I think everybody, in the developer and architecture world, knows who is Mr. Ivar Jacobson. One of the founder of RUP and author of numerous famous books on methodologies and UML. I am not the biggest fan of UML, but the thing we can agree on is that, at least, UML is a basis to communicate ideas to people that are not only technical.

Jacobson was in Zurich to explain his latest thoughts on how to build software quickly and at low cost.

He started by talking about a fact we cannot ignore. Indeed, in the last decades, we have seen different trends and waves in the software development. In the 80's, the trend was Object Oriented Programming. Everybody wanted to do OOP. En of 90's, it was CMMI and XP. And today, it's Agile and Scrum. From this history, we can extract mainly two things : the basements are the same, but with new words. At the end, we are recycling ideas under brand new names. The second, according to him, is that most of the CMMI level 5 companies are now just filling papers and quality of deliverables didn't improved that much. By the way, it reminds me the trend of ISO 9001 certifications. What is the status today ? I don't see companies marketing on this anymore…

Another point is that people really hate processes and they don't read processes book. Because it is too long, too complicated and not suited for their day-to-day work. Again, Jacobson says that during conferences he did in the big off-shore software companies, we he asked who was liking processes, only few raised their hand. But, when he asked who hated processes, more than 60 to 70% of the people raised the hand.

So, Jacobson says that it is time to turn into practices. And what is a practice ?

First, a practice has a beginning and an end and is something that is currently used. Moreover, a practice should focus on essential things. Jacobson identified three practice groups :

Peer practices that includes, for example, Use Cases Driven Development and Project Management "à la Scrum".

Extension Practices, such as Use Cases for SOA

And Cross-Cutting Practices that implies workshops and pair programming.

Then, the first goal is to extract a kernel practice which is a kind of metamodel that can be applied to every practices.

Once the practices have been identified, you don't have to apply them to every projects throughout the enterprise, but rather take a subset of the practices that suit the current need.

Finally, what I found fun is the concretization of these practices. How they are materialized. Jacobson showed the audience a set of (pocket) cards on which the practice is presented. This way allows easily manipulating and consulting them. For each kind of card, few pages (from 2 to 3) of guidelines to drive the card into practice with, maybe, links to other informations.

The final word is that rather than having a huge and heavy process that will never be used or implemented correctly, using best practices is more agile. And the fact that it has a concrete side makes it even more interesting. On the other side, we can see and feel that Jacobson is a really good speaker and he is quite used to this exercise.

For more information, visit the following links :

http://www.esswork.com

http://www.ivarjacobson.com

I am selling some electronic equiment that are part of my previous life when I was still doing audio and digital electronic. The fact that I am not using these device any more since more than.......lot of years made me selling them.

So, here is a list of the electronic instrument I am selling :

Oscilloscope Iwatsu SS-5720 => 150 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815752)

Multi-Function Instrument (V/A/Ohm/F/Hz) Metex MS-9140 => 300 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815743)

Function generator Leader LAG-120B => 100 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815726)

Function generator Voltcraft FG-506 => 200 CHF (more information, in french : http://www.anibis.ch/n/1815721)

Feel free to contact me if you are interested in some or all of these devices.

I have been needing a BPMN and a UML 2 stencil for Visio 2007, and, truth said, I think I found my happyness in the following stencils :

For UML 2, I found one at softwarestencils. There are plenty of different stencils, even for Visio 2007. It offers all the shapes, but for some of them, you need to change the properties of them to have them appearing on your design surface. So, for UML 2, go there.

Regarding BPMN, the one proposed by Tyner Blain is a goodfit and it seems, at a first glance, it fits all my current needs. It offers all the BPMN shapes, the only thing missing, maybe, are the swimlanes.

Sizing correctly a virtual hard disk (VHD) during the creation of a virtual machine is not really easy. Well, it is possible to see big and to set the maximum size at 100GB, but I am not a great fan of always oversize an infrastructure.

So, it happened yesterday that my virtual machine hosting my SharePoint 2007 development environment was running out of disk space and the question on how to resize a vhd file came to my mind. My friend google gave me a lot of answers but none of them were working totally. Basically, you have several steps to follow :

1. To resize the VHD file
2. To expand the disk size within the guest operating system

For the first step, there are essentially two main choices : VHD Resizer, which is free and available on the vmTools web site, or VHD Utility from Xtralogic. I decided to go for the VHD Resizer tool and I was quite happy with that. The main reason was that I wanted to expand my VHD at the lowest price...(at the end, it costed me a bit...)

