RefCardz - Little known reference at the tip of your finger

DISCLAIMER: I am not an employee of DZone Inc. and I am not paid for talking about the RefCardz. RefCardz are available for Free (as in free beer) online on their website. RefCardz in printed format can be obtained at different events or by contacting DZone directly.

Maven Refcardz just got released today. Everybody that use Maven might be hyped over that but… did you know the other Refcardz?

My favourite is the “Design Patterns” Refcardz. There is easy diagram to understand the organization of your classes as well as 2 interesting sections. “Use When” contains indication on when to use this particular pattern and “Example” contains a small problem that would require this pattern. As an example, let’s take the Adapter Pattern.

The “use when” in this section mention that an adapter should be used when:

• you need to adapt a class to your interface
• complex conditions with behaviour and states are present
• transitions between states need to be explicit

I didn’t use the Adapter pattern a lot so I just knew about the first two. Still thinking about the third one.

Those RefCardz are offered for free in PDF format on DZone or you might find them in glossy hard paper when going to conference/code camp/etc. Most of the developers I know have DZone on their RSS reader but have never taken the time to look at the RefCardz that are available.

The RefCardz can be found on here.

Here is a few of my favourites:

• SCRUM (by Michael James)
• Core .NET (by John Skeet)
• C# (by John Skeet)
• Design Patterns (by Jason McDonald)

Redefining ALT.NET or rather, rediscovering it’s meaning

I’ve heard about ALT.NET about a year ago. At first, I thought that it was about using alternatives to Microsoft or to avoid Microsoft software. ALT.NET was supposed to be about going “alternative” and being against “The Man” and being for “The People”. Well, I must agree that I wasn’t totally right with that. I mean, Microsoft make some mess but it also does a lot of great tools and particularly a great IDE with lots of extensibility point.

Then, I did what I should have done in the beginning. I looked up the definition. On the ALT.NET website, we have this:

We are a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.

Hum… that’s a totally different story now. The emphasis is mine and helps get the key points. First, I would have never gotten into a field that I hate and I love to learn. That makes the desire to improve ourselves done. I always challenge assumptions and try to find the better tool for the job. I know that Microsoft makes some great tools but sometimes they just don’t cut it. They will someday… but they not always will. Most of the time, you can’t wait for Microsoft to build a tool that will help you finish a software… so you get what works for you at the moment.

Finally and not last, “help each other pursue excellence”. That is the hardest one. Of course, I participate in the .NET Montreal Usergroup, but… I felt that more could be done. I then started to speak with Greg Young and other passionate programmers in Montreal. Something that Greg kept repeating during our “Beer Meeting” was always: “But what concretely can we do to improve the level of the people in Montreal?”. This stayed in my mind for weeks.

Since I wanted to help improve my fellow programmers and I thought that we learn best while coding… I started searching for a way to improve everyone while coding. It happens that it already exist and it’s named a Coding Dojo.

Last Thursday, I organized the very first Coding Dojo for the ALT.NET Montreal group. We were few but learned a lot. We also had a lot of practice in learning TDD. It was hard since I never did a Coding Dojo before. I learned a lot, and our fellow programmers learned a lot. I’ll try to get one Dojo per month and to get more and more people to join the group. As Kevin Coster was told… “if you build it, they will come”.

So my last word goes to Scott Bellware. All hope is not gone Scott. People around the world is still organizing to teach other people best practices and to try to raise the bar of everyone. Our group is small… but if it had to start somehow it had to be small. I hope all hope is not gone on your side Scott. Passionate programmers love to learn and we are trying to offer them a way to learn and improve themselves and at the same time… propagate their knowledge to the workers that didn’t cared enough to come.

Participating in the community and improving yourself

This post is sadly not going to be about code so much that it’s going to be about the profession. Some professions have it easy. You can cut hairs without having to learn something new every 2-3 months. You can build houses without having to learn new methods every year. Of course, all professions are evolving and new ways to do the same task more effectively are created.

What is really different when you are coding is that new languages are coming every 1-2 years. Methodologies are coming every 5 years. New frameworks are coming every 5-6 months. I might be off on those numbers but I feel pretty confident about it. WPF came in less than 2 years. C# 3.0 came in a year and a half ago. C# 4.0 is due to 2010.

All those technology require a lot of our time to learn. This is the main reason why there is so much conference, workshop and community event happening in a single city. This year, I’m going to the .NET Montreal User group , I’m trying to organize a Coding Dojo, I’m attending the Montreal Codecamp 2009 and I’m presenting at this same Codecamp. My question here is… is it too much?

I feel that I won’t learn enough in my lifetime to but a great programmer but that if I work enough, I might just be good enough to be proud of my work and make changes in the way that we do our job (The Daily WTF anyone?).

However, even if the amount of changes are tremendous… I don’t see any desire to participate in community events. It doesn’t mean a lack of desire to improve. I just think that a lot of people like to learn on their own off a book or by doing the trip themselves.

How is it on your side? How is it like in the US? India? Slovakia (yeah! got a lot of those readers!) ?

What is your take on participating inside the community and self improvement?

LyricWiki.org – How to retrieve lyrics for your mp3 in C#?

