Pavan Gayakwad

Java JDK Installing and Removing in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 May 2019 12:42:00 +0530

Anytime with following command in Linux terminal you get to know the version of Java JDK installed

java --version

Installation

There are two Java deployments available for you install
(1) Oracle Java (oracle-java) (2) Java Open SDK (openjdk)

OpenJDK

Most of the linux distributions either come installed with OpenJDK however just in-case if you get it pre-installed, you can run below command to get it easily.

sudo apt-get install openjdk-default

Oracle JDK

Add the repository first
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxuprising/java

Update the changes
sudo apt-get update

Initiate installer
sudo apt install oracle-java11-installer

Then set the installed version of Java as default
sudo apt install oracle-java11-set-default

Now, running below command can help you check that the installation was successful
java --version

Uninstallation

Below link has the detailed information:
https://novicestuffs.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/how-to-uninstall-java-from-linux/

Hangfire with In-Memory Storage (ASP.Net MVC 4/5)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 15:04:00 +0530

This is in continuation to my previous post: Hangfire with ASP.Net MVC : Simplest Code To Start with.

In this post we will see how Hangfire can be configured without the SQL Server as its backend for job scheduling, instead, manage all in-memory

1) Create ASP.Net MVC 4/5 Projects
2) in web.config file
3) Run Install-Package HangFire -Version 1.6.17 or visit here for latest version: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Hangfire/1.6.17
3) Run Install-Package Hangfire.MemoryStorage -Version 1.5.2 or visit here for latest version https://www.nuget.org/packages/Hangfire.MemoryStorage/
4) I am simply updating a table with a primary key (auto incremented), and string field "StampTime" with current date and time.
5) Open Global.asax.cs and paste below shown code.
6) Run the app and check the database.

using Hangfire;
using Hangfire.Common;
using Hangfire.MemoryStorage;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Hosting;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Optimization;
using System.Web.Routing;
using System.Web.Services.Description;

namespace HangFireDemo
{
    public static class MyTasks
    {
        public static async Task<int> MinuteTick()
        {
            await Task.Run(() =>
            {
                BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => MyTasks.Tick(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
            });

            return 1;
        }

        public static async Task<int> Tick()
        {
            await Task.Run(() =>
            {
                using (HangFireDemo.Models.HangFireDBEntities db = new Models.HangFireDBEntities())
                {
                    db.Tracks.Add(new Models.Track
                    { StampTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss tt") });
                    db.SaveChanges();

                }
            });
            
            return 1;
        }
    }

    public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        private BackgroundJobServer _backgroundJobServer;

        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
            FilterConfig.RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
            RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
            BundleConfig.RegisterBundles(BundleTable.Bundles);

            GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.UseMemoryStorage();

            _backgroundJobServer = new BackgroundJobServer();

            RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(() => MyTasks.MinuteTick(), Cron.Minutely);
        }
        protected void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            _backgroundJobServer.Dispose();
        }
    }
}

Hangfire with ASP.Net MVC : Simplest Code To Start with

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:20:00 +0530

It seems many are looking for using Hangfire with ASP.Net MVC 4 / 5+ SQL Server here is the simplest code example for you to start quick.

I am using Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition

1) Create ASP.Net MVC 4/5 Projects
2) <add key="owin:AutomaticAppStartup" value="false" /> in web.config file
3)Run Install-Package HangFire -Version 1.6.17 or visit here for latest version: https://www.nuget.org/packages/Hangfire/1.6.17
4) From the sample code, make sure you create database in SQL Server DB and update the connection string.
5) I am simply updating a table with a primary key (auto incremented), and string field "StampTime" with current date and time.
6) Open Global.asax.cs and put this code.
7) Run the app and check the database.

