Posts on Emad Alashi

Simulate Azure IoT Telemetry And Device Twin using MQTT Directly

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 09:21:28 +0000

TLDR;

In this post I show how to simulate Azure IoT device D2C (Device to cloud) messages telemetry, and Device Twin Reported Properties using MQTTX CLI.

Introduction

I have been working in several Azure IoT projects in the past 3 years, where MQTT was the preferred device/server communication protocol. In these projects, there has been a repeatable need to generate MQTT messages to simulate devices’ telemetry, without going through the Azure CLI.

M5 Atom Lite, Home Assistant, ESPHome, and Capacitive Soil Sensor

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 01:24:01 +0000

Summary

Update: Tatham had a great thread of tweets about this posts where he filled several gaps in this post, including the need of the MQTT server. Check it out here: https://twitter.com/TathamOddie/status/1357904732027637760?s=20

In this post, I describe what I did to set up an M5 Atom Lite with a capacitive soil moisture sensor, configure it with ESPHome and connect it to Home Assistant. The Home Assistant is deployed in a Docker container on my Synology NAS (DS220+), and my dev machine is a MacbookPro.

Contributing to Open Source Software with Project KEDA

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:54:23 +0000

Summary

This post explains my latest experience in contributing to open source software with project KEDA.

Last week, the KEDA team accepted and merged a pull request I created to support Pod Identity in the Event Hub scaler. @Simon Wight, an amazing community person, encouraged me to write about my experience (cheers for the nudge Simon :)), and this post is that.

I will explain how it all started, what I did to get it done, and all the fun and challenges that happened during that.

“Azure Functions on Kubernetes” Talk With Integration Down Under Meetup

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 05:18:44 +0000

Earlier this month I was invited to talk about Azure Functions on Kubernetes at the Integration Down Under meetup. It’s an amazing meet up held by highly regarded professionals like from all around Australia.

Below is the recording of the session, make sure to follow their channel because they post regularly. Also all feedback is welcome :).

My Twitch Streaming Setup – Part 2 Software

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 07:55:20 +0000

This is part 2 of the three-parts blog post about my Twitch streaming setup.

Hardware

Software (this post)

Humanware

As I have said before, I have learned a lot from amazing streamers like @noopkat and @csharpfritz so you will find a lot of this content matches theirs.

OBS Streaming Configuration

OBS is the main software that streams to the streaming service (Twitch in my case). I used Streamlabs at the beginning, but because it's just an abstraction over OBS, I faced some limitations when I wanted to try different plugins. So I preferred to play directly with the OBS itself.

My Twitch Streaming Setup – Part 1 Hardware

Tue, 19 May 2020 13:42:49 +0000

There has a been a lot of interest lately about home studio setup for streaming and recording videos. In this post I will explain my Twitch streaming setup, and my experience thus far.It’s been less than a year for my journey in streaming on Twitch, and I am still learning and trying things out, so take these posts with this context.

While writing this post, I realised that it’s going to be a long one, so I will break it down into three posts:

How to Fix Minikube Invalid Profile

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 14:01:56 +0000

TDLR; Minikube recent version might not be able to read old profiles. In this post we will see how to fix a Minikube invalid profile, at least how I did it in my case.

minikube profile list, invalid profile

Last Saturday, I had the privilege to speak at GIB Melbourne online, where I presented about Self-hosted Azure API Management Gateway. In the presentation, I needed to demonstrate using Minikube, and I spent couple of days preparing my cluster and making sure everything is good and ready.

Posh-git on Mac using Oh My Zsh Themes

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 10:30:07 +0000

This post explains how to have posh-git prompt style in Oh My Zsh theme on Mac.

After 4 years of using Windows, I am coming back to using a Mac. And there are so many things in Windows I am missing already. One of these things is posh-git; I loved how in one glance to your prompt you know the status of your git repo: how many files changed, how many added, how many deleted, how many indexed… just love it!

Learning a New Programming Language (Go language as an Example)

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 13:38:25 +0000

Summary

This post explains why and how I learned the Go language. Hopefully this will help you to learn it quickly, or will inspire you on how to learn new languages.

The Reason to Learn a New Language

There can be many reasons why someone would want to learn a new language, the main ones to me are: 1) To solve a current business problem 2) Learn concepts to adapt to current tools 3) For fun and passion. Of course, you can have a mix of these reasons to push you to learn a new language, or maybe just one strong enough of these reasons.

RBAC in Azure Kubernetes Service AKS on Twitch!

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 23:06:51 +0000

tldr; I will be streaming on Twitch next Monday (25th of March) at 8:30 Melbourne time (GMT+11), configuring Azure Kubernetes AKS to use RBAC.

For a long while, I’ve been thinking about streaming live development to Twitch or YouTube. Having spent some time behind the microphone while making DotNetArabi podcast, I can say there is a satisfiying feeling in producing content in a media format through which you can connect with the audience.

Fix “Mixed Content” When Using Cloudflare SSL And IIS Rewrites

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 13:33:50 +0000

In this post, I explain how I fixed the “mixed content” security issue when using Cloudflare Flexible SSL, and IIS Rewrite.

I Run Two Websites Under One Account Using IIS Rewrites

I have two websites that are hosted under one account with my hosting provider (I know!): https://emadashi.com and https://dotnetarabi.com. The way I do it is that is by using IIS Rewrite rules in my web.config; any request that is targeting one of these domains, I “rewrite” the URL so it is pointing to the sub-directory to serve the request. This changes where the file is served from, but does not change the request URL to the user.

HTTP Binding in PowerShell Azure Functions

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 07:04:35 +0000

In a small project, I was trying to utilize an existing PowerShell I had, and host it in Azure Functions; I needed to understand how HTTP binding work with PowerShell Azure Functions as I didn’t want to rewrite my script to C# just because the PowerShell Azure Functions had the “(Preview)” appended to its name.

I wanted the Function to return a plain text response to an HTTP trigger based on a query parameter (this is how Dropbox verifies Webhook URLs). So, naively, I followed the basic template as an example:

مساعدة في دوت نت عربي

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:42:32 +0000

نشأ دوت نت عربي منذ ثمان سنوات ليكون من أوائل المواقع العربية التي تقدم محتوى عربيا ذا جودة عالية، قدم من خلالها العديد من الحلقات مع نجوم تقنيين عرب أصحاب خبرة طويلة و أداء مميز. بدأ البودكاست بجهود فردية و نفقة شخصية غير ربحية، و استمر عدة سنوات بأداء جيد و بمعدل حلقة كل أربعة أسابيع و بشكل مستمر.

و لكن خلال السنتين السابقتين بدأ إصدار الحلقات بالتباطئ و باتت الفترة بين الحلقة و الأخرى تطول على الرغم من كل محاولات زيادة الانتاج. فكرة إخراج العمل من دائرة العمل الفردي إلى دائرة العمل الجماعي لم تغب عني و منذ سنوات، لكن لم أستطع إيجاد آلية واضحة و عملية يمكن الاعتماد عليها لتحويل العمل من فردي إلى جماعي تطوعي، و يمكن من خلالها اغتنام ما قدمه بعض المستمعين المخلصين من رغبة في المشاركة في هذا العمل. استمر الأمر كما هو عليه حتى كان لا بد من الخوض في فكرة العمل الجماعي التطوعي حتى و لو بأبسط الأدوات. و “أن تأت متأخرا خيرا من أن لا تأت”.

