Nour's SpaceNour's SpaceAll you need about Software Industry, Technlogy and Software Development Articles
Moving to WordPress!
2009-04-09 00:05:00 This was really a hard decision to take but I have decided to transfer my blog to WordPress: http://innovativeperspective.wordpress.co m. All the posts has been imported there, there is nothing missing!Actually, I didn't expect how fascinating is WordPress as a blogging experience. It gives you more features and tracking statistics. More extensible, more handy and easy to customize. WordPress is more than a blogging system. It gives you Wiki features like adding pages, creating custom friendly links, custom gadgets and more.This blog - http://mnour.blogspot.com - will be still there, there is no intention to close it. However, it's not expected to publish new posts here in the future. Please stay tuned and update your feed reader to link to the new blog:http://feeds2.feedburner.com/innovat iveperspective.com More About: Wordpress , Moving
Disaster Recovery - If you fail to plan, plan to fail
2009-04-08 12:21:00 The CuttingEdge Club will organize a two hours session about "Disaster Recovery ". The session will be in Wednesday 8th April, 2009 - 5:30 PM, ITWorx - Free Zone. The speaker is Nahla Osman, Quality Team Leader, ITWorx.CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simple, pragmatic and accessible way.
Resolution: The Underlying Connection Was Closed
2009-03-27 23:17:00 You usually got this exception when trying to use System.Net.HttpWebRequest class in .NET 1.1 for creating internal URL calls from your ASP.NET code. The exception is also reproducible when trying to invoke webservices using the proxy class.By default, there is two concurrent connections in every ASP.NET application. As ASP.NET is a service it may require more than two concurrent connections to handle the requests. When you try to request URL from your ASP.NET code, ASP.NET may not be able to handle it. The solution is to increase the number of the concurrent connections which ASP.NET can handle. You can do so by modifying the "connectionManagement" element in the configuration file. For more information about the problem and its resolution, check this post. More About: Connection
yEd Graph Editor Replacement For Visio
2009-03-23 21:55:00 yEd by yWorks is a very nice graphical editor which can be considered a very perfect replacement for Visio. The tool is very simple and provide most of the functionalities of Microsoft Visio. It doesn't provide a very large collection of graph types like in Visio but at least it provides the most used and popular ones. You can create UML diagrams, flowcharts, block diagrams, networks and more. You can have glassy figures, rounded corners, curves, edges and shadows. Although, it's a Java tool, I didn't find it slow or heavy in loading. It's a very powerful graph editor tool and it really worth a try: Download yEd Graph Editior More About: Editor
MIX09 Sessions Videos
2009-03-20 14:43:00 MIX09 is a Web Design and Development Conference which is considered one of the most popular events for web professionals. The conference this year has already been launched in the last March 18th and will end in March 20th. To catchup with the event, you can watch the sessions through this link: MIX09 Sessions[Update] 29th March, 2009MIX stuff collected all their videos in one page: Click Here[Update] 21st March, 2009Guy Burstein collected all the sessions in his blog post and made available for download. So that you can watch MIX09 videos offline: Download MIX09 Sessions and Watch Offline More About: Videos
Software Security
2009-03-20 14:11:00 In the world of Facebook, E-Commerce and Email; modern threats have emerged exploiting application level vulnerabilities more than ever, A simple bug in a web or desktop application could lead to hundreds thousands dollars loss and sensitive information disclosure. Hence the need for security measures on the application level. The CuttingEdge Club will organize a two hours session to discover the modern applications threats together with the mitigation techniques, discussing the different activities that should be done throughout the different phase of the software development life cycle to end with a more secure software.The session will be in Wednesday 25th March, 2009 - 5:30 PM, ITWorx - Free Zone. The speaker is Ahmed Saafan, Information Security Engineer, Raya Security Services. CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simp... More About: Software
Blocking IP Addresses Using MMC
2009-03-18 15:27:00 I was searching for a solution to block any communication with specific IP addresses. I have come to this solution using MMC (Microsoft Management Console). The following steps will allow you to block any communication - whatever the protocol is - with specific IP addresses or subnet:1. Open Start Manu > Run > Write "MMC". Then press Enter.2. In the Management Console > File > Add/Remove Snap-in...3. In the opened dialog, leave "Local Computer" as it's and click "Finish".4. You will have a new node in the left tree called: "IP Secuirty Policies in Local Computer".5. Right click on this node and select "Create IP Security Policy".6. In the opened dialog, write "Block IP".7. Click Next till the end of the wizard and then "Finish".8. You will have an item in the left pane called: "Block IP". Right click on it and select "Properties".9. In the opened dialog, click "Add".10. Go through the wizard, till you reach a step called: "IP Filter List".11. Click "Add". IP Filter Dialog will open...