The example code also showcase a hack on how to run jobs with few seconds interval.

namespace HangFireDemo
{
    public static class MyTasks
    {
        public static async Task<int> MinuteTick()
        {
            await Task.Run(() =>
            {
                BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => MyTasks.Tick(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(15));
                BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => MyTasks.Tick(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30));
                BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => MyTasks.Tick(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(45));
                BackgroundJob.Schedule(() => MyTasks.Tick(), TimeSpan.FromSeconds(59));
            });

            return 1;
        }

        public static async Task<int> Tick()
        {
            await Task.Run(() =>
            {
                using (HangFireDemo.Models.HangFireDBEntities db = new Models.HangFireDBEntities())
                {
                    db.Tracks.Add(new Models.Track
                    { StampTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm:ss tt") });
                    db.SaveChanges();

                }
            });

            
            return 1;

        }
    }

    public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        private BackgroundJobServer _backgroundJobServer;

        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
            FilterConfig.RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
            RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
            BundleConfig.RegisterBundles(BundleTable.Bundles);


            GlobalConfiguration.Configuration
               .UseSqlServerStorage(@"Server=.\sqlexpress2012; Database = hangfiredb; User Id = sa;Password = system456*;");

            _backgroundJobServer = new BackgroundJobServer();

            RecurringJob.AddOrUpdate(() => MyTasks.MinuteTick(), Cron.Minutely);
        }
        protected void Application_End(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            _backgroundJobServer.Dispose();
        }
    }
}

If you really want to witness documentation that looks super good and tells you too many things that you feel not-required at the beginning, read the Hangfires official long startup guide: http://docs.hangfire.io/en/latest/tutorials/send-email.html.

Please note, this is just a quick get-start sample code for learning and may not be production ready.

Also check my followup post: Hangfire with In-Memory Storage (ASP.Net MVC 4/5)

Installing MySQL on Windows using a noninstall zip archive

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 9 Aug 2016 15:28:00 +0530

At-least for me, configuring MySQL zip archive on server by reading MySQL team's unfriendly, multi-navigational document has been quite a challenging task.

Here is my simplified version:

Download mysql noninstall zip from here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/
Extract do C:\mysql folder
Under c:\mysql folder you will find my-default.ini file, make a copy of it and rename it to my.ini
Open my.ini in notepad, You will find basedir and datadir as commented statements, just uncomment them (by removing # from the starting position of each line) and do the changes shown below

basedir = c:\\mysql #installatin directory
datadir = c:\\data #data directory, it can be in some other drive too!

Open cmd.exe as administrator and type below commands one after the other

Go to bin folder where mysqld.exe file is present

cd c:\mysql\bin

Below command will initialize the data directory, by reading my.ini file (in our case its in c:\mysql folder)

mysqld --initialize-insecure

Install mysql as background running service in Windows.

mysqld --install

Verify MySQL server service installation

in command prompt just type services.msc and hit enter
and look for MySQL service in the services list, set it as "Automatic"

That's it!
MySQL server will be up and running and can be accessed over 3306 port
Download and install the MySQL Workbench and connect to server as root with no password.

Uninstalling MySQL

open command prompt in administrative mode
Stop the mysqld for service activity

net stop MySQL

Uninstall the serivce

sc delete MySQL

Delete the c:\mysql folder

One of the best info out there for you to setup MySQL on Ubuntu

https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/installing-mysql-server-on-ubuntu/

How a university is saving 2.5 tons of paper every year?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 5 May 2016 13:22:00 +0530

Considering the current environmental imbalances, many non-profit organizations (like The Nature Conservity, SayTree…and many others) around the world working desperately to save plant and trees. It is our responsibility too. We felt starting with universities is the better place to spread the awareness. With this, we also made universities administrative work more manageable and effective.

The story I am going to share tells you how a university quietly worked and stands as a role model by saving tons of paper and millions of rupees of its own and its students.

In the year 2012, VT University (Visvesvaraya Technological University also popularly known as “VTU”) Belgavi (India), has moved its thesis evaluations to online to effectively reduce its use of paper and streamline the process online. University’s this decision made it save several Lakhs of rupees (~ tens of thousands of dollars) every year in paper cost while giving faculty and administrators more direct access to evaluation procedures and results.