Productivity Satisfaction Maturity Levels

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 07:05:17 +0000

Such a fancy title ha, probably the influence of our industry (bad influence)! Well you can just substitute it with something like “These are the stages of productivity between which the satisfaction jumps in exponential magnitudes”.

Note: before we check these stages out, it goes without saying that all the “he” in this article are absolutely replaceable with “she”; it’s just that the “he/she” style is too verbose.

0. Ignorance

In this stage the individual doesn’t know what he is missing , he does not add any value to himself or the community; he enjoys “time-waste” activities, or watching TV YouTube. Indeed there is joy in being a couch potato, but it is negligible compared to the next levels, which he hasn’t experienced yet, thus explains why I gave it the number 0.

I Have Been Hacked!

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 21:58:28 +0000

Yes, I’ve been hacked, and it wasn’t fun! In this post I will go through some of the lessons learned. But before that, let’s shed some light on what happened.

It began when a friend of mine notified me that my DotNetArabi blog, which is WordPress blog, has new suspicious and unrelated posts. I rushed to my admin page, deleted these posts, and then changed my password to a stronger one.

“Cloud-Ready Web Apps With ASP.NET 5” – Ignite Australia

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:17:18 +0000

It was a wonderful week last week spent in the beautiful Gold Coast after a very interesting Microsoft Ignite conference. I got the opportunity to present on how ASP.NET 5 is designed to be suitable for being hosted on the cloud, the following is the recording of my session:

If you missed the event you can catch up with recordings of the sessions on channel 9, videos are still being uploaded.

Dependency Injection In ASP.NET 5 – One Step Deeper

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 14:04:27 +0000

Dependency Injection has always been an integral part of all the web frameworks under the umbrella of the ASP.NET: Web API, SignalR, and MVC. But historically, these frameworks evolved separately from each other, hence each of these frameworks had its own way of supporting Dependency Injection, even with Katana‘s trial to bring these frameworks together through OWIN, you still needed to do some hackery to have a unified container that supports them all at once. Well, things have changed!

ANZCoders Wrapup

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 23:43:45 +0000

Over the last week, the first ANZCoders virtual conference was taking place, the conference that you can attend in your pyjamas! Fifteen sessions over five days by twelve speakers, all voted upon by the audience themselves.

The conference was live, but it was recorded also on Youtube; every session has its own Youtube video available for watching any time. So I hear you say “Why attend live if the video is going to be available later?!”…here is why:

Consultant Skills: Self-Confidence

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:51:44 +0000

I have blogged before about some of the skills that a consultant should be acquainted with like Story Telling, Knowledge Depth & Breadth, and Having an Opinion, all of which I see very important. But in this post I would not hesitate to say that self-confidence is the single most important amongst them all!

Before we continue, what does “self-confidence” mean? my words of choice would be: “it is the belief someone has about his/her capability of accomplishing something that he/she hasn’t tried before“. Notice here that it’s a “belief”

Consultant Skills: Having an Opinion

Sun, 16 Nov 2014 00:06:35 +0000

This is the third of three posts I’ve written about consultant’s skills, check the previous posts if you like:

————-

We work in an industry where one general problem can be solved by too many ways, each emerges from a different mindset and different circumstances. But also, in this industry there is community pressure, there are “cool geeks” and “cool solutions”, there are “best practices”, and there are hypes and fads.

9 Things I Learned From Skiing

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 10:56:54 +0000

I had the opportunity to visit Mount Buller to do skiing for the first time in my life (thanks to Joshua McKinny), and the experience was UNBELIEVABLE! In addition to the loads of fun I had, I learned some life lessons that can be applied in any field, even software! and I’d like to share with you.

When in doubt, get rid of doubt.
A night before the trip, I was at the shops. I saw this winter warm hat that I thought I should buy, then I remembered I had one at home but I wasn’t sure if I still had it; I remembered one time when I needed it and I couldn’t find it, so I had doubts!
I had to take a decision, something like the following diagram:

Apparently possibility D has a much higher cost compared to any A, B, and C. And the only way to avoid it is to take decision X rather than Y… I chose Y, and ended up with D!
At the end I managed, but let’s just say I was left in an embarrassing situation.
Everything has pros and cons
Between choosing Skiing and Snowboarding, I chose Skiing; the majority of opinions was that Skiing is easier and you have more control, which is better for beginners. But this came with a cost; the boots were horrific to walk with, and I had to carry two sliders and two poles all around! I don’t regret my choice, but let’s say I am a lot more aware that there are cons with every choice we make, the question is are we willing to make the most of it or not.
Listen to the experts
Josh gave us of a long list of advice beforehand; what stuff to bring along, where to get the gears from, what we should expect…, all of which made a huge difference. And whenever you fail to listen you are beaten, I will never forget a scarf when I am at the top of the mountain!
It’s more difficult than I thought
I judged Skiing too early, from the videos and photos I have seen in my life, it seemed too easy! just go in angles and change the direction once you reach the edge of the slope, and repeat until you reach the end. Guess what? Easier said than done!
Skiing literally is sliding on a slippery surface, while you try your best to control sliding; the sliders are long, heavy, and go in all directions, the amount of effort you have to give to control the sliders to go in a certain direction is big, and they don’t just listen! the angles in which you have to position them to accomplish that control is tricky, the pressure on your knees is enormous, your body’s position makes a big difference, and the slightest loss of control of the sliders your body will start wobbling, and you don’t just cross your legs to fix that! Oh and did I mention that there are types of snow, some of which makes things even harder?…ENHALES!
The idea of this lesson, don’t just underestimate and judge too quickly, anything, unless you try it out first.
**You don’t know what you are missing, until you try it. It’s loads of fun!
** Sometimes we are just too lazy, and due to our laziness (or let’s say “comfort zone”) we miss out on too many opportunities. I knew that it’s going to take me a day, and it’s going to be cold, and I have to learn skiing, and was afraid that I wouldn’t enjoy it…but…I pushed myself; I also knew that this is not going to happen again anytime soon and should tick it off my bucket list, let me tell you this: IT WAS AWESOME! Doing it myself revealed many aspect I’d never get from watching a video, the mere speed a human can reach on these sliders is of utmost thrill, let alone the joy when you really start controlling it.
It really made me think of all the things I might be missing due to the same reason, whether it was leisure or career opportunities
You are going to fall, and it’s going to hurt
There is absolutely no escape from falling, unless you are an expert, than you already have fallen plenty of times, and to the surprise, it hurts! I fell so many times: one time on my arm which ended up swollen, one time twisted my leg, and another time was displaced couple of meters away from my slider after it flew off.
These falls were necessary; I knew exactly what to do, and what NOT to do, because I didn’t only “hear” about the consequences, I lived them, and they hurt! So because of these falls I had to learn, because of these falls I became a better skier
In fact pain is part of the fun
The falls mentioned in point 5 were painful indeed, but they also were fun; it breaks the routine of the body, the monotonous experience we go through in our lives, being thrown and twisted in the air, and feeling your body going through a different experience, all of this had its flavor, it might be funny, but it really did (don’t break something while you do that).
But more important than that, these falls also gave a better meaning for success; when I slide for longer periods without falling, the feeling of success I have is deep, and meaningful. If it was too easy that success would taste like…meh.
Following instructions is important, but so is following instinct
I had a lesson by an instructor for I am an absolute newbie, the instructor gave us the instructions on how to stop and manuever, along with some other instructions, and then released us to the wild. I tried to follow all his instructions perfectly, usually I am a good student, but I still kept falling!
Then at one of the slopes I felt like I should be leaning my body in a certain angle, and press with my toes down, it was an absolutely instinctive feeling, not a trial and error thing, and guess what…it worked! the instructor didn’t mention this; maybe because he never really gave it a deep thought, maybe he has been skiing all his life, regardless of the reason, he gave me instructions that weren’t enough, I had to use my instinct that proved highly valuable in addition to the external knowledge.
Most importantly, company is everything
This, my dear reader, was of the utmost importance; Josh and Neil were extremely good company, very understanding, patient with my primitive skiing skills, easy going with suggestions, generous, and full of knowledge that filled the trip with beneficial discussions. All of which allowed me to enjoy things enough to come up with the previous 8 lessons!