Maintenance Plans in SQL Server
2009-03-17 12:41:00 Creating backups for your database is an essential task in every environment especially for critical data storage. But have you ever ask yourself how to create your backups in a periodic manner - say every week or so? If you was able to do so, how will you manage the space in your disk? Maybe you don't want to keep any backup files older than one month.The first solution you may think about is to create a SQL script and execute it in a custom job. But wait, SQL Server can do it for you and save alot of this implementation hassle. In the SQL Server, you have the option to create "Maintenance Plan" for your database. This plan provides you with more advanced options for creating backups for the data and the transactions logs.When you create a new plan, you will have to go through a configuration wizard. The interesting part is in the backup configurations. You can provide how often you want to backup your database (i.e every week, month or so). You also specify how long you want to k... More About: Plans
Stories From A Gaming Startup
2009-03-09 13:13:00 CuttingEdgeClub organize a seminar in ITWorx to elaborate a story about how gaming startup can emerge. The seminar is scheduled to be on Wednesday, 11th March, 2009 at 5:30 PM in ITWorx - Free Zone. The session will be provided by Mostafa Ashour - Managing Partner, Khayal Interactive Entertainment.CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx technical seminar club for technology enthusiasts. Its mission is to provide an easy gateway to pertinent and updated technology information for a growing audience in a simple, pragmatic and accessible way. More About: Gaming , Stories , Startup
Resident Evil
2009-03-08 17:03:00 Do you know about the time-bomb viruses? Those ones which start execution in a certain time frame. Today, I have a similar behavior but this time not a virus. It's an evil code.We have an application on the production environment which has been created seven years ago. The project seems to be working properly for a long time with no massive problems. However, an exception suddenly encountered when any user try to edit some data items.Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0006'Overflow: 'CInt'/newsline/newsline/dbshell.asp, line 641The project was implemented in classic ASP and VB script. If you had the opportunity to work with this crappy-style languages, you can imagine how debugging in this kind of code is missy. So I had no way except to analyze the exception getting the most out of it. If you notice, it's an overflow exception. This means that CInt has got some large integer number to convert and failed to. After googling, I have found that there is a maximum limit for thi... More About: Evil
Code Camp '09
2009-02-07 15:07:00 dotNetWork will organize a day called: "Code Camp '09". The day will allow the development professional to introduce several technologies and new Microsoft products. dotNetWork is promising that the day would be one of the biggest events they have ever organized before.Code Camp '09 is a two day event. It will be held on: Thursday, February 19 and Friday, February 20, 2009. To have more information about the event and the agenda, please visit the event website: Code Camp '09.network.org user group is a group of youth who share the same passion for the development on .Net platform in Egypt. The group started in the last December 2007 with several technical events during the last year. For more information about the group, visit their website here.
ASP.NET MVC Routing Using XML Custom Configuration Settings
2008-11-22 23:42:00 In ASP.NET MVC application, you need to add some routing code in the Application_Start of the Global.asax file to define your routing criteria. These lines of code take a shape of configuration settings for the MVC application and I was thinking if we can transfer these configurations line of codes to be XML settings in the web.config file. My target is to make the routing configuration in the web.config file as following:As you can see, the later configurations define the Ignore and Routing lists of the MVC application. In the "Ignore" list, you define the URL criteria to be ignored by the MVC routing. In the "Map" list, you specify a list of the routes including the route name, controller and action. You can also define any optional parameter mappings for your actions. To do that, I have to create a custom configuration section: MvcRouteConfiguration Sectin. The section has a IgnoreCollection - inherited from ConfigurationElementCollection class - of IgnoreItem and another RoutingC...