It’s been 4 years, 55 post-graduation course are promoted to online system. VTU is using “Examinater” – an online thesis evaluation software, for their Ph.D, M.Tech, MBA and MCA courses. More than 28000 theses evaluated online to date. With paper-based evaluation, several Lakh rupees used to be the postal charges and 2.5 tons of paper utilized annually. Now all this is reduced to zero. This saving is recurring every year. 217 VTU affiliated colleges individually making a huge impact in terms of cost savings, accuracy, reduced time delay and high operational efficiency. Easy to use software “Examinater” is offering an opportunity to transition to the online evaluation of thesis, expanding the environmental savings beyond VTU. Students saved from creating multiple copies of their hardbound thesis and collectively this alone is saving 60 Lakh rupees (~92K USD) every year! Now with Examinater, all dissertation related effort is not just made simple, in fact, automated. The system is successful to encourage faculty to go paperless and respond on-time.

VTU demonstrated how a university can make its own contribution to the environment with the help of Examinater while making sure to meet its peer expectations. This is a remarkable success in terms of securing the future of the tree species and also elevating university's standard of operational procedures.

Its high time now, all universities are requested and encouraged to start automating their processes and go green, go paperless. Isn’t this a pragmatic example of “A penny saved is a penny earned”? We are ready to join hands, are you?

Hosting your website? Know the Darkside of Big Brands

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:11:00 +0530

Please note, Below mentioned hosting providers are reputed organizations with well established infrastructure. This post is for your information and only intended to keep you informed about their 'policies' that turn evil when you have cut throat challenges.

Hostgator

We heard a lot about Hostgator and we registered one of our customers website with them without giving a second thought. Few months later, during our support phase on our customer's website, we encountered Hostgator feature and support challenges which I think not many experience unless they do some hardcore technical activities with their website.

Many said hostgator has good support track. For us it was always waiting for 20 or more minutes to connect Hostgator support executive for online chat. This can be excused if it is ones in a while, but that was not the case for us.

If you are running an e-commerce kind of website or offering online services every minute, then 20 minutes wait time feels like 20 hours.

To connect the database (be it a MS SQL Server or MY SQL) from our machine through database management tools, we first need to white-list our machine IP address on hostgator web admin console, only then you are allowed to connect to database for debugging purpose. It wouldn't have been a problem if white-listing process is quick and instant. Sadly, that's not how it is. The white-listing process takes minimum of an hour!!

If you are working on a quick fix and need to run database queries directly, be patient, you need to wait for 1 hour and get blamed from your customer for delayed response.
We lately observed, IP address white-listing takes few minutes only if you haven't done it for considerably long time. Your subsequent request make you wait an hour for sure.

Hostgator don't support sending bulk emails over SMTP server through a registered 3rd party provider's server like sendgrid!! You can't connect to 3rd party SMTP server through php or dotnet program to send your promotional or service notification email updates!!

You are saved only if your 3rd party bulk email service provider offers REST APIs.

When your database grow bigger (I am not talking about 1TB+, it begins with 250MB), problem of exporting data back and forth to your backup drive also grows exponentially with Hostgator.

When we were restoring our database after several database updates/changes from our backup server to hostgator using SQL Server Management studio, Hostgator servers forcefully terminated the connection more than often. You need to try hard with Hostgator database import/export utility only, which is not feasible all the time for a database administrator.

This is it for now, I will update if we encounter new challenges. In case if you have facebook account [ sorry, if I sounded like an age old person:) ], you can check my discussion on this matter here.

As I said, if you are just hosting static website or WordPress site for simple usage, you may not encounter problems mentioned here.

GoDaddy

Another "requires no introduction" hosting service provider and as well popular for their amazing discount coupon offers. GoDaddy amazes you with its last minute intelligent calculation while applying discount coupons to your bill. That is sometimes hard to notice. Here is my experience.

One of my .com domains renewal charge proposed by GoDaddy was Rs.710 rupees and magically godaddy already applied 27% discount to it. Now, if I apply 30% offer coupon on top of it, Their billing system considers only 3% discount on it (the magical 27% + 3% from coupon = 30% offer!) That's how calculation works at GoDaddy!! However, when I checked same thing with other service providers they were charging Rs.592 without any coupons which is a competative offer to GoDaddy's discounted price.

You can check discussion thread posted on Facebook group here

I was greatly under the impression that Godaddy coupons can get rid of high cost, but that's not really true most of the time. So be sure to validate before you enroll and pay!

