try...catch...finally...bloggg....: October 2005

try...catch...finally...bloggg....

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Charts using logixml reporting tool

As indicated in my previous blog entry I tried out the charts using the logixml tool and I was thoroughly convinced that this is a really really well thought thro tool. I could accomplish all my visual charts and reports in less time. Once you clearly identify how you want to display the charts and the report it hardly takes a few queries and if you are good at SQL the report generation is a couple of hours of work. We have officially migrated all our reports to logixml. Saves a lot of time and the stunning reports created with logixml really impressed the business leaders and gives them a way to analyse the data. Download logixml from www.logixml.com

CVS to SVN Conversion

Recently We wanted to have more flexibility in our release process and already facing problems with CVS while renaming files or moving files I decided it was time to convert to Subversion. So I did a quick evaluation and found that the change was compelling and would really help us. I am listing out some of the reasons for our change
1. Atomic commits.
2 CVS maintains the file level versioning whereas SVN maintains a project level versioning. We get the changeset of what files were changed in a particular commit without the hacks of same time commits as in CVS.
3 Braching and tagging are now a O(1) operation than O(n) as it was in CVS. For us we do a lot of releases and tagging and branching operations were quiet often and we used to wait for 10-15 mins for it to complete. Now it just zips fast.
4 File renaming and even directory level tracking. (This is one feature for which I would definitely change. We do a lot of refactoring and it was causing us loose history in cvs and now its like a breeze)
5 Better handling of the binary files. We maintain a lot of word doc and if some users forget the -kb switch we were really loking for a trouble in cvs.
6 Better network usage. Some of the operations like diff, revert, status can be done without the network so it makes your job easy to carry work home and work without the repository.
7 separation of update and status clears a lot of confusion and you can update the code only when you need it not to look at the changes made.
8 Properties handling is much cleaner way of storing associate information.
9. Undoing changes made in a single changeset is much easier than rolling back at each file level.

Ok I think we are convinced that SVN gives better facilities than CVS. Now coming to moving of the repository we would like to maintain the history of the repository. There are a couple of ways of doing it
1. To get the latest source code imported to SVN and maintain the CVS as a readonly repository for previous history.
2. Use cvs2svn or there are a couple of more scripts available to convert your cvs repository to SVN repository. They convert your branches, tags and group the changesets based on the time of commit. My version of CVSNT I had was 2.0.51d. I downloaded CVS2SVN 1.3 version and started my conversion.

CVS2SVN conversion program doesnt work on Windows environment. I downloaded the cygwin library and ran the python script from cygwin and boom the repository got converted. I had to do some tweaks like giving the --force-tag --use-cvs attributes. The error messages provided were pretty clear and it took about 30 minutes to convert my entire repository and I had a total of 4000 changesets.

We work on eclipse and so I got the subclipse client setup. Now i can take on rampant refactoring projects. Happy moving files around.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Server Application Unavailable Problem in ASP.NET

Server Application Unavailable
The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the "Refresh" button in your web browser to retry your request.

Administrator Note:
An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the application event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what cuased this error to occur.

APPLICATION EVENT LOG ENTRY:
Source: ASP.NET 1.1.4322.0
Category: None
Type: Error
Event ID: 1088
Computer: Shiva
Description: Failed to execute request because the App-Domain could not be created. Error 0x80070005 Access is denied.

Recently ran into this issue and the fix which helped me was to run check server extensions. Follow the below steps
Go to IIS Manager
   Default web sites right click on it
      Select Check Server Extensions

Monday, October 10, 2005

Quality management principles - ISO 9000

We are trying to go for the ISO 9001:2000 certification by Jan 1 2007. I looked briefly at the ISO 9000 Generic quality management standard and cant appreciate the simple, efficient management principles which lot of us forget.

  • Principle 1 Customer focus

  • Principle 2 Leadership

  • Principle 3 Involvement of people

  • Principle 4 Process approach

  • Principle 5 System approach to management

  • Principle 6 Continual improvement

  • Principle 7 Factual approach to decision making

  • Principle 8 Mutually beneficial supplier relationships



The below URL has the complete description of each of the principles. I am sure this approach is generic and fundamental to any business. I cant find words to appreciate the standards.

http://www.iso.org/iso/en/iso9000-14000/understand/qmp.html

VSS anywhere - Dynamsoft

I have been working with VSS and this tool from Dynamsoft has made accessing the VSS from remote servers like a charm. The professional client integrates well with the VS.NET IDE and gives you a feeling that you are connected to a VSS server on the local network. The standalone cross platform client supports all the VSS operations and its a good tool to have when working with global teams. Check out the tool at http://www.dynamsoft.com

Sunday, October 09, 2005

SHIT Meetings

Recently We have started the concept of SHIT (Say Honest Important Things) meetings with all the employees. These are the meetings where we open up and say honest things about the performance and expectations to our employees. I was really skeptical at the start of these and now I have to admit the sheer success and transparency these meetings have created amoung our employees. Virtually now everyone knows where they stand and what is expected out of them. Sticking to honest important things has also given us the edge and everybody a chance to look at their blind spots and work around or correct it. My Whole last year can be summarized in one lesson I learnt which is "Any system/process put in place without tying into the organizational goals/vision is bound to fail" I have been wondering why so many of my good initiatives were failing despite my pressure to stick to it. For eg I started a task tracker and asked all our employees to fill in the time they spent on different tasks so that they can see their progress over a time period. It sustained for a week before everyone dumped it. Now I tied it with the organization goal we started analyzing the time we spent on each project and we have setup a requirements tracker which would help us prioritize what we want to work. Now the task tracker is a must and should for us to make intelligent decisions on the delivery dates and now the system is working like a charm as people understood the significance of the role of the system and how it is important for the organization.


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