Did I learn more lessons? indeed, but 9 is a nice number 😉

OWIN, Katana, and Helios At DDDMelbourne – Presentation Slides

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 20:29:14 +0000

Here are the slides of my last talk “OWIN, Katana, Helios…What’s Going On?!” I delivered at DDD Melbourne. Sadly there was no recording.

Owin, Katana, and Helios from Emad Alashi

NOT Another Post About Estimation

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 03:54:09 +0000

I was involved in a project that was given 10 days to finish, the tight schedule was due to budget reasons.

The client explained to me his requirements and then asked for an estimate for details. We stood in front of the whiteboard, broke down the features and then started estimating the time for these features, until we reached feature x.

In my technical life I’ve been beaten by over-simplified requirements far too many times, so as simple as feature x sounded I strongly felt that it might stretch. Subsequently, this influenced my opinion of giving feature x three days, against which the client of course argued back.

Consultant Skills: Knowledge Depth & Breadth

Wed, 02 Apr 2014 22:03:32 +0000

It’s a crazy era for IT! everyday new concepts, libraries, products, and even languages are introduced; so many solutions for so many problems. It is indeed the era of specialization.

There is absolutely no way to grasp all this knowledge, specialization and concentration of knowledge has to occur, and we must choose a technology to specialize in. But… (You knew this was coming, didn’t you)… this is not good enough!
Before you jump on me and start yelling “But you just confessed; it’s impossible!”, let me explain.

On Building Quality Software

Tue, 04 Mar 2014 22:05:22 +0000

The 2nd main cause of buggy software (time pressure is #1), is laziness and boredom.

Every job in this life consists of a “core”, which is the most challenging and most exciting part of the job, and a “chore”, which is the boring and tedious part.
Let’s take a chef as an example; he is an artist whose art is producing quality food, a process that involves mixing precisely-scaled ingredients, perfectly stirred on a period of time, or fried on the grill with an artistic movement…all are actions that the chef consider as crucial part (core) of the process producing the magnificent product of his.
On the other hand, the chef sometimes has to chop onion into xxx-small size of chops, a task that may be really boring to him (I wouldn’t blame him!). Being such a boring task, the chef is tempted to getaway with just xx-small size of chops; after all 95% of the meal preparation is there! So he ships the dish to the customer.
The customer tastes it, he generally likes it, but something is wrong…”ah!”, the customer discovers, “I am chewing pieces of onion!”. He almost rated the restaurant 4.5/5, but just that last bit ruined it!
3/5 is the final rate.

Don’t Just Fit Into The Gears

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 08:55:41 +0000

Most of jobs in our modern world come with a job definition; a list of tasks that is expected from the candidate to accomplish during his/her occupation of that role. Very convenient approach; setting expectations for both parties.

A convenient approach indeed, but extremely dangerous as well! what is dangerous is NOT the job definition, rather the mentality it instills in the mind of the candidate.
The candidate examines the list of tasks, believes that he can do it, he takes the job, and once he starts in the new role he just fits into the gears of the existing environment/process, regardless of how rusty it is, or how inefficient the mechanics of these gears are! The environment or the process, part of which this role is, could be extremely malformed, inefficient, slow, or of any negative attribute you can stamp on a process that is not 100% fulfilling its goal. Just fitting into this system will make you part of this failure! But for innovators and positive influencers this is absolutely not acceptable.

Update Database with Dbup When Deploying With Kudu

Sun, 19 Jan 2014 03:58:08 +0000

Update: @DavidEbbo checked the post and thankfully he notified me that we don’t need to use the RESTapi to add an environment variable to Kudu on Azure; we can use the AppSettings in the portal.

——-

Kudu is a deployment engine that enables websites to deploy directly from git repository, it is the one behind git deployments in Azure Web Sites.
Two things I loved about Kudu: you can use it locally in your environments, and it is open source!

Develop without Googling

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 10:21:38 +0000

Yesterday I was playing with Kudu, the Azure websites deployment engine, and it was all fun and joy.

While I was happily hitting the key strokes of joy enjoying the new cool stuff I implementing, I got an error, and shamefully the minute I saw the error I copied and pasted it to Google!
For my bad (and later good) luck, after opening two links from the search results I discovered that I am late; I have to hit the road, so I instantly closed my laptop, pushed it in my bag and ran.

Complicated Software? Or Solving Everything At Once? Message To Product Owners

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 10:23:30 +0000

As software developers, we happen to come across many business problems with various complexity levels. Although this complexity depends on the nature of the domain sometimes, what I have noticed that product owners add a lot to this complexity themselves without a need!

For once, software developers are innocent here; the product owner, the entrepreneur, or the man behind the niche, these people have a very big responsibility on defining the complexity of the system; most of the time, the complexity introduced to the software was because they wanted to solve everything with a button, maybe two!

OAuth Authentication in OWIN

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:18:18 +0000

Last week I got the chance to speak on the Victoria .net user group, presenting OAuth authentication (and authentication in general) in the new .net web world of OWIN.
You can find below the link to the source code, the presentation slides, and the video on Youtube.

Source code on GitHub

For some reason the animation doesn’t work on Slideshare, maybe because it was Office 2013

OAuth in the new .NET world (OWIN) from Emad Alashi

Enjoy 🙂

Consultants’ Skills: Story Telling

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 05:17:28 +0000

You have to listen to two words only before Cristian Prieto grasp your attention till the very end of his talk, even if it was about cats! everybody just goes silent, listening carefully, staring and waiting for more!…and the secret behind it, as I see it, is HE IS A PERFECT STORY-TELLER!
Let’s face it, people like stories; we watch movies, we read novels, even news sounds much more interesting when there is a “story” behind it! it is the nature of humans.

ASP.NET Routing & MVC Presentation

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 08:33:31 +0000

Last week I delivered my first talk in Melbourne: “ASP.NET Routing & MVC” with the .net user group VIC.NET.
Even though there was a problem with time control due to reasons out of hand, the audience stayed till the very end of the presentation; good to know that the presentation didn’t suck that much :D.