Startup Notes: Software Sales and Product Quality

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 11:58:00 +0530

When I visited a potential customer (their minimum monthly business transaction is more than 10 Lakhs) to discuss about our software products and services, they showed interest to spend only 12K for the product worth 70K. I denied to sell our software solution to him. Few days later they succeeded to get one for 10K (from some other startup) for their business. Few months later the same business owner called me back and told me that the software he purchased for low cost, is with many defects and support from vendor is not up to the mark. He also expressed that “I started hating software startup companies. Are you a startup?” For next few days we had several exhaustive discussions and finally we managed to deploy our software solution to the customer with our previously offered price. Now, he is our happy customer.

When I checked, the software vendor who sold software for 10K is a 2 years old startup and he is struggling to get more customers bothering least about his software quality and support model. When I personally had chat with him, he told “It was hard to manage customer at that cost. He was expecting more features for very low additional cost”.

2 Things. Software sale competition and product build quality.

I don't wanted to assume anything about the startup community just by looking at one guy and wanted to do the reality check. I posted a query in one of the popular Facebook groups "Bangalore Startups" where nearly 19K+ startup enthusiasts interact each other.

The query was simple, "How many of you are using Ticket (issue) tracking system to track your work or software defects? If so, which app (online or offline) you are using?"
I expected some good response from fellow members and I was wrong. Less than 10 people took interest to like and comment on this post. (later I made another follow-up post https://www.facebook.com/groups/blrstartups/permalink/736607643028043/ it attracted only 5 people!!)

This made me clear that many StartUps are starting but not really doing things in a proper or matured way!! Many are failing to gauge proper cost for their product but very busy in acquiring new customers (with unhealthy price offerings), pushing their (moderately tested) software to production and later, not just lose customer but also contribute to create wrong reputation about software startup community. If this is the attitude of startup companies then its a serious problem to all. StartUps should not run behind making quick money. Instead they must concentrate on building (if not innovative) stable products and look for long-term trusted relationship with customers.

Now a day, I see not many business owners inclined towards investing more than few thousands for a software solution to manage their business. They already faced many startups before, seen them quoting unreasonably low price and came to the conclusion that software they need to manage their business should not cost more than few thousand rupees. It is those startups who are in hurry capturing new customers are responsible to set such a low pricing expectations.

All startups need some kind of understanding, its like, we know a double cheese pizza with prize tag Rs.500/- is actually prepared by spending less than Rs.150/- but still we can not protest or bargain, the reason?
- The quality of that pizza is soo good we don't want to have any other.
- Though other pizza shops prepare their own flavored double cheese pizza, you won't get it for Rs.150/-, It is still priced nearly Rs.400/- or Rs.450/- if not Rs.500/-. So for any customer who think of having double cheese pizza, never think of getting it less than Rs.400/-. It is those pizza owner's business strategy or you can call it monopoly to maintain a minimum profitable cost and stabilize their market.

So next time, when you are having pizza in-between your busy programming schedule, think about it, should you offer an ERP suite that is worth "minimum" of Rs 50K for Rs.10K just to win one customer? Aren't we diluting our opportunities by offering under-estimated cost?

My request to the aspiring software startup community is please properly value your software product. Work hard to build a brand instead growing unmanaged customers list. Most important thing is do things systematically and avoid unhealthy competition. It is true that if you don't act fast, some one might grab your opportunity. Agreed! but your urgency to make business should not compromise core values.

So, That's it!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:06:00 +0530

2 months back
If you are like me, then there is a list prepared by your mother or wife sitting in your pocket reminding you to purchase some items on your way back home in the evening :) I slightly deviate from my regular walking route and reach the shop where I buy most of the household items. By the time I finish shopping and reach home I am almost dead tiered and never dare to imagine to sit and document how much money I spent few hours back.

1 month back
When Srushti's lab released a private beta version of Expense management application, ServeEase and suggested me to use. I am reluctant to use it until I explored the following feature.

Today
I always suggest my wife to include purchase items to "Expense" section of ServeEase. She does add items marking their price as zero.

So, everyday evening on my way back home, I make sure to check expense section on my mobile and get all items that are with zero price tag. That clearly hints me these are the items to be purchased for the day. As soon as I purchase them, track their cost whenever I find time (like..in the long wait for traffic signals or travelling by city bus) and that's it!