Regarding the second step, it was another story. On the web, there are a lot (and when I say "a lot", I really mean a lot) of tools, free or not, to manage partitions and disks. To give some examples, you have Partition Magic, gParted and ParagonPartition Manager to give only the few I tested. Then, you can also use diskpart or even vhdmount to manipulate the drives and expand them.

gParted is free and you can download a live CD in the ISO format that allows you to mount the drive directly from the Virtual PC application. Unfortunately, it did not work for me, Windows Server was not able to see the new disk size.

The same problem occurred with Partition Magic.

At last, I have given a try to Partition Manager 9.0 Server. It costs $299 and it is quite expensive, but when I realized that I had spent already more than half a day to solve this resizing problem, I rapidly decided to go with that tool. Then only problem I see with that kind of product is that you cannot really test if copying a hard disk (especially a Windows Server 2003 boot disk) works, because most of these tools (it was the case for PM 9.0) works only in simulation mode if you have only the trial version. So, spending 299 dollars without really knowing if it will fit the needs is a bit worrying.

Then, using PM 9.0, I copied my original hard disk to the target one, I resized the partition to take the whole disk and.......it worked perfectly. It took 1 hour to copy everything and to make the partition bootable for a 40GB disk. Windows Server 2003 was not only able to see the new disk capacity, but the disk was bootable.

Again, I would have preferred to do it using free tools, but with PM 9.0 Server (the server version is important here, because Windows Server 2003 is supported) I did it end-to-end with success.

It is done !

I successfully passed the 70-631 exam and I am now MCTS on Sharepoint, more precisely "Configuring" SharePoint.

It was not so easy (that is why it is a certification) and it required a bit of work in order to be able to see the different aspects of the SharePoint configuration. MeasureUp helps, but when you are in front of the screen for the exam, you realize and you thank the experience you have with SharePoint...

But, it is done, and now, go for the next one...

If you are in the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) field, you should go to the ZapThink's 5th SOA Practitioner's Conference in Geneva, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

This event, sponsored by my Company, amongst some others, will held several interesting topics such as the basics of SOA (Fundamental SOA Concepts) and real world application of SOA (Real implementation cases of SOA).

Go there and have fun with SOA...

Couple of days ago, I received an e-mail on one of my e-mail address I use to receive spam warning me that I won an auction on e-bay. It sayd I commited to buy a tanning bed and it invited me to pay it by a connection on their web site using a button available in the e-mail.

So far, no problem. The only odd thing was that, even I have an e-bay account, I do not use that e-mail address and more strange, I never made any bid for a tanning bed.
Then, this was a clear attempt of phishing, and let's demonstrate how it works.
First, what is phishing ?
Phishing is a technic used by people to obtain personal and/or confidential information from the victims by claiming they are from a banking company or somebody you trust.
In this case, it was eBay, a well-known target for this kind of attack.
In the body of the e-mail, there was a button redirecting you to a fake e-bay web-site to sign-in and enter your user id and password.
This button opened a web page at http://www.ebay.com.item3-login.com (do not try this link, the web site is already offline) which had exactly the same look-and-feel as the original one. That URL might wake up a red light in the head of people who knows how internet works.
In fact, if we carefully look at the URL, we do not access to the eBay web site (in this case, it should be www.ebay.com), but, instead, a web site named item3-login.com. This domain name is owned by a person who has a really strange phone number, only composed of 4 and 7.
With the login form, the owner of the site can get user ids and passwords from a lot of users.
These last months, lot of e-mails coming from supposedly banking companies are received by people, requesting to verify some personal informations. Here, it must be said that banks do not communicate this kind of request by e-mail, but only by letters.

A communication from the BCV about phishing : http://www.bcv.ch/html/bcvnet/conseils-securite/securite-phishing.html

Currently developping a little application using the Framework 2.0 and the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class, I got this nice exception when trying to set the StopBits property of my SerialPort instance to StopBits.None :

Quite strange, isn't it ?

Knowing that GIMF, nothing to read about this problem, or a little in the mono version of .NET. So, I launched one of my favourite tool, Reflector, to see inside the System.dll (Version 2.0.0.0 in the Framework version v2.0.50727) assembly. And here is the result when we look at the set_StopBits sub :

As we can see, before setting the property to the value passed in parameter, a little check is done on its value. And if that value is less than StopBits.One, it throws the ArgumentOutOfRangeException. Maybe the guy who wrote this code forgot to add a "N" at the beginning of the enum value....