Here are the slides: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/aspnet-routing-mvc/15438666

Speed Reading Is Nice…But

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 08:29:13 +0000

If you are in the software industry, you HAVE to read, read, and read; and it’s not only the “of course reading is essential”, it’s a matter of life and death…of your career!
And there is tons of material every day: books, blogs, news, articles,….etc., so how to manage? of course is Speed Reading.

Once you master it, yes…you will use it for every reading situation, and at this point, my dear reader, you start doing it wrong!
It is a tool like every tool we have; suitable for some scenarios, and not suitable for others!
For example, it’s good for the following scenarios:

Performance Counters For Multiple Processes With Same Name

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 08:48:00 +0000

There are couple of posts talking about this subject: when you have multiple process’s with the same name, it’s not straightforward to figure out which performance counter instance represents which process. The suggestion would be to use the process ID and the “ID Process” performance counter (This is not the essence of this post, if you know this already scroll down).

To explain this further let’s say we have two web applications with two different application pools that we wish to monitor their consumption of memory (though probably there are better ways to do it). The worker process for a web application on IIS is a w3wp.exe process, so for our two web applications we will have two w3wp.exe process’s running like the following:

Microsoft.Web.Administration for IIS

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 07:10:54 +0000

Update: In addition to this post, you can check as well the valuable post of Stuart Cullinans’s.

One of the recent projects I worked on involved managing IIS programmatically, and I found the proper tool for it, meet “Microsoft.Web.Administration”.

You can read about this library’s purpose in its own page above; what I will list here are three points I noticed while dealing with the library:

I couldn’t find where to download, or install the library from, it appeared to be residing in “C:\Windows\SysWOW64\inetsrv\Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll” and yes my OS is 64-bit I am not sure where you can find that on a 32-bit machine
The main class ServerManager reads data the moment it’s created only, it will NOT maintain a valid state after the initial read; for example, consider the following snippet:

static WorkerProcess currentWP;

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    currentWP = new ServerManager().ApplicationPools[0].WorkerProcesses[0];
    while (!Console.ReadLine().Equals("quit"))
    {
        Console.WriteLine(currentWP.ProcessId.ToString());
    }
}

This code snippet will get the first WorkerProcess of the first Application Pool in the local IIS. Run the code, enter bogus input just to make sure the loop works, and you will find on the Console the W3WP Process Id displayed (e.g. 4295).

Working for Readify

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 22:34:14 +0000

And finally I have the time to post about my new job, yes I changed jobs and now it’s Readify.

I have never seen anything like it! Readify’s consultants are the top professionals in the IT industry working on the Microsoft stack; when I step in the office every morning, I sit in a room in which there are two MVP’s (of 12 MVP’s work in Readify already!), two book authors and user group leads, couple of speakers, and many silent geniuses. And I am drinking knowledge from a fire hose!

Working with Windows 8 on Parallels 7

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 23:46:50 +0000

I have installed the latest Parallels update and created a new Windows 8 virtual machine.

Being in all-touch universe right now, the guys behind Windows 8 decided to use corners of the screen to do certain actions like showing Start, active applications, or the settings flay-out.
The issue is that I couldn’t use these corners because Parallels menu would pop up the minute your mouse touches the top edge!

My work around was to enable “Active Screen Corners” on Parallels for my virtual machine and then assign them to nothing, access it by going to Configure > Full Screen. Check the following screen shot:

Html.EditorFor, Model Property vs RouteData Value

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:41:40 +0000

The ASP.NET MVC team made our lives easier when they created the Html editor extension method Html.EditoFor(); you just pass the model property and it creates the right editor, filling it with the property’s value…but not always!

Let’s consider that we have the conventional route definition:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default", // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
);

and this simple action method:

ثلاثاء عمان التقني – الذكرى الثانية

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:39:08 +0000

ثلاثاء عمان التقني لمن لا يعرفه هو لقاء تقني يعقد كل أول يوم ثلاثاء من كل شهر، يتناول مواضيع مختلفة في كل مرة تحوم كلها حول التقنية و استخداماتها، يتم فيه استضافة متخصصين في موضوع تقني معين يطرحون آراءهم في أهم المستجدات في الموضوع المختار أمام جمهور كبير من المتحمسين. يقوده طليعة من الشباب الفطن الجاد.

How Html.Action() Work

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:30:48 +0000

Let’s take the example:

@Html.Action("Latest", "Episode")

What this will do is to invoke the “Latest” action method in the “Episode” controller. But what really happens behind the scenes is NOT a direct invoke; it will actually start from the beginning of the ASP.NET MVC execution pipeline using “Latest” and “Episode” as Route values for the keys “action” and “controller” respectively.

This means that you should pay very good attention to your Routes definition in the Application_Start() in Global.asax; Html.Action() will try to match the best route in your defined routes according to the RouteValueDictionary created above (action and controller) along with any additional route values provided in the overload.

The Magical Effect of Simple Encouraging Words

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:16:14 +0000

Recently I had to go through some health checkup that included tests for my eye, one of these tests required from me to keep my eye open for a long period of time concentrating continuously into an extremely strong and annoying light.
During the test I kept receiving encouraging words from the examining doctor every couple of seconds: “Bravo Emad! very good concentration, keep it up, that’s it”.
Even though it was a simple task and me being in my 30’s!… I still had a strong feeling that I was doing something right! and that I should keep doing what I was doing, to give more effort no matter how annoying and hurting this intense light was; and all of this was due to his words! the more he encouraged the wider I opened my eye and concentrated.

Criticizing Google Reader’s UI

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:29:45 +0000

Since Google changes the look of its products very often, most likely this post will be out of date soon, nonetheless I believe it’d be a good to share my thoughts about Google Reader’s current UI… with a little rant.

Lots of real-state waste: All the areas surrounded with yellow borders are wasted, especially that I have no control over hiding or showing them (click on image to see it real size):

QueryString in Routing and Model Binding in ASP.NET MVC

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:39:57 +0000

In a nutshell, a query string will not be part of the RouteData dictionary in the routing process, yet it will affect the route matching. On the other hand, when Model Binding takes place, query string will be used to bind to the parameters of the action method, unless there is an item in route data with the same key.

Now the details. Let us consider this ASP.NET MVC application. We have an action method:

Interviews with Jordanian Microsoft Guests

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:08:00 +0000

During the last quarter of 2011 we have hosted two amazing Jordanian Microsoft guests, Yousef Al Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer), and Ayman Dahleh (Development Manager for the Global Experience Platform group), who happened to be having their vacation here, they generously accepted our invitation to deliver sessions here in Jordan despite their busy times.

The community recorded these two inspiring interviews with our guests through which I can see how close achievements can be.

Hide Subfolder in Multiple Domains Under One Site

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:10:40 +0000

After I have moved to WinHost, I was surprised they don’t support multiple domains under one site out of the box; you have to rely on IIS URL Rewrite magic to achieve that.

So as expected, I looked for a solution in their KB and the internet (you don’t reinvent the wheel, remember?) and found couple of posts here, here, here, and here that helped a lot in achieving this.
So I managed to have www.emadashi.com and www.dotnetarabi.com working fine together residing in the folders “emadashi-blog” and “dotnetarabi-root” respectively under the root; they both have same IP address, but upon request a redirection is made to the proper application folder.

