A story of laptop repair

July 27, 2008 at 4:54 PMalex

After a period of overheating problems, my primary laptop went down, thus leaving me in a dark mood, because it was a three-year-old device without the warranty at that time. Being in a dark mood, I called HP via their online char and was happy to hear that for the specific amount, they can repair device and replace virtually any piece of faulty hardware including LCD, motherboard, or, if you will, graphics card such as ATI or NVIDIA. They shipped to me an empty box via FedEx overnight service and you'd have to package the laptop and send it back for repair. Even though they estimated the repair to take 7-9 days, it took them just one business day to replace the broken motherboard, which was in my case the component that broke down and another night the repaired laptop was shipped to me. So, I picked it up on Friday at FedEx location and was happy about the successful story. I was quite amazed by the easiness of the process and it took less than a week to get my primary laptop. Thus, I'd recommend to contact the manufacturer of your laptop if it's out of warranty but still relatively new (3-5 years) and you might be able to get it repaired.

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Remoting Compression Sample

July 25, 2008 at 10:22 AMalex

There are requests from the business to increase the amount of data to be passed through remoting. Due to the know fact that the default binary serializer is very chatty, the amount of data passed through the channel is very large. There is a global solution, which allows to compress the remoting requests and responses thus alleviating the problem of exceeding the remoting maximum request size.

I was looking at the possible design approaches related to the compression of the remoting and found that extendable remoting framework architecture allows the following as depicted on the diagram:

diagram

Next we will review the sample code with the custom compression sink, which represents the typical application designed with layered architecture.

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How to always have drivers around

July 24, 2008 at 11:54 PMalex

Consider that when installing the devices on new computer or just connecting a printer to another computer, one could not find the appropriate in the miriad of the CD-ROM disks. You will save a lot of time by creating a folder called Drivers on drive C: of your primary computer and every time you buy a new device, copy all drivers for operating system to that folder. This way you would always be able to locate the approriate driver very quickly.

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Unit testing user controls in ASP.NET applications

May 30, 2008 at 4:43 PMalex

 

After trying several times to start writing a testing framework for UI layer in one of my applications, which I should acknowledge were not really successful, I finally came across the Scott's blog post on best practices related to reusing the user controls between the projects at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479564.aspx. The trick is to reuse the user control from the application in another project, which implements the test harness. In just under an hour, the working prototype was created in Visual Studio 2005. And this does not require any third-party tools such as NUnitAsp and could be build from the scratch, which I prefer over the bloating the code with unnecessary dependencies on the external tools. Alright, so that means that the work can be done in truly test-driven approach and result in to the higher quality of code.

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New blog up and running

April 24, 2008 at 12:45 AMAdministrator
I've decided to migrate to new a blog engine and retire BlogX. It was very interesting to run BlogX all these two years, be able to port the engine to .Net framework 2.0 and add some custom code to tailor it to my specific needs. Now its time to have a better standards compatibility, add a new features to the blog, support RSS 2.0 feeds and use community recognized blog engine.

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Html overflow problem

November 2, 2007 at 12:03 AMAdministrator

Recently, I was challenged by the task of managing the overflow of the post on this site, for example in the following post: Visual Studio 2005 Class Diagram for Web Site. The problem is that there is no easy way to shorten the text and add ellipsis to the end, because the actual html of the post has complex structure. So, I decided to parse the code to a graph and work on this graph until it satisfies the condition. In this case, the condition was to have the length of the source not greater than some constant N, for example, N=1000 characters. So, I wrote the following class and validated it using several test cases.

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Genesis Turn It On Again Tour

October 4, 2007 at 11:56 PMAdministrator

Just got back from the Genesis concert at United Center called Turn It On Again Tour. Phil Collins rocks! The performance was awesome, sound was perfect and visuals are excellent. He performed the best songs including Invisible Touch, Mama, Turn It On Again of course and many other well-known songs.

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Visual Studio 2005 Class Diagram for Web Site

October 4, 2007 at 11:56 PMAdministrator

If you try to add class diagram to Web Site in Visual Studio 2005 and create a diagram of code-behind classes of web controls, the following messages will appear preventing from creating the diagram for such classes:

Visual Studio allows only classes in Add_Code folder and its subfolders added to class diagram and to manipulate such classes. This is a limitation in current release of Visual Studio because development team decided to take an opportunistic approach and limit the functionality of class designer only to static classes, not dynamic classes such as code-behind ones in web site projects.

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Vista ReadyBoost

February 17, 2007 at 11:54 PMalex

You asked... Vista ReadyBoost requirements etc at http://blogs.technet.com/james/search.aspx?q=readyboost&p=1

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Blogging around CLR

February 17, 2007 at 11:53 PMalex

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