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...

Finally the Big day is here !!!

After more than 11/2 year of designing/developing/testing/testing/testing/... finally i reach the end of tunnel for Release 2/3.

Release2/3 is going live tomorrow,..

hopefully the light at the end of tunnel is not an incoming train ;-)

.NET Logging Framework (Options)

After seeing the limitations with EIF, i would like to see other logging options.

Will update this post, once i get full details ...

okay for now the issues we face with EIF,
EIF configuration for COM+ and GAC components (esp we have a lot of common components) is not deployment friendly;
No option to log to a text file;
No decent tracelogs viewer utility, one that comes with install is kids play;
CustomSink seems to be really costly if used with full force

But i have to agree, EIF's configuration power meets any enterprise demands, but i heard there won't be a version for Whidbey.

p&p CMAB encryption feature

I still don't find time to put down my ramblings on CMAB, but today i was asked to tweak the block to use client's encryption helper component instead of out-of-box encryption. Unlike other blocks, I have a great respect to this block for its sound design (as usual no COM+ support).

I wonder why didn't MSFT create a encryptionHelper component, that can be used across other blocks or a stand alone encryption application block, instead of implementing the algorithm in the CMAB block itself???

Do Yourself Mainframe Interop in 1 Day !!!

Mainframe Interop with Avalon.

Cool Avalon frontend for green-on-black mainframe screen. Must see all new avalon Carousel control, you should see the vector graphic in work when he zooms in-out. But i don't believe this can be good way to show a hierarchical data {may be for simpler stuff's}. But i like to see it used in user navigation.

SwankyUI aside, we can see the microsoft strategic lean towards interoping with PlatformX.

What next, ... platform neutral Office suite :-)

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition demo by Scott G

*Demo of next version of ASP.NET*, i was expecting some ASP.Net show, but anyhow Scott G, showed some of the feature additions in the new Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition, really a lot of improvements {may be lot of *bug-fixes* too}. Some of the feature i liked, Code refactor-ing option, debug mode code change, improvement in design/source mode of page, auto compile of changes, help on exception causes, ...

But when VS.NET was released, i was told it will be one tool for all, but why now a spl edition for web development tool, are we going back to the age of launching multiple apps to work on different projects???

Avalon says "Hello World"

After fighting for more than an hour, I was able to develop a *Hello World* win app in Avalon {March ’05 CTP}, it was tough to get help online as so much changes are happening to the framework, it took me some time and guessing to find the PresentationCore assembly and really tough time understanding what msbuild was expecting in the .proj. I am still yet to find how to use XAML with msbuild.

Long way to go…..

Indigo CTP

Go get the Avalon and Indigo CTP released to public...

Joint system testing completed

As i am wrapping-up the final program validation, i should thank everyone of offshore team. I happen to dig out some statistics of the work we completed,

7 online process 15 batch/components
~51,335 Lines of Code excluding comments, white lines
0 defects, 6 Accepted changes

I would have been happy if we had a chance to repeat this in FundRaiser, if not for that CR, that scoped out the application.

Here goes the list of dedicated team members,
Arumugam, Praveen
Raja Simman, Kamalesh Kumar
Chinnasamy, Ramesh babu
Elumalai, Dhanasekar
Sampathkumar, MuthuAnitha
Prasanna Subramanian;
Sundaresan, Raghuraman;
Cuppala Janakiram, Roopesh Kumar
Elwin, Annecca
Kandimalla, Neeraja
Karthikeyan, Ramesh Kulothunan
Narayanan, Sajitha
Seethapathy, Ganesan
Selvakumar, Annam

And my thoughts,

The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men. Labour produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity -- and does so in the proportion in which it produces commodities generally.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)