I have an iPhone and I got a lot of songs on it. I don’t particularly love to sing but I got a few bands that have tendencies to say their lyrics in a… obscure way. Since I’m really curious, I’m always on Google searching for the lyrics. I wanted to save some time and avoid unnecessary browsing. The iPhone have the capacity of displaying lyrics if they are included inside the mp3 metadata. Updating the lyrics is something but where will I retrieved thousands song lyric?

I recently found out about a website called LyricWiki.org. What is interesting is that they have a web service (for free) available. I then decided to share how I did it. First thing is to start a project. You will then add a service reference like this:

Click on Go, change namespace and click on OK. Once  this is done, the easy part is done. Please note that the service URL has been stored under App.config with all the related settings.

Now to retrieve the actual lyrics, no more than a little bit of code:

// create a client to connect to the service
LyricWikiPortTypeClient client = new LyricWikiPortTypeClient();

// retrieve a song. Creed is good. Love this band.
LyricsResult song = client.getSong("Creed", "One");

// display the artist and the lyrics
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Found lyrics for \"{0} - {1}\":\r\n\r\n" +
                                "{2}", song.artist, song.song, song.lyrics));

// let you read it :)
Console.ReadLine();

That was easy now wasn’t it? Next post, how to update your mp3 with iTunes! Keep reading!

EntLib 4.0 – ExceptionPolicy.HandleException is not thread safe

We've faced this problem recently where Enterprise Library was crashing. Not everywhere... just on this little line of code. We were trying to save to a database asynchronously but if the database was not available, it threw an exception which Enterprise Library was supposed to catch.

However, this never happened. Enterprise library crashed on us. Mind you, we didn't figure out this problem until recently because the problem was just happening in production.

When we managed to reproduce the exception in a development environment (where debugging is possible), we got an error similar to "An item with the same key has already been added". Here's the beginning of the stack trace:

Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionHandlingException: The current build operation (build key Build Key[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.ExceptionPolicyImpl, LogException]) failed: The current build operation (build key Build Key[Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Logging.LogWriter, null]) failed: An item with the same key has already been added.

That lead me to this thread where it was mentioned that an issue was logged. I found this issue which mentioned concurrency issue. Since our code was multi-threaded, we had two options. Replace Enterprise Library 4.0 by Enterprise Library 4.1 or make a thread safe wrapper for the call to the log exception.

The first option required reconfiguring the build and all development machine, the second one consisted of coding a dirty patch. We went with the first one (what else did they fix in 4.1?) for obvious reason.

So, if you have this kind of problem with Enterprise Library 4.0, you might want to upgrade to Enterprise Library 4.1. Since the problem happen in the error handling section, it makes this kind of bug hard to understand and erratic (due to concurrency).

Find and Reproduce Heisenbugs – CHESS is the tool for you

Microsoft is mainly known for 2 things. Windows and Office. However, for programmers,  Microsoft is also know for many more projects/product like .NET, Enterprise Library, ASP.NET MVC, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, etc.

Among the few tools that are not really known and publicised at the moment are the projects inside Microsoft Research. This is the land of Beta or “software-never-to-be-released”. Either the project is too crazy(read: inovative?) or not useful for people at the time. But there is time where a tool stands out and need to be  talked about.

My friend Eric De Carufel recently talked to me about this tool called CHESS from Microsoft Research. He tested it and it allows for testing for those rare bugs that are only found when there is enough concurrency. Those bugs were tested before with stress test. Stress test are not supposed to be used for finding concurrency bugs but they are traditionally used for that too because when a system is under stress, concurrency happens.

CHESS is there to solve this problem. It includes itself among your unit test and try every possible permutation of code that happens asynchronously. This include race condition, dead lock, and what else exists (not an expert in multi-threaded applications).

Of course, I expect Eric to blog more about this amazing software that is coming from Microsoft’s Trenches.

Want more information? Get on the CHESS website. If you want to find more interesting projects that Microsoft’s genius are working on, visit Microsoft Research.

CodeCamp Montreal 2009 – Unit testing with Moq

I’m happy to announce you that I’ve been selected to present a session at the Montreal CodeCamp.

My session is going to be focussed on Moq and unit testing. Since simply looking at a framework can be done simply, I’ll be going over the framework and many “how-to”. I’ll also try to fit a few interesting demo with some “refactoring for unit test”. Of course, this will all be centered around “best practices” since it’s the theme of this year.

See you all there!

Adding lyrics to your MP3 via iTunes

I found tonight an interesting site that built an application that insert the lyrics inside your mp3 collection.

It requires iTunes and the .NET framework.

It can be found here. I will rewrite the application in C#, improve the source and contact the author if we can put it in Google Code or Codeplex.

Enjoy!

Coding Dojo – Thursday, May 21st

Alright, after our small ALT.NET meeting (with beer) at O’Reagan Irish Pub, we decided to organize a coding dojo. If anybody is interested, please leave a comment on the blog or contact me via Twitter (@MaximRouiller).

The Coding Dojo will happen on Thursday, May 21st. It will start at 5:30pm and may include free pizza. No guarantee but I’ll try. We don’t have a local yet but I’ll keep you all updated as soon as we find one.

The Coding Dojo will be oriented around TDD and will take the format of a RandoriKata.

Who will participate?