Girish Bharadwaj

2 years gap and hopefully back

2008-11-20T10:53:19Z

So, life has a way of becoming interesting in chunks. I am sure the two subscribers to my RSS feed have probably left reading my blog a long while ago... :) Anyway, I have in the last couple of years, lost about 30lbs, worked with Java and J2EE and .NET and Ruby and some of Groovy and even some of Rails. All in all, as I said in the beginning, life has been interesting. Hopefully, I can begin to post more but, then again, I might not.

I am back after a long while

2006-10-13T00:55:16Z

I have been busy with vacation (went to India for a month with a stop over at London), came back, deemed an "architect", got immersed in architechy work. Anyway, I am having a blast with the new role with SharePoint, J2EE, portals et al. Its fun. So, I decided to find myself a new blog post editor since w:blogger was no longer cutting it and it did not work very well for editing some stuff. So, I found "Windows Live Writer Beta". Sweet, and it works with Community server too. I love it. The really neat part is that it actually downloaded my blog settings and I can see the post as it would appear.

Here are some pictures I took while on vacation:

Only reason to post the pictures was to test that ability of Live writer. :) Oh, I also started fiddling with photography for a hobby. It seems that all work and no play seems to have made me a really a dull boy.

Waterfall2006, the real next big thing

2006-02-10T16:32:59Z

Here is a great way of implementing your next project. http://www.waterfall2006.com is conference at Niagara falls. Make sure that you pay attention to all course excerpts.

IE Tab for Firefox

2006-01-09T16:35:55Z

If you are one of those people who likes Firefox and starts IE only to test a page or two, There is a really neat extension at http://ietab.mozdev.org/. IETab creates an embedded IE browser window within Firefox. You can just Right-click and select "view in IETab" to get it to be rendered by IE engine instead of gecko.

i-mate JASJAR

2005-12-21T11:25:47Z

I got one of these when I went to PDC. Its one of those things that has basically removed all need for carrying zaurus, iPod and a Motorola phone in my pocket. I love it. I do have one issue with it though. It seems like it needs a soft-reset every few days. Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me, I wonder.

Oh, I have telepottyphobia since I got this phone.

Microsoft "Award for customer excellence", I got one too

2005-12-21T11:18:48Z

By getting Microsoft award for customer excellence, I am joining the illustrious crowd that includes Wallace McClure, Frans Bouma, Anand Narayanaswamy and Sam Gentile.

When I saw the email initially, it looked too much like a phishing scheme. Then I thought, If a guy knows enough about me to know that I play with VS.NET 2005, respect Soma and like Microsoft more or less, I should hand him my personal details. :)

Of course, I did a googled on it and found that it actually is a real award.

Well, I am honored.

Updated voo2dotray

2005-12-16T13:56:39Z

Voo2dotray has been updated by Robbie Coleman with many cleanups and enhancements. You can read more about it and download it here. Thank you Rob.

Also, Shimon has posted his comments on this. It makes me proud to see that something I hacked together is actually usable :)

Martin Fowler on Agile

2005-12-15T14:01:34Z

I found from Sam Gentile's blog about Martin Fowlers updated "The new methodology" article. Its an excellent read. It provides very good measures for going agile or not. If you are uncertain about agile, make sure you read "Should you go agile?" section.

Quote: "The first step is to find suitable projects to try agile methods out with. Since agile methods are so fundamentally people-oriented, it's essential that you start with a team that wants to try and work in an agile way. Not just is a reluctant team more difficult to work with, imposing agile methods on reluctant people is fundamentally at odds with the whole notion of agile development."

That means, if you don’t like your teammate, don’t bother going agile. You will not succeed unless you make not going agile to your teammate be a career limiting move. :)

Exceptions and ASP.NET 2.0

2005-12-14T19:35:27Z

Scott, in his usual style, has a blog entry regarding unhandled exceptions in ASP.NET 2.0. The gist of it is that if you have secondary threads in your ASP.NET app and you let an exception leak through, you are going to kill the asp.net worker process. That means, you better handle any exceptions that might arise from the secondary thread.

BTW: This is applicable only to the secondary threads. If you are have unhandled exceptions in the main thread that handles the request, ASP.NET infrastructure handles as usual. Not that I recommend doing this, but, you know who you are.

Using CSBlogger to post

2005-12-13T20:34:05Z

I ditched my attempts at using Zoundry for editing my msmvps.com posts. That and blogjet and other blog editors failed miserably for this. But, I found CSBlogger which works like a charm.

Thank god!

I cannot bear to edit stuff on web pages. I tend to get too distracted with them.

But this is beautiful.

Anyone coming to MS launch on 15th Dec at Boston?

2005-12-13T20:14:00Z

I will be there. Look like it could be fun. I will be at the Pre-launch Architect's council Breakfast as well. Free food is always welcome.

Steve on TDD

2005-12-13T20:07:00Z

Steve Eichert gets TDD. I know its not that hard to say you are doing TDD when you are basically doing upfront design and coming up with fancy UML diagrams and then developing the code with some tests around the code. I will not say that that is not TDD (Kent Beck, in his excellent book "Test Driven development: By Example" acknowledges that it is a form of TDD). But, doing BDUF is is not really getting the spirit of TDD. As Ward Cunningham has famously said, "Test-first coding is not about testing". I guess it was unfortunate that the "Test" word in TDD causes everyone to think that its about testing work.