Microsoft’s Support

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:21:34 +0000

Couple of days ago I tried a key I acquired from Microsoft MSDN subscription to activate an Office installation, the activation didn’t work for some reason, so I filed a ticket, and I thought to myself “Oh great! now I will have to wait for ages until such large corporate like Microsoft would answer my ticket!”

“AmmanTT: Developer Edition” presentation and slides

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:46:14 +0000

It was a very interesting event “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” which took place last Tuesday; the team did a very good job putting it together, it is really great seeing this great effort put into such fruitful events; moving the community steps forward, so thank you AmmanTT team, you rock.

Hereby I post the slides I presented in my talk:

Software Life Cycle, Humans & Code

Speaking at AmmanTT: Developer Edition

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 10:58:22 +0000

I will be speaking at “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” next Tuesday 6th of December 2011. Never heard about AmmanTT? quoting from their About page:

Coming to you on the first Tuesday of every month is a 2-hour event that brings industry experts, local technologists/engineers, entrepreneurs, idea-generators and just about any enthusiast together in a casual setting to meet and learn from each other

I will be talking about the real-life side of the software development life cycle, and about the overlapping between Process and Humans in the cycle. So mark your calendars, I will be very happy to meet you there.

HTML5 and IE presentation on Microsoft Open Door

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:32:14 +0000

And it’s over, the Microsoft Open Door event is behind us now, and so was my presentation about HTML5 and IE; all praise to god, the feedback was great and I am humbled by the nice compliments.
If you were among the audience and you have any comment, question, or critique, you are most welcome to contact me anytime.

Below is the presentation slides as I promised:

HTML5 & IE

Speaking at Microsoft Open Door

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 14:13:44 +0000

I will be speaking at this year’s Microsoft event Open Door; the session will be about HTML5 & IE, including highlights on the main new specifications for HTML5, and how Microsoft is approaching it through IE and some of the dev tools.
It will be on Day 2, Track 3, at 3:00 PM.

Check the event details and agenda here, catch you there hopefully.

Best Skype Audio Chat Recorder

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:24:08 +0000

This is a shout-out to MP3 Skype Recorder, the best Skype recorder I have ever used to record Skype calls.
It’s been two years since DotNetArabi’s first episode, most of the episodes were recorded over Skype using MP3 Skype Recorder. It wasn’t the only tool I tried, I have downloaded several, but none competed with its simplicity and robustness, never hanged, never failed, and it’s totally free!

My MVP Award Dedication

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 07:36:09 +0000

Couple of days ago I received the wonderful email from Microsoft telling me that I was awarded the MVP; it really feels nice when you achieve results. But the best part of all this is my friends’ reactions, the congrats, and the big smiles on the faces (not mentioning a generous gift from my colleagues ), to all these true friends I say big thank you!

Continuous Integration Book Review

Sat, 21 May 2011 13:05:07 +0000

To be frank I hesitated a bit to review a “a Martin Fowlers signature book”, but I have to share this review with others; to set expectations.

The book “Continuous Integration” is ok, but it’s too general, that’s it!
I have read several articles about Continuous Integration and posts here and there until I thought to myself “that’s it, it’s time to get the book, it’s time to delve deep into this”, to my surprise the content of the book was too general and it didn’t add much to the articles I read.

Reflections on Jordev Web Camp

Mon, 16 May 2011 22:11:05 +0000

Last Saturday 14th of May 2011 we had the first web camp in Jordan among Jordev’s activities, and it was great!
check my presentation slides at the end of this post.

The event was like the following:

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM: Registration
9:00 AM – 1:00 PM: Four 50 minutes sessions with 10 minutes between each for breaks, there was a few attendees at the beginning so we delayed the first session for couple of minutes (yes we have a morning problem here). Sessions were “Entity Framework 4.1”, “ASP.NET MVC One Step Deeper”, “Dynamic Data”, and “jQuery”
1:00 PM – 2:15 PM: lunch break, where people went to the near market and had their lunch there.
2:15 PM – 4:30 PM: free coding session.

Things went great:

First Jordev Web Camp

Sat, 07 May 2011 10:40:05 +0000

For too long, all Jordev’s activities have been in the form of sessions with fast code demos, and for the first time we are going to break this rule and do our first web camp in which attendees will have the chance to have hands-on experience with some of Jordan’s active experts. It will be on the 15th of May 2011.

There are two things in web camps that make them more interesting: REAL CODING and COLLABORATION; coding is a practice science, best way to learn it is by practice, and this practice will be much more fruitful and enjoyable if done with a bunch of enthusiasts who share the same passion with you. Speakers will have their share, but the biggest share will go to the hidden experts who have been hiding under excessive working hours and who avoid boring talkative sessions. This gathering will be a chance for us to dig these gems out and have the most geeky fun and benefit we seek in such communities.

Brilliantly Simple Code Sharing

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:19:11 +0000

Today I was looking for a fast way to find the index of a nth occurrence of a string in a string, so I found this very simple and intuitive site on which you can find and share .net extension methods, the website is http://www.extensionmethod.net Dah!

I couldn’t find what I looked for, so I shared my solution here; the website made it crazy easy to share this! Something I definitely would add to my log on how to create wonderful websites, simple and effective.

Code Sample Should Be Clean

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 15:21:46 +0000

The other day I needed an ASP.NET MVC grid control, and I have always heard about Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions and the great tools they provide, so I decided to give them a try.

So I followed the installation guide step by step, and prepared my code to use the extensions; I added a reference to the DLL, added the scripts, etc… and I thought I was ready to test-drive it.
I opened Telerik’s sample website which showed the control and below it the code sample that made it work, innocently enough I did what any other developer would do to try out the sample code: copy and paste it in your page and then build. To my surprise there was an error in the View; it didn’t recognize an Extension method called “Configurator”!

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC session at Jordev

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:51:47 +0000

It was great to get back to presentations after this while; ASP.NET MVC was the topic for the latest session I delivered through Jordev. The audience was great, I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did preparing for it.

you can find the slides on Slideshare, embedded here as well:

Introduction to ASP.NET MVC

View more presentations from Emad Alashi.

Attend Tech-Ed Middle East 2011 for free!

Sat, 30 Oct 2010 20:42:13 +0000

Here is your chance (with little effort) to win a fully-paid trip to Tech-Ed Middle East 2011. Simple tasks are required from your part and you will find yourself with the ultimate geeks in Dubai next year.

For the details check the competitions website on http://compete.jordanruns.net/

Use Powershell To Follow Your Followers On Twitter

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:24:32 +0000

Update: Twitter “statuses/followers” API documentation had a small note at the bottom that says it returns only 100 followers if no paging is used. I have updated the script accordingly. Thanks to @RamyMahrous for notifying me in his comment below.

For a long time I thought that @DotNetArabi shouldn’t follow it’s own followers due to various reasons I had, but lately I discovered that I was wrong. So I have decided to follow them back no matter how many they are, but that would be a tedious thing to do manually. Here comes Powershell to the rescue.

Happy Life with Intuitive API in Smart Controls

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:42:23 +0000

In this post I will show you an example of how smartly built controls and API’s can make the developers programming life extremely enjoyable, hopefully this example will urge you in giving such a smart effort when you build your own control or API.

