsoft). In her blogs she addresses the "memory issues", "performans issues", "crash scenarios", "debugging" etc...

Espcially crash scenarios are interests of mine. They are so well written and handy. Many to learn many to discuss she offers. If you call your self an ASP.NET developer, scratch that, if you are even slightly interested in anything that uses IIS or even ASP or, hmm scratch that too.

Sigh, you need to see her blog and decide for yourself. It is so informative and well written, I can't even describe how helpful it is. In her own words;

"This blog is intended to help people that develop applications with the .net framework resolve issues on production system, mainly using Windbg.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx along with sos.dll that ships with the debugging tools."

You can also follow her on Twitter too.

SoapUI 3.0 Final Release

I was too busy using the beta version, I missed the Final Release. For who doesn't know what it is? It is the most featured, easy to learn, user friendly SOA-Testing tool ever written.

It makes the testing process even easier, fun and eye-candy to show off in meetings. I already covered best improvements for me in an earlier post. But overally this 3.0 series will be even cooler, it looks like. Here's the official web page of SoapUI. And Here's the direct download page. Let me tell you this, it is worth the price, without second thinking. Make your project team buy this tool if you are developing SOA in order to have a fully featured testing suit for semi-pro needs.

They say "As always thank you to all of our users that have reported issues and annoyances, we owe you :-)". And I say "no we thank you eviware."

Windows 7 Performs Better Than I Expected

Hello all, today I want to write about my Windows 7 experience. I have been using it for 7 days now, and collecting data in order to write about it.

I was a Ubuntu user as I said it earlier cause I am in war with piracy personally. I do not pirate anything under any circumstances. Since I am not so rich. I am trying to avoid licensed stuff and stick with share and free ware whenever I can.

Back to business, when my Ubuntu last died, I was trying to install OpenLDAP so I can get some idea first and then decide to use it at work in development environment. Yeah, Yeah I had free time to try it out at home, that wa my mistake. Anyways Ubuntu died and I had no OS CD or DVD at that time except that MS sent Windows 7 RC 7100.

Since Ubuntu died completely at that time I had no internet connection to download anything to recover it or fix it or etc... I hopelessly put the 7100 dvd in. And my trip began.

It was a wonderfully fast installation. Under 20 minutes, and at that point I'll give my computers specifications. But under 20 minutes? wait a minute! Here goes specifications;

• Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Prescott [800 MHz bus]
• 1 GB ram [DDR 400 mhz]
• 160 GB SATA HDD
• ATI x1650

Installation ended in under 20 minutes, I was not impressed but shocked! Because last time I installed a windows on this computer it was an XP SP2 and it took twice that!

Yeah Installation ended anyway, It was a disaster from a point of finding the appropriate drivers. I had no internet connection cause it missed my NIC. I found the drivers that took my 3 minutes or so [yes I am going to count this time as setup time, at the end it was Windows' fault]. I showed the drivers. and excatly like another 3 minutes. It installed all my other drivers, including on board sound card, ATI, some other drivers that belongs to mainboard. Cause as soon as it gets the internet connection there wa appropriate drivers installed and Windowsgot updated too. So yeah it was a clear 26 minutes update. And under 30 minutes I installed the DivX codecs and start to watch movies on my LCD TV.

Along the whole week I noticed Windows is abruptly responsive on my old very old system. I am clicking on something and BAM! It is there, so fast so responsive. You know what it is even shocky that it does whole this with no HDD noise. After this week; I decided to give it a longer term chance, I found my original MS Office 2007 Home and Student Ed. installed it, give this old timer 2 GB more ram [It is now a 3GB machine with practically wings]. It is working like a magic. Looks everything right for the moment we'll see, who knows maybe this RC expired I buy a Windows 7? not go back to free Ubuntu or buy a Mac Mini? Who knows?

PS: Death To Software Piracy! I am living a true developer dream! Everything I am using is licensed or free of charge! YAY!

iPhone OS 3.0

It's released, and I got it. I liked it. Here's my quick review on the items that I found important. From most important to least important.

Cut/Copy/Paste: Wow, at last! And it works like a wonder. Having it works on SMS is also awesome. Makes it life easier. Having it works on Notes & Mail is even more awesome than I thought.

Spotlight Search: Mac is not my primary system. Not at home, not at work. But such a search tool is very very efficient, now I understand... It is a definite must have.

Shake to Shuffle: It is good to have this on iPhone because I got used to it on my iPod Nano 4th gen. So this is important for me.

Delete single SMS thing: C'mon, everybody has some secret.

