Michael Ayvazyan

Distributed version control (DVCS)

For a long while I was interested to try out some DVCS. The problems caused me to not do that was really simple – which one to choose Mercurial or git? I read some technical articles and came to a conclusion that Mercurial has better merge capabilities. Unfortunately I don’t have links to these articles (I read them several months ago) But what I like about git is that it has a huge community and that’s why there are many neat tools for it. For example there is a two-way bridge between TFS and Git. Today I came over Mercurial, Subversion, and Wesley Snipes article and Eric Sink says there:

But if I were choosing a DVCS as a regular user, I would choose Mercurial. I've used it some, and found it to be incredibly pleasant.  It seems like the DVCS that got everything just about right.

primaryGroupToken via C# from Active Directory (AD)

I needed to change Primary Group of the Active Directory user programmatically (via C#). I found a good example in PowerShell. But it wasn’t obvious for me on how to convert the following code fragment into C#:

$NewGroup = [ADSI]"LDAP://CN=Domain Guests,CN=Users,$DomainNC"
$NewGroup.GetInfoEx(@("primaryGroupToken"), 0)
$NewGroupToken = $NewGroup.Get("primaryGroupToken")

group.Invoke("GetInfoEx", new object[] { new object[] { "primaryGroupToken" }, 0 });
object primaryGroupToken = group.Invoke("Get", new object[] { "primaryGroupToken" });

Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern

I’ve just read excellent introduction to the Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern. And you know, it seems really worthy to have in a toolbox.
Actually just to be ready to use it I’ll need to research many related patterns such as Reporting Database, Event Sourcing, etc..
So check it yourself - read this great CQRS introduction to see how many useful patterns and practices those are related to CQRS you don’t know yet ;) …

MSpec and TFS Build Service (MSMSpec)

If you are going to use MSpec in your next .NET project you could face the following issues:

1. Visual Studio won’t be able to execute MSpec specifications. (MSpec has it’s own test engine)
2. TFS Build Service is able to run only MSTest.

1. I added MSMSpec.tt to the solution items. And added its as a link to each MSpec project.
2. I made TestExecutionHelper class internal. It was public initially, so if one MSpec project is referencing another, public TestExecutionHelper will result in a conflict. (since both assemblies are declaring the same class). MSMSpec author suggests another workaround but it doesn’t fit my need since I use shared MSMSpec.tt.
3. I added 108 to the suppress warnings list in all MSpec projects. (to suppress “_Setup hides inherited member. Use the new keyword if hiding was intended” warning)
4. Finally I fixed Cleanups execution order (Parent class Cleanup should be called after Child class Cleanup):

Team City: Windows Authentication

There is detailed article on how to configure different authentication modes in Team City. But it lacks some information… Let consider the following example:

1. You setup Team City
2. Configured Project in it
3. All went fine and now you need to configure user access
4. So you switched Team City to Windows Authentication
5. Now you can login with you Domain credentials, but you can’t give administrator rights to any user since you don’t have administrator yet

1. Login using Default Authentication Mode as Administrator in the Browser #1
2. Switch Authentication Mode to Windows Authentication
3. Login in as a Windows Domain User in the Browser #2
4. In the Browser #1 open Users and Groups
5. You will see newly created user account for Windows Domain User logged in using Browser #2
6. You can select this account and give it administrative rights

Automated Build Usage Example

A problem

• Wait Visual Studio to be started
• Get latest source code
• Wait until Visual Studio will load a project
• And finally we need to build a project.

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Peopleware is a really amazing book. IMHO it isn’t just for managers or management people, but to the all people engaged in collaboration. So please consider to read it since I’m sure it will provide a lot of joy for you! Some great quotation.

• The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
• There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.
• Quality—If Time Permits

People must  learn  that it's  okay sometimes not to answer their phones, and they just learn that their time—not just the quantity but its quality—is important.

Erlang and web development

First off all what is Erlang? Here’s description from the http://www.erlang.org/

Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements on high availability. Some of its uses are in telecoms, banking, e-commerce, computer telephony and instant messaging. Erlang's runtime system has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance

Tempo – tiny templating engine (JavaScript)

Tempo is a neat JSON templating engine with No dependencies. And it’s just 8KB of the minified JavaScript code. However if we will decide to use JQuery (for example to make AJAX requests in a convenient way) probably we could just use mature jQuery Templates. Anyway I’m totally sure Tempo could be a great choice for some kind of projects. …

Knockout.js - MVVM for the client-side code

If you didn’t have a chance to review Knockoutjs library written by Steve Sanderson, please Do that It’s just amazing! Furthermore it has great interactive tutorials so you’ll be able to learn the basics in a very convenient and fun way! By the way Steve shared which open-source components he used in learn.knockoutjs.com. …