Anyway, Steve gets TDD. Check his blog entry out at : http://steve.emxsoftware.com/TDD/TDD+and+Unit+Testing+are+NOT+the+Same.

While you are at it, just subscribe to his blog at http://steve.emxsoftware.com/rss.aspx.

Thank you, Susan!

2005-12-13T16:33:00Z

This is great. We are on Community server 1.0. Woohoo, looks good, smells great.

I love it.

Snow

2005-12-09T19:12:00Z

Yuck, We are getting pummelled by snow today. I like snow when I can stay home, light up the fireplace and watch the snow from inside. Not today. I am in office and feel like it will be an adventure going back home.

Oh well!!

Scott is funny ...

2005-12-05T20:48:00Z

Here is a nice little blog entry by Scott Allen about the kind of interaction he seems to have had during a code camp presentation. Now I know why I like him. :)

BTW: It also has some interesting ASP.NET 2.0 links in that entry.

Anybody playing with Ruby or Rails?

2005-12-02T04:03:00Z

I have been having a blast with Ruby and Rails framework. By far, this has been the cleanest experience I have had with languages and frameworks. I have started a blogger site for writing on ruby experiences.

I have been mucking with Ruby in Emacs but since I found eclipse plugin, things seem to click a lot better..

TDD and MS continued

2005-12-02T00:46:00Z

MS seems to have listened to the industry and pulled the paper about TDD from MSDN. I am impressed at the response. That is great!!!! Hopefully we will see better information next time around, may be get Martin Fowler or Michael Feathers to write that chapter...

MS and its TDD fiasco

2005-11-30T15:29:00Z

MS truly built a Titanic with its MS Visual Studio Team System and seems like here comes the iceberg.

Here is an article by Scott Bellware which sums so eloquently and beautifully, the problems with the methodology that MS has proposed for their version of TDD.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/scott.bellware/archive/2005/11/21/134910.aspx

Outlook macro to get tasks from Voo2do

2005-10-26T03:54:00Z

Since I wrote the earlier one for populating the tasks from outlook to voo2do, its only fitting that a reverse is feasible through macros. So, here it is. This one basically retrieves the tasks that are out in voo2do and stuffs them as tasks in outlook. It assigns your projects as categories as well.

As before, copy this to your outlook macros and run it. Make sure you change the email and password in this. It might be feasible to store the loginHash itself but I did not feel like investing too much time. :)

Enjoy

Sub GetFromVoo2do()
    Dim xml As Object: Set xml = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
    Dim email As String: email = "voo2do email account"
    Dim password As String: password = "password for voo2do"
    Call xml.Open("GET", "http://voo2do.com/api/getLoginHash?email=" & email & "&password=" & password, False)
    xml.Send
    Dim doc As Object
    Set doc = xml.responseXML
    Dim node As Object
    Set node = doc.selectSingleNode("//login")
    Dim strHash As String: strHash = node.selectSingleNode("@loginHash").nodeValue
    Dim strUser As String: strUser = node.selectSingleNode("@userId").nodeValue
    Call xml.Open("GET", "http://voo2do.com/api/getIncompleteTasks?loginHash=" & strHash & "&userId=" & strUser, False)
    xml.Send
    Set doc = xml.responseXML
    Dim nodeList As Object
    Set nodeList = doc.selectNodes("//task")

    Dim f As MAPIFolder
    Set f = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(olFolderTasks)
    Dim t As TaskItem
    Dim tI As TaskItem

    For Each node In nodeList
        Dim strSubject As String: strSubject = node.selectSingleNode("@taskdesc").nodeValue
        Dim bFound As Boolean: bFound = False
        For Each tI In f.Items
            If tI.subject = strSubject Then
                bFound = True
                Set t = tI
                Exit For
            End If
        Next
        If bFound = False Then
            Set t = Application.CreateItem(olTaskItem)
        End If
        If (node.selectSingleNode("@deadline").nodeValue <> "") Then
            t.DueDate = node.selectSingleNode("@deadline").nodeValue
        End If
        t.Categories = node.selectSingleNode("@projName").nodeValue
        t.subject = strSubject
        t.Save
    Next
End Sub

Outlook macro to update Rememberthemilk or voo2do

2005-10-19T16:09:00Z

If you are one of those guys who uses these todo list sites such as RTM, backpackit or Voo2do, like me.. you probably despise the fact that you need to start off with typing in the same things that are in the “tasks” list for outlook. If you do, here is a simple macro that basically pushes all the inclomplete tasks in your task list to the site using their e-mail in support.

Replace the mail.To with the right email address, stick it in as a Outlook macro through Tools-Macros. That's it.

Sub PostToRTM()
    Dim f As MAPIFolder
    Set f = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI").GetDefaultFolder(olFolderTasks)
    Dim t As TaskItem
    For Each t In f.Items
        If (t.Complete <> True) Then
            Dim mail As MailItem
            Set mail = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
            mail.To = "<replace this with the email that you have from the todo list site>"
            mail.Subject = t.Subject
            mail.BodyFormat = olFormatPlain
            mail.DeleteAfterSubmit = True
            mail.Send
        End If
    Next
End Sub