Or, if it is what they really wanted to implement, nothing in the documentation is telling it is forbidden to set the StopBits property to None.

If anyone reading this post has an answer, I would appreciate at its own value and I thank you for your comments....

I just finished the setup of atlas and I get a nice errror :

Parse Error Message : Unrecognized attribute 'xmlns'

If you look at the image below, you can see that the framework used to run the Atlas local web site is in version 1.1. However, as Atlas would let guess, it uses the version 2.0 of the framework.

To fix this little issue, you must go in your IIS management console to change the version of the isapi filter to use for this virtual directory. Right-click on your virtual directory and select "Properties" in the contextual menu. It will display the "Virtual Directory Properties" window, then click on the "Configuration..." button and select the "Mappings" tab in the "Application Configuration" window. Finally, for every Extensions that are using the .Net Framework 1.1, click the "Edit" button and change the aspnet_isapi.dll file to use and look for a 2.0 version of that file. The image below shows how it should look like.

After this fix, the atlas web site should run perfectly...

The Official Microsoft "ATLAS" Site

Session I111 – Biztalk 2006

Probably the unluckiest session of the day…

I was waiting a lot of this talk. A bit took much I’m afraid. But, frankly, what to say about this presentation ? I really do not know, because the slides presented were nothing but what biztalk developers already know. And, unfortunately, all demos failed because of a virtual machine problem…

Session D310 – Writing Mobile Enterprise Applications Using the .NET Framework 2.0 and SQL Server 05 Mobile Edition

Probably the biggest title session of the day…

Sascha Corti is definitely a great speaker. He is fun, he knows how to speak and how to present things clearly with a lot of humor and a good rhythm.

He started his talk with the features included in the Messaging and Security feature pack among them, I could say S/MIME support, Gzip compression for emails and the possibility to push emails from the Exchange Server to the Pocket PC.

One of the major improvements in the Compact Framework 2.0 is that it is now possible to use the mobile devices such as the camera, the outlook agenda, and sending SMS or making calls. Before, it was a hassle to do these things. The new version now covers about 86% of the standard System.Xml namespace and 91% of the System.Data namespace. Moreover, there are fewer components to install afterwards than before. Controls, such as the web browser, have been added to the toolbox. With the previous version, to launch the web browser, P/Invoke calls were needed. To utilize the mobile devices, it is incredibly easy and most of the samples presented were about 10 lines of code to send SMS, catch or make a call and so on.

Following this introduction, Sascha made a demo of the publish/subscribe feature of the SQL Server 2005, publishing two tables on his laptop and subscribing to them with the SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition. It was also amazing to see how Visual Studio 2005 can generate parent/child data bound controls without any intervention of the developer.

In the System.Xml namespace side, the serialization is now supported in the compact framework. But, using datasets in applications is not the best idea on Pocket PC. We can add a lot of memory in our PCs, but, mobile devices cans not go over 128MB of memory. That’s too bad ! That is where the SqlCeResultSet come in play. This is nothing but a brand new connected dataset only available in the compact framework. Its behavior and features are exactly the same as the Dataset. At the end of the presentation, he gave us a secret…….in the next version of the compact framework, WinFx will be included…..

Sascha Cortis's blog

Session A209 – New XML file formats

Probably the shortest session of the day…

Office 12 or Office 2007 will now use the OpenXML standardized format (yes, I know, it is a Microsoft format, but I hope it will be followed by others to store documents) to store Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. This could break the compatibility with the previous versions of Office unless Microsoft provides a way to export/import new documents to older versions of Office. And they will….at the same time they will release Office 2007. For the user, the only difference he/she will see will be the extension used to name the documents. For Word, it will be either .docx or .docm depending if the document does not contain or does contain macros in it respectively. This will avoid to open a document to see that finally it contains macros.

For a developer point of view, the difference is more evident. He will see a zip file. To proof that, simply rename a .docx or .docm file to a .zip one. For the little story, you could do the same with an OpenOffice document. Into this package, at least one file, [ContentTypes].xml and three folders. The [ContentTypes].xml contains all the types of sub-document that can be found in the document, such as dooters and headers. In the .refs folder, there is one file containing all links from the main document and its sub-documents. And finally, the documents with the content in plain XML are also stored in one of these folders.

The major advantage of this new format is that files will have a more little size because of the zip compression. Secondly, it is now possible to generate reports or documents automatically from a web server, for instance, without installing the well-known OLE-Com Office library.