Once in two weeks, I navigate to "Accounts" and check reports section, that clearly present expense and current balance statement to me. End of the day I feel happy because that's all I wanted and ServeEase does it very nicely.

No doubt, it clearly helped me to analyze and control expenses. Saved time, saved some money!

Want to experience the ease of expense tracking? Start now, get it free! www.ServeEase.com

Windows forgets visual effects settings on log-out or reboot for non-administrator account

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 21:44:00 +0530

Steps given here worked for me with Windows 7 SP1. Hope you may find it useful.

Start -> Run-> cmd (press enter) -> type SystemPropertiesPerformance.exe
This gets you the "System Properties" window, go to Advanced tab -> Performance Settings -> Visual Effects tab and choose "Adjust for best performance" and click OK.

Note: While doing all these UAC doesn't show-up as all changes you are doing will be saved in your logged-in profile account.

Reference material used: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee330866.aspx

Feel free to comment your findings.

In This World - 17

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:40:00 +0530

"The true leadership is not given, it should be earned and consistently demonstrated."

"A true leader creates more leaders and feared ones create blind followers"

Hiring a Super Programmer?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 20:11:00 +0530

When it comes to programming, I noticed most of the super programmers share similar attitude and thought process. I started identifying similarities whenever I took interviews.

After meeting 3000+ potential candidates (thanks to all my previous companies choosing me as interviewer), I dared to have a quick points to spot a 'Super Programmer' from the pool of programmers.

When I shared these points with my colleagues, they found it useful during their interviews.

Please note

These points are strictly valid for 'Rock Star Programmers' only. If you apply these observations to a good programmer, you may loose him.
I always don't follow these points very strictly in interviews as there will be many other aspects to consider, However these can just be used as indicative pointers if you feel good.

So here it goes,

They may be little nervous in the beginning. When you ask them about their interesting project, their eyes glow and for a moment they just forget where they are and completely immerse in explaining the problem, how much they were amazed, their explorations and implementations.
They have habit of knowing all latest happenings in their interested technical area. That means they are closely following beta and release candidates as well.
They read lot of blog posts, tech articles and most of the time own a technical blog. They have good bunch of posts on technical articles or pointers in their blog.
Even if they don't know the answer, they logically think and almost get through the problem. Their hands don't shiver when writing code. No matter even if the syntax is wrong.
They always try to generalize the approach and try to make it reusable.
They are fanatic about browsing the project code-base and finding out what is best in it. If something is badly designed or written, it disturbs them and try to revamp/fix it if permitted. They will be proactive in doing it (provided such an opportunity is given).
They have earned good reputation points in technical forums. That is more important than having bunch of certifications.
Their resume contains bunch of memory profiling, performance profiling, code review tools and many popular open source frameworks used (like Caliburn..etc) in their project and few of those is introduced in their company projects because of them.

Ask which piece of code in their previous projects liked a lot and which was not. It indirectly tells us their level of understanding about technology.
Observe your conversation with them. As you know, the developers conversation context is bit different. Are they catching it quickly? your such conversation should go with them smoothly. For example, I usually ask what version of Dotnet you are using and many reply, its 2010 or 2008! First point, They are best Visual Studio.Net IDE users than Dotnet programmers. Second, they are not understanding the context. I have asked the version of Dotnet framework not the IDE. If you are explaining too many things during the discussion, then there is a problem.
When you give them a paper and pen and ask to write a program, check how much space they waste. 2 things to notice,

If they fill A4 sheet page to write 2 small programs (reverse a string and looping through ArrayList having different type of objects) maintaining bigger inline space, then they can't think more on efficient usage of computing resources also. Even if they think, it may be their simple programming habit but not something coming out from geeky mind. This is more inspired from 'you will work the way you really are'.
With minimum inline spacing, even if they fill A4 sheet writing lot of code (without striking unused ones) then, they are dangerous programmers. They can explain the logic on the same day it is written and anytime in future you need to pray for God to know about the hidden logic.
Why there should be a 3rd point when I said only 2.