Hewitt Middle East Best Employer Study
2008-11-13 13:18:00 In the last December 2007, this blog hosted a quick survey to measure the different aspects of the software employers inside Egypt. I am glad to announce that there is another independent initiative showing up these days. Hewitt - a provider of HR outsourcing and consulting services - launches the Best Employers in Middle East 2009 study. The study aims to honor the leading organizations of Middle East as outstanding places to work. Hewitt conducts its Best Employer research in a number of markets, including Eastern Europe, Canada, Latin America and Asia. This survey is designed to be the largest employee research project ever undertaken in Middle East. Hewitt invites all the employers in the Middle East to participate in this survey. The survey will show how effective is your organization and wither it provides a workplace that engages the intellectual and emotional commitment of your employees or not. The study will provide a level of confidentiality so that the names of all parti... More About: Study
On Finding the Arabic Needle in the e-Haystack
2008-11-12 18:41:00 Lack of information is an issue, but lack of ability to reach the information is a much more serious issue. With internet getting appended everyday with million of new information pages, search engines become unconsciously mandatory to use.CuttingEdgeClub organize a seminar in ITWorx to elaborate how search engines operates and to highlight the status of the rapidly growing Arabic -Web in particular.The seminar is scheduled to be on Wednesday, 19th November, 2008 at 5:30 PM in ITWorx - Free Zone. The session will be provided by Hany Abdelkawi - Project Manager, Link Development.CuttingEdgeClub is an ITWorx Club aims to share information about the latest technologies among the IT community by organizing technical sessions and seminars in a regular base.
.NETWork.org 9th Gathering - Coming Out This November
2008-11-08 22:21:00 .NETWork.org announced the next 9th Gathering to be held in 29th November. The event will be in CIC - Canadian International College and four speakers from ITWorx and Raya Software will be giving the sessions. Here is the list of the topics and speakers:BizTalk - SharePoint Integration.Hossam El-Deen M. BarakatSenior Software Developer | Raya SoftwareInformation ArchitectureMostafa MouradTeam Leader | ITWorxIIS 7Hossam KamelSenior Software Engineer | ITWorxApplying Domain Driven Design on ASP.NET MVCMohammed MeligySenior Software Developer | Raya Software.network.org user group is a group of youth who share the same passion for the development on .Net platform in Egypt. The group started in the last December 2007 with a total of eight technical events during the last 10 months. For more information about the group, visit their website here. More About: Network
PRG Pattern - You're Already Doing it
2008-11-08 20:50:00 Have you ever had this message dialog asking about resubmiting the data when you try to refresh a web page? This actually happen after submitting a form or enter your login information.One of the good practices when developing web application is to redirect the user after a successful posting request. This practice is refereed as PRG pattern (Post/Redirect/Get). The target is to avoid duplicate post requests from the client and providing a smooth navigation through the web application.What actually happen in PRG is that the browser try to send an HTTP 303 redirect request along with HTTP "Location" header. It's nice to know that something you're used to make as a default practice is actually a pattern. The following is a sample code in ASP.NET MVC illustrating the usage of the pattern:[Authorize][AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs .Post)]public ActionResult ChangePassword(string currentPassword, string newPassword, string confirmPassword){ if (ModelState.IsValid) &nb... More About: Pattern
NeatUpload - File Upload Open Source Library
2008-10-01 20:51:00 NeatUpload is a very nice open source ASP.NET component which allow you to make file uploads to file system or database storage with customized AJAX-like progress bar indicators. The library is made in .NET and it works under Mono's XSP/mod_mono or Microsoft's ASP.NET implementation. You can easily download the source code and even modify it to match the required behavior of your project. The library features 2 custom web controls: InputFile allows the user to select a file to upload, and ProgressBar displays the upload progress either inline or in a popup. ProgressBar uses AJAX-style refreshless updates on modern browsers when JavaScript is available, but also allows users without JavaScript to see upload progress. HttpModule is included as well to get the upload progress and handle the upload context states. You can download and give it a try from this link: Brettle Development NeatUpload More About: Open Source , Library , Open , Source
Microsoft and jQuery Engagement
2008-10-01 20:26:00 It seems that Microsoft is going to include jQuery by default in the new releases of Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC in the near future. jQeury is a very nice and handy Javascript library which has an increasing acceptance recently in the web development community. Here is a part of the John Resig post in jQuery Blog about this news: Microsoft is looking to make jQuery part of their official development platform. Their JavaScript offering today includes the ASP.NET Ajax Framework and they’re looking to expand it with the use of jQuery. This means that jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (which will include jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation).Additionally Microsoft will be developing additional controls, or widgets, to run on top of jQuery that will be easily deployable within your .NET applications. jQuery helpers will also be included in the server-side portion of .NET development (in addition to the existing helpers) providing complementary functi...
