Michael Ayvazyan

Thoughts about Qt 5

I’m working as a windows developer for the most part of my carrier. I started as a PHP developer and I like linux (especially command line). Recenlty we were making our middleware system to work on Mono to be able to run it on Raspberry Pi and similar low price devices. So I had a chance to play with Linux again. It’s was fun so I decided to do some reading on cross platform development. I did a brief reading on Qt and liked it. Then I found very nice book on Qt5 and QML. I really encoredge you to do at least a brief reading of it. It’s worth to mention that porting our .NET system to Mono wasn’t a painfull process at all. But still now we have 2 support two different platforms .NET & Mono. There some difference on how Mono executes our code. In the same time Qt will execute your code just the same on any plaform. It’s really neat advantage. So it’s very good idea to have Qt5 in a toolbox while choosing architecture for an upcoming project. …

Javascript Unit Tests on Team Foundation Service with Chutzpah

I was helping my peer developer to setup TFS Build to run Jasmine tests. Thanks to Visual Studio & TFS teams it’s really easy to do since TFS 2012! (I configured TFS Build to run Machine.Specification couple of years ago) We were using the Javascript Unit Tests on Team Foundation Service with Chutzpah guide. It’s very nice and straightforward article. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it needs to set Copy to Output Directory on each test file. Instead of that we added the following Post-build script, so we don’t need to set Copy to Output Directory on each test file.

for /R $(ProjectDir) %%G IN (*.test.js) DO copy "%%G" $(TargetDir)

Dependency Injection in .NET. Seemann Mark.

Recently I had a chat with a peer developer about IT books. I recommended him a great Seemann Mark’s book Dependency Injection in .NET. After that I realized that I never blogged about it! I’d say that in my opinion this is an Must Read book for .NET software developers. At first I was a bit surprised that it’s a 500+ pages book about one pattern, but it’s really worth it. First chapters are an amazing explanation of the Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control patterns. Last chapters dives in details of some popular DI containers. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain a chapter about Ninject which is my favorite DI container, but there are tons of information about it on the Internet. Service Locator is anti-pattern? I was very excited that he lists Service Locator as a DI anti-pattern! We were using Service Locator on a big WPF application couple of years ago. After some time I released that it’s not an ideal choice. Seemann Mark stated the following issues with Service Locator pattern:

• The module drags along a redundant Dependency
• It isn't apparent that DI is being used

Mono 3.2.7 is working on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian (hard float)!

We were planning to port our application into Mono to give it a try on a Raspberry Pi for a quite a while. What’s interesting now, then we finally started to do this, Alex Rønne Petersen added a hard float support to Mono! I was able to build his armhf branch directly on my Raspberry Pi. So now I’m all set to port our application! Thanks to Alex! Thanks to the Mono team! :) …

Stop your console app the nice way

This would be obvious for someone. Posting it just in case :)

    class Program
    {
        private static readonly AutoResetEvent AutoResetEvent = new AutoResetEvent(false);
 
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.CancelKeyPress += OnCancelKeyPress;
 
            //TODO: do work here
            AutoResetEvent.WaitOne();
            //TODO: shutdown here
        }
 
        private static void OnCancelKeyPress(object sender, ConsoleCancelEventArgs e)
        {
            e.Cancel = true;
            AutoResetEvent.Set();
        }
    }

Durandal: TypeScript modules support

I’m working on a prototype of HTML5 Single Page Application (SPA). I’m happy to use plumbing provided by Durandal. It’s really exciting SPA framework.  Unfortunately it doesn’t support TypeScript modules. According to Rob Eisenberg it won’t be fixed for now (quote below)

I'd rather not make a change in the core based on the current state of TypeScript. Rather, I'd prefer a plugin that re-configures durandal for this case. But, it will get fixed in TypeScript before v1.0 I confirmed that by checking their roadmap. Also Luke Hoban responded to me via codeplex to say they have every intent to fix it https://github.com/BlueSpire/Durandal/pull/13

Typed XML programming

I want to tell you about very useful project LINQ to XSD

The LINQ to XSD technology provides .NET developers with support for typed XML programming. LINQ to XSD contributes to the LINQ project (.NET Language Integrated Query); in particular, LINQ to XSD enhances the existing LINQ to XML technology.

services services = services.Load(@"c:\services.xml");
string name = services.service.First(x => x.FullTypeName == "xx").Namespace;

TFS 2012 migrated from TFS 2010: Project Creation fails

As I mentioned previously we migrated to the TFS 2012 + SharePoint 2013. It’s worth to mention that TFS 2012 is just great! It’s so handy to use new dashboards and task planning stuff. We just Love it But today we had to create new project… and it did work for us. TF301777: Team Project Creation Failed New Team Project Wizard encountered the following error and could not continue. Error The Project Creation Wizard encountered an error while creating reports to the SQL Server Reporting Services on http://servername/ReportServer/ReportService2005.asmx. After some Goodling I found Jeremy Jameson blog post on the similar issue. Although our cause was a bit simpler - all the TFS reports were in Reporting Server. So I just had to ran below SQL statements:

USE master
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON master.dbo.xp_sqlagent_notify TO  [NT SERVICE\ReportServer]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON master.dbo.xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs TO  [NT SERVICE\ReportServer]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON master.dbo.xp_sqlagent_is_starting TO  [NT SERVICE\ReportServer]
GO
USE msdb
GO
-- Permissions for SQL Agent SP's
GRANT EXECUTE ON msdb.dbo.sp_help_category TO  [NT SERVICE\ReportServer]
GO
GRANT EXECUTE ON msdb.dbo.sp_add_category TO  [NT SERVICE\ReportServer]

Schemaless Data Structure

I planned to get familiar with some of the schemaless databases for a long time. And eventually got time to this a couple of days ago. And it was real surprise for me to see post on this topic on the Martin Fowler’s blog next day since I blogged about my first MongoDB experience. Anyway I highly recommend you to review this great Schemaless Data Structures presentation. …

MongoDB at a glance

Just finished reading of the MongoDB: The Definitive Guide book. You know it was really exciting. The book is a great introduction to the MongoDB and to the all it’s features. Also there are several nice examples those emphasize the advantages of the document-oriented databases. As for the MongoDB itself, I hope to try it on one of the upcoming projects, cause I suppose document-oriented model will work just great for it. …