Ask them very basic questions (If you have to implement AJAX response/request what objects do you use in Javascript) and see how detailed and thoughtful answer they give. Whats more interesting is how deep they delve and present different aspects of it.
They have either contributed to one of open source projects (on CodePlex, SourceForge,gitHub..etc) or have hosted their own.
They have published some articles on technical article sites (like CodeProject...etc)
Majority of their posts on twitter or facebook speaks about their serious technical explorations than 'I ate this', 'been here..' or sharing funny cat videos.
They have list of achievements in the resume and may not be a certified professional.

No matter even if candidate don't stand true for all above points. Most of the time we believe our senses and take the decision (and that is usually proved right.)

Well, this is my list. Do you have some quick points? Feel free to share here.

Thanks for reading!

Openness with Free Web Fonts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:34:00 +0530

If you want to design a webpage with stylish font. There are few important things to consider before using graphical text images.

If you prefer search engines bring traffic to your web page, it has to be Search engine friendly, as of now crawling engine ignore text written in images. (BTW, can search engines improve to extract text from image and index? like Quick Quest does ;)
The font should be rendered and displayed consistent across multiple browsers.
When viewed through mobile browser, it should wrap (as normal text do) to fit the small screen.

Its now old fashion to choose the most common font (either Times New Roman or Arial, that are for sure exist in users computer) and design the page accordingly to stay safe.

Things have changed, so the approaches.

To respect above points, HTML font embedding became essential need to design impressive web page (SrushtiSoft.com home page is using font embedding. Its live now!).

Back in 1997, Microsoft released Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT) which allows to create font objects (.eot) file from our favorite True Type Font (TTF) and refer it in CSS. That's all! Any page viewed in Internet Explorer started rendering our favorite font even if it is not present in user's computer.

That's really cool.

As usual, Microsoft restricted this openness only to IE browsers and that made many web developers to ignore this effort silently. (However, Microsoft is still active on WEFT initiative and anytime may strike back)

So there comes Google with free open source Web Fonts! http://www.google.com/webfonts.

As of now there are 291 free open source fonts for embedding. With each font, Google provide a quick guidelines on how to use in a web page.

Your jaw drops when you see Google giving just 2 lines to integrate web fonts!

SrushtiSoft home page uses one very decent font out of 291 Google web fonts. We tested it over 100+ browsers on Linux, Windows and Android platforms and very few browsers failed to render.

I sense strong future of web fonts as they make web pages to render without mandating users to install required font. For a web developer, there is so much of relaxing factor in it. :)

In This World - 16

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 5 Oct 2010 19:36:00 +0530

"Relationship shouldn't be complicated, if it so, then its time to look at it from a different perspective and attempt to resolve challenges, if that doesn't work at any cost, put a period and move on."

Well..I have one more view to share which may sound bit contradictory to what I expressed above, but its indeed an unarguable truth!

"Move on - is the simplest one to say and most difficult to go through!" :)

Windows Service or Windows Task Scheduler?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 09:40:00 +0530

Are you planning to create long running background process (in C#) and thinking to build a Windows service?

Then wait for a moment!

Windows Task scheduler (Start->Programs->Accessories-> System Tools-> Task Scheduler) can also be a decent choice!

"Windows Vista and higher windows (server) operating systems are offering matured Task scheduler with many advancements like Triggers, Actions, Conditions, failure recovery, email notifications, security and much more."

Its obvious that many programmers think Windows Service is easy to maintain and what it can do, task scheduler can’t. But now, it’s time to look at Windows Task Scheduler [also at Microsoft white paper] and see what great features it is offering.

When to go for Windows Service?
Okay, let me try to answer this popular question in one line.

Windows Service is suitable for receiving service request 'anytime' and process 'instantly'.

Just think of anti-virus scanner, network port activity tracker, remote access connection manager, SQL Server database service, chat server..etc. all these need ‘long running process’ because they have to serve the service requests coming in ‘any time’.

Scheduled Processes
If
your process wake up every few minutes, queries intended source (like database, Message Queue..etc), performs some operations and goes to sleep
And
Next time when it wakes up, has no interest in knowing what it did previously.
then
consider leveraging Windows Task Scheduler. Write a console program (hide console window if you want) or WinForms program (with Form + Taskbar visibility false) and set it up with Task scheduler.

