This is a phrase coined by i-don't-know-who. But this is a phrase used my a colleague of mine at office. When ever there is any issue in the code on the TFS, instead of doing a history check and the past check-ins, this guys identifies the author of that code based on its "handwriting". Interestingly enough more often than not, he is correct. And surprisingly enough, when you think about it for a minute, there seems to be some sense in his method.
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So, this is something very basic i learned today. The scrollbar in silverlight appears only when the length of the container is predefined and not depended on its parent container.
For example, if you set the grid row height in which you have placed you textbox to "AUTO", you will never be able to see/activate the scrollbar. Simply because the textbox assumes that you have set the parent grid in a manner that will keep the size in check. Instead of activating the Scrollbar in the container, in this case the text box, it will simply stretch the textbox beyond the parent container boundary.
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Today i learnt yet another painful lesson at work. When you generate a service proxy using SvcUtil, the NameValueCollection data type does not get parsed. In my case it parsed it into a ArrayOfXElement object type by creating a System.Collections.Specialized namespace within the proxy.
I Googled around, then asked around, thinking that i missed some basic object type in c# (read ArrayOfXElement). But that was thankfully not the case.
I found a lot of workaround for the given issue. Many involved writing a simple parser (as a wrapper, don't get worried). But a simpler and wiser approach was not to use a NameValueCollection in the first place. Use a Dictionary instead.
The same issue comes up in the event of a ArrayList it seems. Use a List object for that. After a little bit of googling i found that the NameValueCollection and the Arraylist are Week Types.
According to this discussion thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/939118/wcf-serialization-problem-using-namevaluecollection Week types and Weekly typed are two different things. How and why are questions which i am still trying to resolve.
But the big and small is this: Do not use NameValueCollections, its an unnecessary headache.
Every project is a result of a set of requirements. The success and the failure that project depends upon the extent to which those requirements are satisfied with the project. This is not another piece of literature that will tell you the importance of understanding a client's or consumer's requirements because it is important for the consumer. I am a coder, and i will like to, for a change, try and point out the issues a coder has if the requirements are not clearly defined. To be more explicit, i really do not care about how poor requirement analysis usually effects the consumer, i am more concerned about how it effects the coder, who is expected to transform those requirements to a finished product and machine. My point being, if the coder himself is unclear about the specs., then we have bigger concerns, bigger than the client.
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Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where no one suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some belived that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world...But I belive, that as a species, human beings define their reality though misery and suffering.
- Agent Smith, The Matrix
This is probably the best way to define the human case. Infact, it is the best way to define the case of any sentient species. It is not our advances that define us, but our failures and imperfections. Today, my friend and i were having a very animated discussion on Artificial Intelligence at office. He spoke of AI agents and fuzzy logic and i was going on and on about the powers and shortcomings of the Artificial Neural Networks. All that talk led us to how technology and science has advanced to some very brilliant leads in this vast and illusive field, which encompasses Computational Theory, Biology, The study of the Brain, Psychology and Mathematics. However, very soon we started talking about what is yet to be done and we soon came to a common conclusion: there is no point in understanding and studying artificial intelligence, if the final aim of the subject is to emulate human/animal thinking. Why? Simply because of the fact that human thinking is about how we make mistakes and recover from them, not how brilliant we are at coming up with the best algorithms and solutions. You ought to study Natural Stupidity instead of Artificial Intelligence to really get a grasp of how human beings think.
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Today i got some time from work to at a good look at the chrome extensions and its development. I have been doing a lot of reading in order to understand what the whole buzz is about. Another reason as to why i have been procrastinating the development of my 1st Extension is due to a lack of good idea(s). So i have to get my creative juices flowing. May i will over this weekend. But, all that reading has done me some good and i wanted to share as to how simple it is to build these extensions. So this post is about a specific UI concept in Chrome Extensions and it is known as a Browser Action.
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For a long time i have been using a scheme of things in developing UIs which has started to bug me, literally in every sense of the word. What i do is this:
For any page/view, i create the control, which in essence is a form or a configuration controller. Now, this control is independent from everything else, and i can use it as i deem fit. It has its own set of hooks using which i can feed and retrieve information from it. Mind you, these controls are very specific to the application itself and do not form a very integral part of a generic sdk. So, the freedom i get with these controls is absolute flexibility. I can place them in a page, a view, a pop up or a sidebar. But the only issue is that i have to play with some ground rules. Just one ground rule actually: I cannot make service calls from any of these controls. Like i discussed this in a previous post of mine in detail, doing so makes the control tightly bound with the service or the backend, hence limiting its usability in another part of the application. While this gives me a lot of freedom of where and how i want my UI to appear and look it gives me hell when i sit down to develop most of my app.
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Busy at work...
The overlaying of UI Elements or controls is something all UI Developers and Designers do. While it may be pretty useful, it can bring a lot of questions on efficiency, ease of code and logic.
So, lets get down to basics: Why have overlaying or overlapping controls? Well, for one, i have been using it a lot for variable functionality. It basically means making your UI possess a different set of UI elements or controls altogether, offering radically different functionalities in varying scenarios. One in specific is having a ComboBox (drop down menu) on top of a Read-only Textbox. This can be used in a form to great effects. While the user is entering a new Form, there might be a predefined selected set of values which he might have to select from for a given field in the form. But, after saving it once, the selection should no longer be accessible and the value of the field should be permanent for the entire lifetime of the form.
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