Session D308 – LINQ

Probably the most advanced session of the day…

The problem we face every day is to transform relational data into hierarchical objects and that is why O/R mapper exists such as Nhibernate for instance. The representation of these two models is totally different. But, retrieving objects with a query like we do in traditional databases would be really nice. One of the answers could be LINK, a language agnostic concept to query not only data, but objects as well. More precisely, to query collections of objects. LINQ  means Language Integrated Query. Take for example the following statement :

var c = from Customers

            where c.City == ‘London’

            select c.Name

Var is then a new data type which is completely different from the object type. It is a location to store a projection which is, in fact, the result of a query. If you open an assembly containing such code with ILDASM, you will see that c is translated to a projection class. From this c variable, it is possible to cycle through it to display its properties. The most efficient way to do it is to avoid the use of the foreach loop statement. Indeed, this instruction is transformed to a bunch of code included in a try/catch block which is really a performance killer. That means if you want to optimize your code for speed, look at your loop statements and replace your foreach loops by a standard for(int i = 0; i < c.Length; i++). The speed will increase by a factor of 10.

Session D304 - WinFX : Presentation Foundation

Probably the most terrifying session of the day...

Remember the days you wrote your personnal web site in Notepad or, if you were lucky enough, in Ultra-Edit. Was it......15, 20 years ago ? Ok, so let's go back in 1990's and replace HTML by XAML. No kidding, this presentation was awful. Not because of the quality of the speaker nor the content itself but only because, so far, the only way to write user interface in XAML for Windows Vista is by hand !

Of course, the only limit in designing a UI with XAML is your imagination. It was demonstrated that it will be possible to completely separate the code from your UI description. This offers you a way to customize the look-and-feel of a windows application as you want or depending of the current user, for example.

One reason why Microsoft started with the WPF is to avoid an application UI to freeze. This is mainly caused because the UI thread is consuming so much CPU avoiding a refresh of the UI. 

WPF is using a DirectX surface to draw the user interface. Moreover, when Vista draws a user interface, the WPF extracts what Microsoft call CompNode from the XAML definition in one thread and it will use an other thread to draw in the DirectX surface by using the CompositionEngine. A CompNode is generated for every controls or widgets that compose the UI, building a tree of CompNode. Then, the CompositionEngine will take this tree and generates the right graphic instructions to render properly the user interface. This avoids then any UI freeze.

Now, the question that may raise is : what will happen with GDI+ and DirectX applications ? For old applications, using GDI+ application, Vista will open a DirectX surface and will take GDI+ instructions and draw them in the surface. For DirectX applications, there will be no problem at all and they will be supported.

The Nicolas Clerc's blog

Tekigo's web site

Session D303 - WinFX : Workflow Foundation

Probably the most interesting session of the day...

By introducing a new framework such as Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET 2.0, Microsoft is offering a very nice way to design and modelize business and human workflows. Altough Nicolas Clerc talked about the possibility of the use of BizTalk server to build human workflows which I really doubt because there is simply no possibility to build a state machine with it, I found this presentation really interesting.

The first demo he showed us was the creation and the instanciation of a workflow in about 10 lines of code. He showed the possibility to create composite activities as we already do with ASP.NET controls.

An example of persisting a workflow instance in a database with an examination of the content of the table was demoed as well. Simply do a ".Save()" on your workflow and....that's it !!!

On the other hand, it is also possible to define a workflow using XML. Indeed, Microsoft developer XOML to modelize workflows and, after a little discussion with Nicolas, it would be possible to change a workflow definition at the run-time. But, in the meanwhile, when a workflow is designed, it is compiled by the workflow compiler (wfc.exe) and then compiled by the C# compiler as well. Then, this generates a dll. To run a workflow, it needs a host which can be an exe or any other type of application.

http://www.windowsworkflow.net

Session D302 - WinFX : Communication Foundation

Probably the most utopian session of the day...

Do not take my words at the first degree. When I say "utopian", I mean that putting all communication means together in a single framework and providing a single layer to the developer is a very challenging goal.

The Windows Communication Foundation (previously known under the name "Indigo") will offer a unique framework with which it will be possible to interoperate with applications that are using web services, .Net remoting, MSMQ or COM+.

The applications written with this framework will take their communication settings such as the access point, transactional behavior or security, from a single configuration file like a web.config one. Some new attributes have been introduced among them the [ServiceContract] and [OperationContract]. With these attributes, a web service can implement an interface which is radically new.

http://www.windowscommunication.net

This is a first post about the TechDays 2006 in Geneva. I will try to write what I heard during the sessions and all comments are welcome...