Benefits

No need to implement timer logic to keep process alive. Having programatic timer unnecessarily consume more CPU cycles because Windows has to create some more threads to keep timer run properly.
Avoids doing more R&D on finding and troubleshooting memory leak problems. Windows Scheduler gracefully terminate the windows process (on which our program is running) and creates new one for next run.
Don’t have to worry about automatic restart of your process when it crash or to perform multiple retries whenever it encountere problems.

Points to consider...

From support point of view, consider using logging component (like log4net) to log events to windows event viewer. Many monitoring systems mostly listen to event viewer and send notification emails to support team to flag about the problem.
When setting up your process with Task Scheduler, make sure to check option to run it even when user is NOT logged into the system.
Make sure 'Task Scheduler' service (Start->Run->type 'services.msc' and check) is running on server operating system and set to 'Automatic' mode.

That's all for now. However choice between windows service and task scheduler is a design decision and depends on requirements. If something is tickling in your mind and want to express your thoguts as a comment, feel free to share here. Thanks!

Tracking Downloads in Google Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 12:19:00 +0530

I wanted to track download count of Quick Quest demo version hosted on SrushtiSoft through Google analytics. I faced obstacle during the implementation process and wanted to share here, hoping to save your sometime if you are also trying to do the same for your website or blog.

Google neatly guide you how to do it, http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55529 with a slashing message "This article is for the latest version of the tracking code". But it just doesn't work at one-shot!

I had to spend sometime to find a way to troubleshoot "pageTracker is not defined" javascript error. Finally, the post on StackOverflow puts you on right path: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3503511/google-analytics-pagetracker-is-not-defined

Though google talks about the approach in detail here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncUsageGuide.html chances of it going unnoticed is more.

Buck

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:05:00 +0530

"Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" is a neat pack of humor, adventure with be on the mind characters. The fun begins when alone, One-eyed, dino-hunting weasel called 'Buck', who is sophisticated yet not so complicated, agrees to find 'floppy green thing' with his set of rules and killing his life time enemy Rudy (T Rex Dino). After that there are many eye catching events and nice animation work.

In the end Buck kill Rudy and says "He is gone! What am I suppose to do now?". In that very moment, I see him losing excitement in life. Not so fascinatingly, he agrees to come to the world of Ice age. All of a sudden when Rudy roars!! Buck finds reason to go back to his world and fight with Rudy all alone.

Its been many weeks, Buck is still in my thoughts and there is no sign of him stopping his blabbering. His existence has no meaning if there is no Rudy. He only knows living for finding opportunity to defeat Rudy. That's his purpose and he is always on his toes. Buck is talking endlessly, sometimes suddenly he pops at me and asks 'hey! whats' your purpose of life?' and I just find myself speechless.

Opera Unite - Browser with New Possibilities

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 3 Sep 2009 07:31:00 +0530

When Microsoft, Mozilla and Google are competing hard to increase browser share by tweaking their products, opera silently concentrated on innovation and sprung with neat free stuffs.

Opera’s new suite ‘Unite’ lead the way in defining how we can maximize our internet experience through its impressive capabilities.

This amazing software is not just a ‘browser’ loading web pages lightning fast with Turbo technology; it’s a web server in the browser, messenger, media/file/photo sharing host, a fridge (people can leave a message for you) and can be more in future!!!

If you are using FireFox, Chrome or Safari and you have set of strong technical reasons for why you are using it over Internet Explorer, then it’s time for you to checkout Opera Unite 10. From the technology point of view, your satisfaction is guaranteed.

In This World - 15

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:09:00 +0530

"Never trust someone more than yourself, they will sure betray you."

2 'Why's

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 3 Jul 2009 15:20:00 +0530

1. Why Microsoft is still using Flash when its own baby- Silverlight light is out there?

2. As shown above, having popup menu open on IE8, why Windows Start menu does not appear when windows key (on keyboard) is pressed? (Windows Vista with SP2 Operating system)

Grr...

In This World - 14

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:15:00 +0530

Any mistake is a big failure if we don't understand why and how it happened.

DotNet: Generic Sorting Class

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 5 Jun 2009 21:21:00 +0530

Recently, I was searching for a generic sorting approach on dotnet List. Many articles (Like one, two..etc) were suggesting standard way of creating IComparer implementer class and using that with generic list (List <T>) in our application. Writing IComparer class for every business object not only take huge time also create challenges in code management when it grow considerably. So, here is simple and effective generic sorting class which can be used with any custom business object and can be sorted on any one of its properties.