Javascript - Access Denied When Calling Window Opener
2008-10-01 19:34:00 We usually use the "open" method in the window object to open a new window in Javascript . However, sometimes you need to change some values in the parent window depending on the changes of the new window elements values or you may need to call a method in the parent window from the child one. To do so, you can use the "opener" property in the window object to access the parent page elements. The following Javascript statement access an input element in the parent window with "txtEmail" ID and update its value:window.opener.document.getElementBy Id("txtEmail").value = "mohammedn@mailhost.com";You can even call a method direct in the parent window from the new opened one:window.opener.SomeMethodInTheParentWi ndow();However, you may get "Access Denied" or "Permission Denied" message when trying to access the "opener" property in the popup window. This usually because you call the window.open with the full path of the pop window:window.open('http://www.domain.com /accounts/register_popup.... More About: Calling
TeamCity - Continuous Integration Server and Build Management Tool
2008-09-05 22:46:00 TeamCity is a continuous integration & build management solution for both .NET and Java development. TeamCity is developed by JetBrains - the producer of the famous Resharper - and shipped in two editions: Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition. The Professional Edition of the team city is free and you can use it without a need for any kind of licenses. This edition is more than enough for small and medium size company or teams.Build Server s are very useful tool in any development environment where you need to track the build state of your team code. It make sure that all the committed code is not in a breaking state. The integration with the build servers and the continuous integration tools like SVN and sourcesafe help you to assign the responsibilities of the breaking code to specific developer to fix.TeamCity is a a very powerful build server which has many features to facilitate your project building process. You can download the last version of TeamCity from here. I h... More About: Management , Integration , Tool
Google Code Jam 08 - Registeration Started
2008-06-20 01:13:00 Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice. Google Code Jam begins in July and continues in August, when you will compete in online rounds against contestants from around the world. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California on Friday, November 14. Google offers more than $80,000 in cash prizes for the winners. Don't be left out! Make sure to register between June 17 and July 17, and show your coding creativity in Google Code Jam. More About: Google
Code Style Review Using Microsoft Source Analysis
2008-06-13 21:02:00 Today, I gave a try for Microsoft Source Analysis aka Style Cop. The tool was internally used inside Microsoft and it's now publicly released. It nicely integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio with the ability to attach the analysis process with the project build - See this post. The tool scan all your C# code and gives you hints for better coding style according to the best practices followed in writing C# code. It gives for example notes regarding the missing comments, formating, missing or extra spaces, extra blank lines and unnecessary brackets.Here are some sample error messages resulted after running the Source Analysis on one of my projects- The class must have a documentation header.- The property must not be placed on a single line. The opening and closing curly brackets must each be placed on their own line.- Property names begin with an upper-case letter: projectspath.- All using directives must be placed inside of the namespace.- The body of the if statement must be wrap... More About: Review
MbUnit 2.4 - Avoiding Crappy Data Resulted From The Test
2008-06-12 21:35:00 One of the nice features in MBUnit 2.4, is the ability to rollback the crappy data in the database resulted from running subsequent test methods. This is really interesting because this crappy data can become a nightmare during the application development or even after the deployment. You will spend pretty much time exploring your data to filter the dirty ones which can lead sometimes to some mistakes.MbUnit give you the ability to rollback any changes made in the database during the test. Using MbUnit 2.4, this can be done by referring MBUnit.Framework.2.0 in the project references and using RollBack2 attribute for each test method.[Test ][RollBack2]public void InsertNewProductTest(){ Product product = Product.CreateNew('Nokia 800', 2300, true); ;Assert.AreEqual('Nokia 800', product.Name); &nb sp; Assert.AreEqual(2300, product.Price); &n bsp; Assert.AreEqual... More About: Data
Thinking In REST
2008-04-18 11:09:00 REST or WS-*? The debate which will never end. While REST is taking the lead gradually, the community see many drawbacks in using the traditional WS-*. The complexity and overhead in using WS-*, REST simplicity and how they fit the web architecture are always the main points of the argument. REST is simple, that is it. It has nothing to deal with except three things: Resources, Verbs and URIs. The idea of making use of the HTTP standards to accomplish all the needed CRUD operations on the resources is really interesting from the service development perspective.It was clear from the beginning of the WS-* evolution that WS-* violates and ignores the architecture of the Web. It replaces the concept that the Web is identified by URIs to the concept that the services is identified by WS addresses. However, in the RESTful architecture, all the addressing is through URIs. This creates a homogeneous architecture comparing to how the web is actually constructed. Even dealing with URIs as yo... More About: Rest , Thinking