Messaging: Well I so rarely send MMS. I ever used it like 4 or 5 times total in my life, but people I know is using it and sending messages through it, so having it once again is nice. I'll be able to recieve MMSs yay. And overally the Messaging application is very cool.

Voice Memos: If I hadn't bought a paid one already, this would be the single thing that is the most important for me... It is essential. It is so important for me that it was the first application I bought. So having it already makes it the last improvement for me...

Other than these either I have not tested them or they are no important for me. But one must be comment about sharing the internet feature. It is also very essential, but iPhone itself answers all my mobile browsing needs. So I don't care about it that much with iPhone. Landscape keyboard for all other applications are definetely good but not for me I was quite ok with normal one. Safari crashes got fixed they say, it must be good but so far it behaves very well for me anyway. Youtube login, meeh not that important. Multiple iTunes account management is yes kind of good. I can use it if I ever need it, maybe on vacation or away from home and my personal computer. These are all good but only on paper for me anyway. Certain scenerios must be occur so that I can find them like WOW THAT'S SO COOL!

A friend of mine was in need of sending contacts on the air. And at last he got it. I heard another friend who is very happy with new Wi-Fi feature. Heard from noone about notes sync, lol.

So they say there are over 100 new features. But those are the key ones that I tried to cover.

Oh I was forgetting that now Assassin's Creed works. So this must be why Gameloft was silent. Still it is bad publicity and stuff...

Ok, that covers all for me...

P.S: 10 mb edge limit is ridiculous and Sega's Sonic game is still not very good responsive to jump/action button.

Patience as a Virtue

Which I don't have. I have no patience whatsoever. Non at all at least when it comes to the stuff that I am very very interested in like technological toys and stuff. For instance; if it is said it is on June 17, I expect it to have it when I wake up. No compromises. If I'll have it on the next day then don't say it is on June 17, say June 18. And I couldn't care less about the time regions. I don't live in the promising party's coutry. I live in my own home country. And my time and date is set by that. Not their own country. Make it the release dates to my country because I am your customer too, you fartlings!

Although I may understand the boxed goods like electronics, hard copy video games and etc... Not all but to a level, I know logistics and deliveries are bitch most of the time. But it is not acceptable as long as the product itself is a digital download, or something like it, like a tv show or alike. Because everyone cares about their own time actually.

My words are going -especially- to big bozos like Apple & Microsoft. I wonder when this issue will become an actual issue of customer relations and customer appreciation subject. Every big company tries their best efforts to keep their customers happy, but noone thought about ridiculous times, time periods of releases and like, I don't know, help desk working hours? In my humble opinion this should be addressed.

SoapUI 3.0 Beta 2

It has been released, with a lot of fixes. That's good but what is really new? Let's take a look;

~Added native installers for Mac OS X and Linux
~Fixed moving of TestCases with properties
~Added [mocking] Multithreaded onResponse/afterRequest MockService scripts
~Added [mocking] Ability to specify local host to bind to

There a lot of new big features and fixes other than these 4. However these are the ones that I am really interested in. I am anxious to see the final version.

For the official site: Click Here!

'"Hosts" File Edit'er

Ok. I am making words up. But I am too drunk to think straight. I am sick of Windows' administrator rights and stuff. Everytime it asks me that permission thingie to edit that file, I get iritated, so I wrote this tiny little script. And sharing it with you, it's pretty simple write an IP address and then write the name for it. It will add it to hosts file. So you won't need editing it or any free dns or something like it. Just give your user `the right` from security tab to access to that stoopeed file and use my script. That's it. If you don't already know what I am talking about, you should ignore this post. Here's the tiny .VBS script.

Dim Stuff, FileSys, WriteStuff
ip=inputbox("IP?")
domain=inputbox("Domain?")
Stuff = ip & " " & domain
Set FileSys = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set WriteStuff = FileSys.OpenTextFile("c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts", 8, True)
WriteStuff.WriteLine(Stuff)
WriteStuff.Close
SET WriteStuff = NOTHING
SET FileSys = NOTHING

Notice that there is no exception handling or something, I assumed you are smart enough to execute this properly. Thanks for watching.

Scripting is even funnier, when you are drunk. I should try Sed&Awk...

Best HP QTP Blog

One address for everything you need;

http://motevich.blogspot.com/

Guy has everything. In fact; not just QTP, think about the whole solution, there are a nice selection of blogs/websites, tips, tricks, examples, etc... It is practically the best source for me right now. Whatever I am looking for it is either in the help menu of the HP tools or there in that blog. It is that simple, know this site, and the help of the tool itself. You even don't need google =] .