Reverse Engineering Taboo

Many (esp in IT world) think this a taboo, well here i'm trying to break. I don’t understand why such negativity associated with this; if this is not so in other industries. Take an automobile manufacturing industry, isn't a common practice to buy competitor product and disassemble it to examine and understand for the purpose of enhancing their vehicles/components. If you can consider that legal (of course if it doesn’t violate any patent/copy-right), then it should be okay to disassemble software for the purpose of understanding and enhancing existing system.

For people who confuse this with Security Hack, question yourself why you have that secured data/logic in the binaries which can be reversed in a matter of seconds (Lutz Roeder's .NET Reflector), esp with the these high-order languages. No, not even NGEN isn't protected from reversing, hmmm, are you still in Fool's Paradise!

Wake-up Buddy. The silent guy in that last desk could be a black hat! Hahahaha.

IM - Thin client

I had not used Yahoo Messenger for a long time, and when i decided to change that and statr reaching ppl, my network group policy didn't allow me to run that in my office machine. I was wondering if there was a thin client yahoo client out there that i can use. And did found few e-Messenger & Meebo.

4/10 update: Today i was thinking what can be done if corporate proxy blocks this site, i renamed yPager.exe to iPager.exe and hmm it seems to work by-passing windows GPO !

Remembering Marshall, MN --continued--

R4 Install day















Release 3 Install day












Diwali '04 @ YMCA















Snow @ Independance park
















Goosberry Falls, Duluth




















A Rest area @ South Dakota




















Upper Sioux Agrncy SP, Granite Falls

Remembering Marshall, MN --continued--

Palisade Head, Duluth















Valley Fair






















Sunset @ Lake Sarah

















Garvin Park
















Split Rock Creek Lighthouse, Duluth




















Glacial Lake ?















Home @ Winter















Ice scrapping !!!



















Home just before Winter














Last flight from FSD to ORD



















Leaving Marshall, MN (Last day to FSD)

Remembering Marshall, MN

-- My first American soil --
-- Photo credits Gg --

Wind Mills before Pipestone















Two Harbors, Duluth















Glacial Lake SP















Rainy eve @ Camden SP















Sunset @ Independeance park















Mt. Rushmore















Sioux Falls















Frozen Lake Shetek















Sunset @ Camden SP















July 4th Independance park















Rainy Eve @ Lake Bendon

C# and VB.NET

After developing .NET apps using C# for a long time, i'm now into VB.NET. I recollect old days where i was forced into C# from VB and my initial aversion over VB coming from C++. All along my .NET years i presumed VB.NET is C# w/o a ;.

Being developer for quite some time, i think language preference (especially .NET langs, JAVA) is mere personal adoration, i didn't had privilege to choose .NET over J2EE. Reason why Microsoft prefers to code in C# may be due to the fact, they have lot of C++ developers and hence transistion to C# should have been easy. And my first annoyance with VB.NET, feature go to matching ending brace with keyboard shortcut Ctrl + [ is not working or may be i don't know that. Speaking of VS.NET shortcuts, you may want to look at O'Reilly's Mastering Visual Studio .NET Shortcut Key Guide

My googling on Syntactical differences and comparison between VB.NET and C#.

Microsoft white paper on Differences Between Visual Basic .NET and Visual C# .NET

MSDN Language Equivalents comparing different .NET languages

Frank McCown's, C# and VB.NET Comparison quick reference guide
Steven Swafford's, C# and VB.NET Comparison Cheat Sheet a derivative of Frank’s comparison, option to download the material in PDF or Word doc.

There is hell a lot of code translators out there and I doubt full fledged use, but a good tool for developer who moves from one (.NET) language to another,
Alex Lowe's http://authors.aspalliance.com/aldotnet/examples/translate.aspx
Kamal Patel's http://www.kamalpatel.net/ConvertCSharp2VB.aspx
Carlos Aguilar Mares's Translation (VB.NET to C# and vice versa)
http://carlosag.net/Tools/CodeTranslator/Default.aspx
& a commercial tool http://www.remotesoft.com/octopus/try.html

Moving on

I am moving on, from the RSG program to my next assignment in a paper tissue manufacturing company. Hope life takes me on a road to more better place, and quote in signature of sign-off email dedicated to Mr KD.

The wise man learns more from the fool than the fool learns from the wise man. - Marcus Aurelius

RSG! The End.

Ahhhh....................

Alas RSG! Sees the final install (Slow-Roll) and looking back this 2.5 year long program all i can think of is HUGE from all aspects (complexity, code size, team size, ...) Anyone who worked on this will have a lot of things to take with.

Still few things are left like Prod. support and end state switch to all SQL. Talking of that i am more than happy to write that 2 lines of code to return SQL in switch component (XXXX0173, just in case i forget this abused component name)

Some facts on the program, i happen to gather after a while

• 5 Major releases
• 3500 Programs
• 1.8 Tb of disk space
• 350K batch jobs per month
• 490 - Peak team size
• 3837 Person Months
• 900 GB of data from DB2 to SQL Server (913 tables)
• 7 million lines of legacy code replaced with 1.5 million lines of code
• 70% reduction in code base

I'll take that for a huge project!

March to final install of RSG

After a week’s relax, here I go again, march to the final install of this long, long project. Expecting R4 to be installed by Jan 15th . Should be offline for some more months…

Hurray! End of Prod Support.

I have to agree, you can be a expert in architecting systems, but knack of fixing a production issue can't be compared to that. If you think zeroing in the problem code is tough, the tougher part is yet to come, no isn’t fixing the code, fixing the corrupted data, i was so lucky that i had to meet this scenario more than once.

Whatever today is end of 45 day support for R2/3, meaning no more calls from operators during nights and weekends! If we find bugs in production after so much testing, one should understand the fact, bug free system is more a difficult task as the size and complexity of the system increases. NUnit/TDD power is only as good as test fixture's strength.

But after initial hiccups, the system did come back and stabilize pretty well, may be it will become as good as mainframe as time goes, okay, at least before this becomes legacy hahaha...