Seekda - Seeking Services On The Web
2008-04-11 21:54:00 SOA is now one of the most valuable options in building integrable and loosely-coupled applications. As much as the number of the web-services increases on the web, indexing the services to be reachable by the seekers became a vital need. seekda! - by Semantic Technology Institute (STI) - is one of the nice efforts to index the business services around the Web. The project is based on the results of another research project funded by the European Union called DIP - which started on 1st January 2004 and came to an end officially on 31 Dec 2006 with total funding of €16.3 M. The project acts like a link between the services providers and service consumers aiming to increase the transparency of the services market across the web. More About: Services , Seeking
Open XML Appears to Win ISO Approval
2008-04-05 01:29:00 After more than 14 months of intensive review, a Joint Technical Committee of the International Standardization Organization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has concluded its formal process to evaluate Ecma International?s submission of the Draft International Standard (DIS) 29500: Office Open XML (Open XML). While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly available information appears to indicate the proposed Open XML standard received extremely broad support. Open XML now joins HTML, PDF and ODF as ISO- and IEC-recognized open document format standards. Read the full story here. google_ad_client = "pub-6699943802796732"; //728x90, created 12/23/07 google_ad_slot = "8172850607"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90;
jQuery Validation Plugin
2008-03-23 23:21:00 We start to see several plugins in the web based on the jQuery library. I have the chance today to work a bit with a plugin called: jQuery Validation Plugin by Jörn Zaefferer - which enable you to apply client validation to your web forms using jQuery. To get started, you have to download the plugin files from this link. And sure the jQuery library as well: jQuery 1.2.2+. Then, you should have: jquery.validate.js and jquery.js files reside on your project somewhere and linked in your markup.The following sample is the simplest one. You use the selector to get the form element. Then, you call the validate function.<script language="text/javascript">& nbsp; $(document).ready( function() { &nbs p; $("#simpleSignUp" ).validate(); }</script>In this case, you will have to set some predefined metadata in the class attribute of the elements telling the library the required rules to apply... More About: Tools , Tips , Javascript
Get the Last Run Query in SQL Server 2005
2008-03-01 13:40:00 Have you ever run an update or delete query by mistake and you need to roll back or at least want to know the last run query to fix the problem? The following SQL statement can help in that.SELECT deqs.last_execution_time AS [Time], dest.text AS [Query ]FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqsCROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS destORDER BY deqs.last_execution_time DESCThis will retrieve the last run queries with its execution time. google_ad_client = "pub-6699943802796732"; //728x90, created 12/23/07 google_ad_slot = "8172850607"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90; More About: Tips , Server
Inversion of Control & Dependency Injection
2008-03-01 11:58:00 In the last Thursday, 28th Feb. 2008, we had our internal demoday in SK. The day was really informative. We had many interesting topics in different fields. My topic was an introduction about the inversion of control and the dependency injection. You can download it from here:Download: Internal_Demoday_28_2_08_IoC_DI.pptxN.B: Most of the examples in the presentation use Sprint.NET as a DI framework.If you want to go deeper in the topic, I recommend the following article: Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern. The author is Martin Fowler - Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks - and the article is considered to be the ideal reference for the topic. google_ad_client = "pub-6699943802796732"; //728x90, created 12/23/07 google_ad_slot = "8172850607"; google_ad_width = 728; google_ad_height = 90;
The Root and Top-Level Nameservers
More articles from this author:2008-02-23 22:17:00 I was reading: Web Security, Privacy & Commerce by Simson Garfinkel and it was interesting to know that there are only 13 DNS root servers on the internet that are responsible for resolving the IP addresses to the top level domains (e.g: .com, .org, .net). For example, when you write unesco.org on the address bar of your browser, the address will be resolved from right to left. The client computer will ask one of these 13 root servers to resolve the address of .org server which accordingly will be responsible to fetch the address of the unesco.org. The address formats of the root servers is: X.ROOT-SERVERS.NET where X ranges from A to M. You may have an initial guess that most of these servers exist in the United States. But actually this not correct. Most of the physical root-servers are outside the United States and distributed in multiple locations in different continents. Check the full list here: root-servers.orgThe root-servers are completely transparent to the internet users.... More About: Networks , Root 1, 2, 3 |
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