Session D301 - A real project using WCF and WF

Probably the most b.....ing session of the day...

The speaker of this session spent, at least, the first 30 minutes of his presentation to explain the structure of the Universities of Applied Sciences of Switzerland and its implication at the HEVs level (HEVs means Haute Ecole Valaisanne, which is located in Sierre). From my point of view, this is not a topic for such conferences where almost all the people were here to listen others talking about technology.

Finally, he talked a bit about a coming project that will maybe start in May or June.

The goal of the project is to use a RFID in a tracking system for cheese (this was taken as an example). Basically, it will use the WCF, BizTalk Server or the WWF. Nothing really technical and the last 20 minutes were spent to talk about RFID, once again a bit off-topic...

http://www.hevs.ch

Last 14th and 15th april were the TechDays 2005 at the Ramada Park Hotel as every year. During these two days, different speakers explained and demonstrated the next Microsoft technologies we will use the next few years. This was a good opportunity to do some networking or simply chatting with other colleagues or speakers. For the first time this year, there were 3 different tracks for infrastructure, architecture and, of course, development.

Day One
Soyez prêt(s) pour ASP.NET 2.0 / Be ready for ASP.NET 2.0
Christine Dubois and Bernard Fedotoff of AgilCom exposed some new features of ASP.ENT 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. Now, it will be possible to split class definition in multiple files in order to put all designed-generated code in one file and to write our code in an other one. That feature is called partial class. If that notion sounds interesting, it is not so new and exists already in other programming languages like Objective-C and its categories. Moreover, on large projects, finding a class in a big tree is already hard, so let's imagine if we start to split classes over multiple files, it would not be easier...
Then, there was a presentation about Master Pages, skins and themes. Master Page concept is the most interesting to me, allowing to no more inheriting pages. On the skins and themes side, it is no more than CSS files for server components.
The main goal of that presentation was to write zero line of code. But all designer generated code was in the .aspx page remembering me my old good asp 3.0 pages some years back. The programmation showed is more declarative, using attributes instead of code behind.
Good point for Visual Studio 2005, refactoring. It will be possible to change a public class variable to a property in just one right click. Changing a variable name will also be easy without doing a search-and-replace...

L'accès aux données sous ASP.NET 2.0 / Data Access with ASP.NET 2.0
The same speakers for that presentation about data access and spoke about new related classes. Caching, using a table and some triggers to call client code, was also the subject of the show.

Nouveauté dans les langages / New Language Features
Nicolas Clerc of Cross Systems was the speaker for that subject. He presented the generics for C# and VB.NET, allowing these languages to know all the goods of the C++ templates. Generics will allow to specify types for some data structure such ArrayList for example. Type problems will be detected at compile-time instead of run-time.

Nouveauté des Windows Forms 2.0 et déploiement "Click Once" / Windows Forms 2.0 New Feature : "Click Once"
As I understood, Windows Forms will be called Smart Clients....
Click Once seems to be a very good deployement technology with pros from rich clients and pros from web applications. The lasts allows to update without any impact on the client side. On the other hand, rich clients have a more complex user interface. With a link in an intranet (or internet), the application using Click Once will be downloaded on the client side and then run. That application can be really installed on the client side, showing it under the "Add / Remove Programs" of Windows or it can just be in a user cache. What is interesting is on the update side. When an update is available, the application will prompt the user if he want to update or not (the update can be forced). In the case of a real installation, it will be possible to roll back of one (only) version in the configuration panel. Click Once will offer a framework to update the application programmatically.

L'accès aux données sous Windows Forms 2.0 / Data Access in Windows Forms 2.0
That presentation was a bit a recap of the one abount data access with ASP.NET 2.0. The new DataGridView control and asynchronous data access was also presented. Moreover, Visual Studio 2005 will offer a real dataset designed.

Day Two
L'ergonomie avec ASP.NET 2.0 / ASP.NET 2.0 Ergonomics
ASP.NET 2.0 will generate XHTML which is an XML compliant version of HTML, adding closing tags the ones that were not mandatory (<br>). A little recap about Master Pages, skins and themes is done. Finally, with Visual Studio 2005 will come about 50 new controls.

L'ergonomie avec les WinForms 2.0 / WinForms 2.0 Ergonomics
The most of that presentation was about ToolStripControls. A cool feature in Visual Studio 2005 seems to be the property editor.

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005
Some examples with Word and Excel were showed. Seems to be easy...

Windows Mobile Applications
Features of Visual Studio 2005 for mobile developments were showed. Most important point was the true mobile emulator.