Piece of my thoughts..: June 2009

Jun 19, 2009

Hug a Developer

I thought you might enjoy this one.

Atleast, I know I am not alone. And, therefore my boss knows, I can't complaint :)

Happy Friday.

Jun 13, 2009

Something trivial as debugging a WCF hosted on IIS eventually cost me hours of googling and digging into VS2008. Lot of lessons learnt though.

In brief:
Built a WCF and a Silverlight app to connect to it.

On trying to run both of them out of development web server supported by VS resulted in error

This could be due to attempting to access a service in a cross-domain way without a proper cross-domain policy in place, or a policy that is unsuitable for SOAP services. You may need to contact the owner of the service to publish a cross-domain policy file and to ensure it allows SOAP-related HTTP headers to be sent.

After digging for while and repeatedly reading the basic requirements to have crossdomain.xml and clientaccesspolicy.xml, this article gave an organized summary with examples on crossdomain. Again, it didn't work. The solutions recommended having either of the crossdomain.xml and clientaccesspolicy.xml files in the app folder or the www root folder. It really didn't work in my case. It started working when placed both the files in root and app folder. Still, not sure if that made it work. Worth a try and different from all the solutions i came across.

Error 2:

Trying to debug the WCF hosted on the IIS through VS.NET started throwing the error "The following module was built either with optimizations enabled or without debug information"

I was sure, the modules were built with debug mode and optimizations turned off. After searching for while, the below url provided ways to debug further. The articles talks about attaching to w3 process and using VS.NET to check the availability of debug information.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/3d99bf8b-dd32-4562-ab9b-8f63982ec57c

http://www.devnewsgroups.net/group/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework/topic49328.aspx

Jun 6, 2009

Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science [Source: DDJ.COM]

Image by Gojca via Flickr

A great post on practical issues surrounding Software Engineering and why Software Engineering is different from Computer Science. The author points out the human factor as the key to all issues and why Software Engineering will never be as rigorous and predictable as Computer Science.

The complete article at Dr.Dobb's journal here.
Must Read!

Jun 2, 2009

The Rise of China

Image via Wikipedia

The Rise of China has been astounding since the dawn of new millenium. Considering the number of years since China has taken center stage, it's growth and rise to power is unimaginable for any other country on earth. Historically, China is probably the only country after the western powers to grow economically and militarily. With the world split into American and Anti-American, Chinese are finding friends around the world in the Anti-American camps. A notable achievement though is to not only militarily surpass USA, but also financially with China's investment of trillions of dollars in US Fed thereby virtually controlling the American economy. With huge exposure to China in terms of investments in Fed and dependency on cheap Chinese exports, US is historically in a tight corner to support its arch rival's growth to sustain its own.

Taking advantage of this situation, China has expanded their clout around the world funding every Anti-American country into its way. Chinese funding of South American countries, Africa and the Asian countries such as Pakistan, Burma, Srilanka has followed the strategy of US in the post-world war era. China has heavily invested in these countries to gain clout over the natural resources as well as military positions across the globe, the same way the US did in the post- world war era building military bases around the world and gaining clout as the super power. China is building ports in major countries surrounding India to establish its clout in South Asia.

Also, China has grown into the largest consumer of cars supassing US for the first time in the history, as Chinese government has been pushing to create China into a consumer market propelling growth domestically than reliance on the US exports. China mustered its clout recently by demanding an alternative global currency to US dollar and providing Chinese currency as mode of funding to promote its currency globally.

On the controversial side, China is known for notorious human rights abuses, stealing intellectual property from global in Chinese soil, tight control over media and the list continues.

Jun 1, 2009

Switching Silverlight 2 and 3 development

Image via CrunchBase

For all those developers writing code on Silverlight 2 and 3 at the same time, Visual Studio 2010 IDE will allow development using both versions. For those who can't wait, here is a quick fix to switch between Silverlight 2 and 3 environments quickly. Checkout the link below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/amyd/archive/2009/03/18/switching-from-silverlight-3-tools-to-silverlight-2-tools.aspx