Lately I have been playing around with a very nice tree control based on jQuery called jsTree. One of the nice features is that it allows populating the tree through asynchronous calls with JSON data representation. In order to achieve that, you needed to provide the data by JSON special format suitable to the tree. This format, regrettably, is open to the JSON vulnerability Phil Haack talked about in his two posts here and here.
So to avoid this vulnerability I had to change this default data format of the tree, at least until the very end of the data flow just before the tree populates the data, only then I can change it back to the default format, like the following:

Stressful Situations Make You Stupid

Wed, 12 May 2010 07:16:19 +0000

Today we came across an interesting issue at work: we have two teams A and B who interchange API calls. Team A needed an API from team B to process a business that is owned by team B of course. The signature was like the following:

public OutputEntity MyMethod(List listOfIds);

It appeared afterward that this method was very slow, and the client was already very upset about the low performance, which consequently caused big pressure on the teams by the superiors to enhance the performance.
After investigating the issue, it appeared that the list of ID’s sent as input consists of some ID’s that do not need to be processed, this criteria of “not need to be processed” is a business owned by team B, done by using properties of the entities these ID’s represent. So the solution to this issue was one of the following:

Exposing DotNetArabi for OData

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 08:14:43 +0000

Lately OData (Open Data protocol) is gaining a great momentum, everybody is talking about, and in fact it deserves all this fuss. OData is a protocol through which you can share data provided as ATOM or JSON formats by exposing URI’s to be invoked via HTTP, check the FAQ for fast information.

If Crashing Gracefully Is Nice, Recovering From It Is Awesome

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:54:31 +0000

Last Saturday we had a SharePointSaturday event here in Jordan, in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Oleson and Michael Noel for DotNetArabi.

At the end of Joel’s valuable interview, which can happen only in a life time, I stopped the recording by hitting the “Stop” button, simple. Surprisingly, instead of stopping the recording, Audacity just froze! I could hear myself screaming inside “NOOO!!!”, I guess even Joel heard that! the whole machine stuck that I had to force it to a Hard Shut down.

DotNetArabi Podcast Equipment

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:14:22 +0000

After publishing 8 episodes of DotNetArabi, I think it would be nice to share on this blog how it goes and what equipment needed in the process. But before we begin, dear reader, note that I am not an expert, I am still in the beginning of the way, though it’s going good so far.

My working machine is HP dv 6700 laptop, my first trials with recording was with simple microphone like the ones you use for chats; recording in winter made things smooth, but when summer came a long the heating problem became obvious in the low quality of the audio recorded, in addition to the higher target I needed anyway, so a different measure had to take place.

Communication Skills Session at MSP – Jordev

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:24:03 +0000

I just finished a session about Communication Skills one-to-one for the MSP program with Microsoft and Jordev. As I promised the audience, here are the slides shared on the very good site SlideShare:

Communication Skills one To one

View more presentations from Emad Alashi.

“Growing Software” book review

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:03:35 +0000

I have been reading this book Growing Software by Louis Testa, and I consider it the book of the year for me.

The book is a about how to create a robust successful software; starting from assembling your engineering team, to having a flourishing company with successful software product/services and happy customers.
If you are a new Development Manager, or already a Dev. manager who is in a small company growing fast, this book is for you.

Nice Development Tools

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 08:48:19 +0000

Sometimes development tools can be very tempting to a degree that you just want to open the IDE and start hitting those keys. Though it’s not always within the IDE; here is a list of development tools, without specific order, that are just so sweet and pretty crucial to teams opt for best development environment!

DotNetArabi Episode 5 دوت نت عربي الحلقة الخامسة

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:38:52 +0000

Episode 5 of DotNetArabi podcast is published on www.dotnetarabi.com

Mohamad Meligy talked in this episode about ORM (Object Relational Mapping), he explained in details how they work, why we need them, their advantages and disadvantages, and listed some of the known ORM engines.

لقد تم نشر الحلقة الخامسة من دوت نت عربي على www.dotnetarabi.com. تحدث فيها محمد مليجي بإسهاب عن
الـ ORM (Object Relational Mapping). مفصلا ماهيتها، و كيف تعمل، و حسناتها و سيئاتها، و ذكر كذلك بعضا من المكتبات البرمجية منها و حسناتها.

Basics Of Successful Communication

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:32:20 +0000

It’s a waste of time trying to explain how important communication is in life, whether it is at work or personal life. So I will start immediately in group of points I find it to be basics when it comes to successful communication in general, and verbal communication in specific.

Here is the list of actions you need to take in order to explain your thoughts as clear as and descriptive as possible. I tried to put them in their proper order considering the communication process, though they can overlap:

DotNetArabi Episode 4 دوت نت عربي الحلقة الرابعة

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:48:49 +0000

I ~~just~~ published episode 4 of the DotNetArabi podcast on www.dotnetarabi.com.

This episode was with guest Mohammad Zayed, he works as Strategic Technology Specialist in Microsoft Jordan. he worked on different Microsoft technologies ranging from Windows Forms applications, Web Forms and Mobile.
Mohammad talks in this episode about Sharepoint, the in’s and out’s, the benefits and the challenges.

لقد تم نشر الحلقة الرابعة من دوت نت عربي على www.dotnetarabi.com ، التي كان الضيف فيها محمد زايد. يعمل محمد زايد حاليا كمتخصص تقنيات استراتيجي لكبار العملاء في مايكروسوفت الأردن. و تكلم في هذه الحلقة عن الـ Sharepoint: ماهيته، و ما يلزم لتثبيته، و تراخيصه، و نقاط قوته، و نقاط التحدي فيه، و الكثير من المعلومات القيمة.

JIT compiler and "Method Not Found" error

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:22:06 +0000

Actually it can be “Could Not Load Type” too, but the reason is the same: you are referencing the wrong DLL version.

well, this is totally understandable; of course you are going to get this exception when you use an outdated DLL that lacks the new extra parameter to THAT certain method. But the interesting part is it will not happen when you first run your application, and neither when execution reaches the changed method; it will happen when code-execution reaches a place that REFERENCES that changed method.

“طور نفسك برمجيا”…موجة من عمر قعدان

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:41:08 +0000

قبل أيام، كتب أخي عمر قعدان في مدونته مقالا بعنوان “شيفرة مصدرية للقراءة” و في آخره استعمل أسلوب “الموجة” في المدونات و هو أسلوب مبتكر في عالم التدوين يقوم صاحبه بكتابة مقال، ثم يطلب في آخر المقال من مدونين معينين كتابة المقال نفسه لكن من تجربتهم الشخصية، و بدورهم يفعلون الأمر ذاته مع آخرين إن أرادوا.

يطلق على هذا الأسلوب في الإنجليزية كلمة “Tagging” و برأيي أن أقرب مرادف لهذا المعنى في اللغة العربية ضمن هذا السياق هو كلمة “موجة”. و ها أنا أستجيب للموجة التي أطلقها أخي عمر.

DotNetArabi Episode 3 دوت نت عربي الحلقة الثالثة

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 12:42:37 +0000

I just published episode 3 of the DotNetArabi podcast on www.dotnetarabi.com.