All you have to do is, copy paste the complete code in to a new .cs file.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Reflection;

namespace Srushti.Business
{
public class GenericComparer<T> : IComparer<T>
 {
   string _propName = string.Empty;
   bool _sortDirection = true;
   public GenericComparer(string propertyName, bool SortAscending)
   {
       _propName = propertyName;
       _sortDirection = SortAscending;
   }

   private int CompareAsc(object o1, object o2)
   {
       if (o1 is IComparable)
           return ((IComparable)o1).CompareTo(o2);
       else if (o1.Equals(o2))
           return 0;
       else
           return o1.ToString().CompareTo(o2);
   }
   #region IComparer<T> Members

   public int Compare(T x, T y)
   {
       PropertyInfo pi = x.GetType().GetProperty(_propName);
       object o1 = pi.GetValue(x, null);

       pi = y.GetType().GetProperty(_propName);
       object o2 = pi.GetValue(y, null);

       if (_sortDirection == false)
           return CompareAsc(o1, o2) * -1;
       else
           return CompareAsc(o1, o2);
   }
   #endregion
 }
}

...and start consuming it as shown below. You have to supply, property name (as String) on which you want to sort the list and sorting direction (Boolean, true for ascending and false for descending) to GenericComparer() constructor.

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
   List empList = new List();
   empList.Add(new Employee() { ID = 1, Name = "Three" });
   empList.Add(new Employee() { ID = 2, Name = "Two" });
   empList.Add(new Employee() { ID = 3, Name = "One" });

   /*** Generic Comparer ***/
   empList.Sort(new GenericComparer("Name", true));

   foreach (Employee em in empList)
       MessageBox.Show(em.ID.ToString());
}

public class Employee
{
   public int ID { get; set; }
   public string Name { get; set; }
}

Please Note: Class properties with complex data types like DateTime, Nullable might require special attention.

Quick Quest - A Step Ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:13:00 +0530

With a history of serving Kuvempu University for question paper generation, Quick Quest is now serving Scholar’s private college in Nigeria and receiving good feedback. The teacher using this software sent his experiences and I am very happy to publish his 'as is' words on main page of Quick Quest section.
This is a great encouragement to the development effort of Quick Quest.

Thanks to “The Scholar’s Private Collage, Akure, Nigeria” for choosing Quick Quest.

LINQ Quick Start

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:04:00 +0530

If you are a new bee to LINQ (Language Integrated Query), stunned by looking at big books and longer web pages on it, here is the relaxing news. Read “LINQ: The Future of Data Access in C# 3.0” by Joe Hummel. He presented LINQ in a simple and effective manner.

This book with 60 pages quickly give you pragmatic understanding of LINQ and push you to start using it in next hour. This is a good quick starter book in spades.

I personally prefer reading such quick start books to get glimpse of technology and later pick thicker book or detailed tech web links to dig deeper.

Present

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 5 Apr 2009 23:42:00 +0530

The saxophone playing in lavish and lazy mood on my home theater audio system. Half filled crystal clear mocktail glass is standing still on the table. It served me 12 times. Ice cubes in the container melting slowly. Few small pieces of pizza left out in the take-away box. Ceiling fan is blowing cool air. With aesthetic gratification, I am sleeping in my bed. Not fully slipped in dream world. My senses are still enjoying the atmosphere. My right leg big and second toe shaking unnoticeably. Laptop silently downloading recent updates and also scanning for Conficker warm which recently attracted much of attention all over the world. Television is in mute, “DOA: Dead or Alive” action was on. Washing machine is busy cleaning dirty cloths. My salary credit message is sitting unread in my mobile message inbox. The alarm is down counting to wake me up in next 2 minutes…
I felt I needed this lazy day after my busy project work schedule at office. I spent restless week. I am lying in my bed like a reluctant chap. I got to hear this from somewhere my inside, "Is this what I wanted?"
I said- “of course Yes! Not sure about the future though. Whatever I have now is what all I use to dream in my college days. Life gifted me this day. One lazy day with immense satisfaction!"