A bit proud of myself

Sometimes it just happens =)

Recently, online banking service (Bank24.ru), frontend part of which had been designed and developed by me & my colleagues, Yuri Kurzhumov & Dmitri Govoruhin, was highly valued and won the first place prize in online banking services contest held in Russia.

 

Although I don’t work for Bank.ru anymore, I am proud of the result and I’d like to congratulate all the staff from Information Technology Department of Bank24.ru who participated in any way in creating, developing and maintaining the best national online banking service. My special congrats to: Alexey Vinogradov, Anna Mamaeva, Boris Dyakonov, Eugene Samoilov, Igor Karfidov, Olga Urchenko, Pavel Gushin, Sergei Vedeneev & Tatjana Talykova. Great work!

Me on Google Buzz

Hello All,

here is my Google Buzz link: http://www.google.com/profiles/Dmitri.Maximov#buzz

I find it a bit more convenient than blog for sharing short ideas, publishing links to good articles and everything quick and small-sized.

Stay tuned! =)

Busy people versus effective people

The excellent essay “The cult of busy” by Scott Berkun about time, efficiency, busy people and everything. Don’t miss it.

It seems that it is rather easy nowadays to become extremely busy, but will you be efficient enough to sort out the problems? The answer is not so obvious and might surprise you.

Denis Krjuchkov vs. Oracle

I’m glad to introduce yet another™ technology-related blog by Denis Krjuchkov, one of the most ambitious and highly talented software architects I’ve ever known. I’m pretty sure that the blog will be extremely interesting especially for those who is keen on investigating the very depth of modern software technologies, concepts and languages.

The first post is dedicated to a struggle with a weird bug in Oracle which prevents robust serializable access to database even when there is only one opened connection. So check this out.

BTW, the long-awaited DataObjects.Net 4.2 is planned to be released at the end of this week. Stay tuned!

DataObjects.Net 4.2 RC’s health status

It is considered as a good and beneficial idea for a development team and the whole product’s development process to become more open for its community. DataObjects.Net 4 team shares these views and tries to move step by step towards the goal of openness and transparency.

We moved the project repository to Google Code, which means that everybody has access to the source code, revision history and changeset tracking. We started to use publicly available issue tracker. Anybody can report an issue, request a feature and vote for it. We use it by ourselves to track development tasks and therefore the current status of the development process can be seen on project’s update page. Finally, support forum is open 24 hours a day, so everybody is always welcome.

A part of our English-speaking developers began their personal blogs in order to share their thoughts, ideas, new concepts, samples and examples with the community. The most outstanding blogs are:

• the well-known Alex Yakunin’s blog. A must have source of information if you are interested in .Net in general and in DataObjects.Net in particular.
• Alex Kofman’s blog. Not so frequently updated but anyway, it is worth reading. Alex prefers to discuss general ORM-related concepts, often in DataObjects.Net 4 context.
• Alex Ilyin’s blog. Although he doesn’t work on DataObjects.Net 4 directly but he makes a contribution to the project on everyday basis participating in hot discussions and reporting tons of suggestions and remarks. It is he, who tests the very green alphas of DataObjects in his sophisticated (and sometimes even a bit weird) scenarios.
• This blog. As you are already here, I suppose that you know what the blog is about ;)

But sometimes I’m asking myself – is it enough to  feel and understand whether the project is healthy, robust, well-doing, or not? How to figure out the core understanding of the product’s quality through the deluge of these numerous activities?
Finally, I’ve got the idea. It’s all about numbers, not words. Unit tests results can be used to assess the health status of the product. For now DataObjects.Net 4 has almost 1000 unit tests for the Core part and almost 1500 tests for storage providers (In-memory database, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server) and such number of tests is enough for a simple statistical analysis.

Here is the indication of DataObjects.Net 4 RC’s health status for today (20-02-2010):

The green/red bar shows the percentage of successful/failed tests for the Core and every storage provider. Note that PostgreSql 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, MS SQL Server 2005 providers show no failed tests at all. The worse result is for Oracle, its 90% only. Support for Oracle 11g is still in beta stage but we are going to improve it. The next unlucky one is the provider for MS SQL Server CE 3.5, it is also waiting for a bunch of fixes as well as its big brother  - MS SQL Server 2008.

So, I’m going to invent this health status meter publishing on a regular basis. Hope you’ll find it useful. In this case it could move to the official website of the project.

BTW, in case you have any suggestions on the topic – don’t hesitate to post a comment or two. You know, you are always welcome!

Google URL shortener for everyone

The above-mentioned Google service is definitely useful, especially for long URLs, but it has one big disadvantage, at least for those who prefer any browser other than Google Chrome and don’t want Google toolbar to be installed. Not a nice strategy for such web service-oriented company, I suppose.

Luckily, there is an alternative way to get your URLs shortened with the Google URL shortener. It doesn’t require any software to be installed, it is no more than a simple web page:

Note, that the project is not affiliated with Google.

Microsoft Sql Server CE 3.5 provider for DataObjects.Net 4

The first version of Microsoft Sql Server CE 3.5 provider for DataObjects.Net 4 is going to be officially shipped in the upcoming DataObjects.Net 4.2 release.

Let me shortly introduce Sql server CE’s limitations. So it doesn’t support:

Feature	Where is used	Workaround, if any
Temporary tables	Local collections support	Regular tables are created and dropped automatically
Full-text search	Full-text queries	-
Batches	Batch database operations	-
CROSS APPLY SQL operator	“First”, “Single”, “ElementAt”, etc. LINQ methods inside sub queries; ”SelectMany” LINQ method without “DefaultIfEmpty” specifying	-
UPDATE FROM [Table]	Upgrade procedure	Another, but analogous SQL statement is used
INSERT DEFAULT VALUES	Insert operation	Default values are explicitly specified
Savepoints	Nested transactions	-
ROW NUMBER SQL operator	“Skip” LINQ methods	-
INTERSECT, EXCEPT SQL operators	“Except”, “Intersect” LINQ methods	-
nvarchar(max), varchar(max), varbinary(max) datatypes		text, ntext, image are used instead
COUNT_BIG function	“Count” LINQ method	Result of “Count” is explicitly casted to bigint type

But despite of all these limitations there is one huge advantage of CE usage: it doesn’t require separate installation. This is significant feature for developers who works on desktop applications for personal use, for example. Just ship, install and it works. No more problems with database server installation, connections, firewalls, network configurations, etc. Another case is running tests on your business model. Actually, you don’t need big database server for this.

In order to use DataObjects.Net 4 with Sql Server CE instead of his big brother, use the following connection url:

<domain connectionUrl="sqlserverce://user:password@localhost/<Path to your database file>"/>

Another option is to use native connection string:

<domain provider="sqlserverce"
        connectionString="Data Source=<Path to your database file>"/>

Sql Server CE 3.5 provider for DataObjects.Net 4 is already available in DataObjects.Net 4.2 RC.