This episode was with guest Mahmoud Alamanasrah, who have 7 years of experience on data-driven web applications with SQL Server. The episode was about the new features of SQL Server 2008, great for all developers who interact closely with SQL Server.

على موقع www.dotnetarabi.com تجدون الحلقة الثالثة من “دوت نت عربي”. موضوع الحلقة هو الـ”إس كيو إل سيرفر 2008 SQL Server”، عن آخر المستجدات و بعض النصائح العامة.
كان ضيف الحلقة الزميل محمود المناصرة، و هو عضو نشط في مجتمع مطروي الـ”دوت نت” في الأردن Jordev، لديه 7 سنوات من الخبرة و يعمل حاليا كـ “Technical Team Leader” أي قائد فريق مبرمجين.

Got a GPS? …Lets Play Geocaching

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:54:05 +0000

The other day I was roaming the Internet; link here link there, tweet here tweet there, and I stumbled upon a very nice game called Geocaching.
Geocaching, simply, is a game in which players hide items in any place in the world, and the other players should find, yes…Treasure Hunt. But the fun part is it’s Global, and the GPS is your primary tool!

The players who want to hide an item, should first label it and give it a unique identifier, then record the coordinates (longitude and latitude) of the place they hide it in, and finally they should post the information along with the coordinates on the game’s website www.geocaching.com.

A Case We Shouldn’t Use Stored Procedure’s In

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:51:18 +0000

We are working on this big project at work in which several teams are assigned to different modules. The modules are, naturally, overlapping in certain areas where they they need to interact with each other through API’s.

One of these modules is central and crucial to the rest of the modules, the dependency is very high that the team has to provide many API’s. Certain API’s was needed by different modules; our team needed a list of entity X, and another team also wanted a list of entity X, BUT…we had different criteria!

DPack for Visual Studio, Better Navigation

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 22:07:33 +0000

There have been couple of code assistance and refactoring products for the Visual Studio IDE, two of the top listed is CodeRush and Resharper; they provide amazing and rich functionality regarding code refactoring and navigation.
But if the built-in refactorings in the Visual Studio itself suffices you (I am comfortable with it), then the only thing you need is DPack for Visual Studio; it’s a simple navigation utility by which you can navigate to the wanted File, Class, Method, or Property as easy as couple of strokes.

Clear jQuery Droppable List

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:25:19 +0000

The other day at work I finally had the chance to get my hands on code (see here why I’m so anxious about it 😛 ).

We were using the jQuery’s Drag and Drop feature, where the droppable areas (DIV’s) are marked as droppable and registered for the events like the following:

126 function RegisterDroppable(DomID) {

128 $(‘#' + DomID).droppable({

Technical Team Leader…Who Is Not

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:19:50 +0000

When I started this blog my goal was to make it a technical one, in which most posts would have code, samples, screen shots, architecture…etc. This was the primary goal, though it is totally fine with me to talk about software life in general.

The issue is that I get the ideas of my posts from my real daily life, which is mostly code challenges at work. I do write code in my leisure time, but for sure it is not as thorough as the thing at work.
And since I haven’t posted any technical stuff lately…the simple conclusion is I DON’T SEE CODE ANYMORE!

DotNetArabi Episode 2 دوت نت عربي الحلقة الثانية

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:33:13 +0000

I just published episode 2 of the DotNetArabi podcast on www.dotnetarabi.com.

This episode was with guest Mohammad Salem, a distinguished community member who has 5 years of experience, we talked about the Enterprise Library in a catching discussion. I hope you enjoy it.

على موقع www.dotnetarabi.com تجدون الحلقة الثانية من “دوت نت عربي”. موضوع الحلقة هو الـ”إنتربرايز لايبراري Enterprise Library”، و هي مجموعة من “البرامج المساعدة DLL” يستعملها المبرمجون بكثرة في المشاريع الكبيرة.
كان ضيف الحلقة الزميل محمد سالم، و هو عضو نشط في مجتمع مطروي الـ”دوت نت” في الأردن Jordev.

DotNetArabi دوت نت عربي

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:25:18 +0000

Finally, here I am declaring the technical Arabic talk show www.dotnetarabi.com. I didn’t realize it will take such effort, although it was the website thing more than anything else, WE SHOUD PAY DESIGNERS EVEN MORE!

DotNetArabi is a talk show about technology in general and about .net in specific, held in Arabic language with me interviewing tech specialists.

أخيرا، ها أنا أعلن عن تدشين “دوت نت عربي” www.dotnetarabi.com ، برنامج إذاعي يتكلم عن التكنولوجيا بشكل عام، و عن تكنولوجيا الـ .net بشكل خاص أقابل فيه تقنيين مختصين.
استغرقني العمل على هذا الموقع الكثير من الوقت يعود معظمها للعمل على شكل الموقع، النتيجة كانت زيادة احترامي لجماعة المصممين، كان عملا مضنياً!آمل أن ينال إعجاب الجميع.

Fear and Humbleness…Obstacles in The Way of Success

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:43:30 +0000

“Oh no, I won’t go into that code; I am not that intelligent!”
“oh no, I don’t want to try this software…I don’t know what it will do to my machine!”
“Oh no, I can’t write such a unique blog post!”
“Oh no, I will not twiply to that celebrity…come on…he is a celebrity!”

These phrases kept chasing me for a long while in my life, and sometimes still does. It had the worst effect on my progress, I couldn’t move an inch forward; by a deep feeling I didn’t confront, I was afraid of failure, mixed with a feeling of negative humbleness.
But that was it, I couldn’t stay as a prisoner to these chains, and leave these cookies of success to people who might have less resources and powers.

JavaScript Date Object and Code Convention

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:01:17 +0000

“is Code Convention important?”, I couldn’t find better time to answer this with a big, decorated, shiny, flashing “YES” more than now!

I was doing some coding with JavaScript in which I needed to create a Date object and add to it 30 days, simple job! So I did the following:

var x = new Date();

Beware of Static Constructors

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 22:39:22 +0000

In Bunian we needed to use a static constructor for some reason, it was all going good; we tested the code and it ran smoothly…excellent (Code Coverage anyone?!).
But when I came across this situation, it appeared that the static constructor wasn’t invoked!even when “Class.Method();” is called! so lets examine it.

I have two simple classes as an Example:

    public class Parent
  
    {
  
        public static string DoSomething()
  
        {
  
            return “Parent: DoSomething() called”;
  
        }
  
    }

    public class Child : Parent
  
    {

default ASP.NET Membership provider on different database

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:27:31 +0000

Every ASP.NET developer should already know about the Membership Provider that ships with ASP.NET 2.0. Configuring it is as easy as opening Visual Studio > select the Web project file > navigate to the Project menu item > and select “ASP.NET Configuration”. Follow the wizard and you are up and running now.

But the problem with this approach is that it will build it’s OWN database in the App_Data folder and create the required tables there. Wouldn’t most of us have their own databases to work with? ok then, if you want the defualt ASP.NET Membership Provide (AspNetSqlMembershipProvider) to work on YOUR database do the following:

Get On With It!

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:56:35 +0000

When we started gathering requirements from the charity organizations for Bunian, it appeared that there are other kinds of people who benefit from the charity organization; there are “needy families” whose father is still alive but can’t sustain their families, and “students” who can’t afford their study.

So Bunian needs to support all these Beneficiaries in smart way; we solved the problem by creating the IBeneficiary interface. But the problem is that in order to get out with the best solution ever (damn perfectionism!), we kept coming up with different solutions, and overriding them with other solutions every once in a while, and this kept going like forever!

Gaza, Starvation For 18 Months And a Massacre Today!

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:09:38 +0000

Update: death toll rate reaches 470 and 2400 injuries, and I will stop counting.

After a 20 months siege during which there was no water, food, medicine, gas, oil, and electricity…today Israel thinks that’s not enough…and starts a massacre; 160 dead, 200 wounded by 40 rockets hit Gaza and still going.

Photos From the Massacre Taking Place Today

English news: here
Arabic news: here

Photos From the Siege

English news: here
Arabic news: here, and here

Importance of Documentation

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:25:15 +0000

Lately we have decided in Bunian to move on to NHibernate 2.0, and the contributor assigned to the move started out, only to send an email one day after: “THERE IS NO DOCUMENTATION!’.
We had errors as a result to the move which couldn’t be fixed without a documentation explaining why this happened.

After searching for a while, we found two resources of the new documentation:

a wiki help that is hosted on Google Knol:
http://knol.google.com/k/fabio-maulo/-/1nr4enxv3dpeq/21#
Not really appealing to be used extensively; no smooth flow between chapters, frames dazzle the eyes, no table of contents, but surely a great step forward for a documentation that is maintained by the community

HttpApplication EndRequest Event Invoked Many Times In Single Request?

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:44:37 +0000

The other day I was putting the last touch of a temporary way to manage the NHibernate session (ISession) in Bunian. So part of the task was to bind a method to the HttpApplication EndRequest event (in the Global.asax.cs file) like the following:

    public override void Init()
  
    {
  
           this.EndRequest += WorkContext.NHibernateSessionManager.Instance.HttpRequestEnded;
  
    }

By doing this, at the end of each page request the NHibernateSessionManager.Instance.HttpRequestEnded() will be called and I can clean the session then. But to my surprise this method was called at least 10 times!! So I thought maybe the Global.Init() method is called many times for some reason and I ended up binding the same method to the EndRequest event many times, so I set a breakpoint at the Global.Init() method and…it’s called one time only.

Travians be Warned…Rapacious is Rising

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 12:55:04 +0000

I don’t know whether to thank or scold my good friend Omar Qadan for introducing me to Travian, a strategy game played online.

It’s amazing how a simple, web-based, HTML-front game can be so rich and vast entertainment-wise. It’s a real strategy game where you build villages, resources, armies, embassies, and conduct trading, diplomacy, wars, and alliances—all through simple images, numbers, and text.

On the other hand, I can’t ignore the programming part of the game (being a developer that is). It must be big, fun, and tiring; think of all these rules and the simulation algorithms the game is built upon, the server handling thousands of players, and scripts (yes, lots of hacks! 😄). Even the hacking idea itself is so delicious (programming-wise only 😄), a true heaven for developers. Also, the makers of the game are on the right track of providing developers points through which they can access the game and display information on other sites or applications. For now, it’s only exporting database tables of statistical information about the game status, but still I consider it a cool step toward supplying nice endpoints for developers, maybe Web Services in the future.

Introduction to NHibernate Session at Jordev Was Good

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:29:47 +0000

The feedback was very good, and I was glad that everybody liked it. Jordev is really moving ahead, and I am very excited being part of it 🙂

Below is the slide show (it’s an enhanced version from my previous one):

Introduction To NHibernate (SlideShare)

Code is the same of the previous one which you can download from here

My First Talk at JorDev .net

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:31:49 +0000

JorDev .net is a .NET user group founded by enthusiastic Jordanian IT professionals. On Wednesday, November 26, I will be doing my first session in a series about NHibernate.

Talk Details

Overview: NHibernate is an object-relational mapping (ORM) solution for the Microsoft .NET platform. It provides an easy-to-use framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. Its purpose is to relieve the developer from a significant amount of relational data persistence-related programming tasks. NHibernate is free open source software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Target audience: .NET developers, software designers, software engineers, and software architects.
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008.
Location: MIC (Microsoft Innovation Center, Royal Scientific Society Building, 3rd Floor).
Time: 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm (Amman, Jordan local time).
For more info:
- Mohamed Saleh: 0788716457
- Ayman Farouk: 0795727344

Reminders

Data Access Within Business Objects -Bunian Design-

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:17:27 +0000

In a previous post I showed the general architecture of Bunian. I’d like, in this post, to touch on the Data Access part and how it interacts with the Business Objects.

In traditional architectures there are 3 known layers: Data Access, Business, and Presentation. DTO’s (Data Transfer Objects) are used to carry the data back and forth between the layers. Look to the following diagram:

Bunian contributors seemed to have the same experience developing against such architecture, so we have decided to go with something different; smart Business Objects with more toward OOP.

The Story of a Winning Frog (a story we all know, and few comprehend)

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:42:12 +0000

If you don’t know it:

Once upon a time there was a group of little frogs, who decided to go through a competition to climb a tower. The tower was high and difficult, and no one of the spectator frogs believed that any of the tiny frogs can make it to the top.

Little frogs started climbing, while spectators yelling:
– “oh my, it’s too high…I don’t think they can make it!”
– “they are too young, how possibly can they reach the top?! that’s insane”
.
.
Shouting and yelling continued, while the little frogs surrendering one by one, except for this one little frog who kept going and going, climbing up further and further more. Surprising everyone, that frog made it to the top and he won the race! well…the only reason for his success that…HE WAS DEAF, he simple couldn’t hear the negative shouting of the spectators!

Bunian Basic Design

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:02:10 +0000

Well, it’s moving on, very slow, but it’s moving!

If you have been following this blog, then I think you are familiar with Bunian, the open source project for charity organizations. During the last Bunian team meeting at the beginning of this week, the basic design emerged (still being discussed and subject to changes till the minute of this post); we have decided to skip the dummy DTO objects, and to try Business Objects (BO), where most of the business logic lays, rather than in a separate Business Service.

Successful Meetings Is The Responsibility Of All

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 22:02:24 +0000

Through all the meetings I had in my life (the voluntary and the professional), all meetings shared key points that made it either successful and constructive, or a complete disaster and waste of time!

These key points can be summarized into:

Meeting is conducted to achieve certain target , a solution to a problem, Keep the focus on that goal
Time is valuable, and the participants will be very annoyed when they see their effort and time is wasted on a subject different from the one they originally agreed to sacrifice their time for. if the meeting was anything except resolving the original subject, it is a failure.

Changing Jobs

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 11:47:40 +0000

Yesterday was my last day in estarta, marking the end of nice period full of experience, knowledge, and amazing friends who have been like a family.

And now it’s time to move on, as a Technical Team Leader in esense. The excitement increases as time goes by (since I haven’t started there yet), I have only one week of preparations to step back into this role (yes, I have been TTL before) in this new environment, can’t wait.

في أي يوم العيد؟

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 19:53:50 +0000

في السنوات الأخيرة، كثر الحديث عن رؤية الهلال، و تحديد بدايات الأشهر القمرية، و لا سيما شهر رمضان و شوال لأهمتيهما. و احتار الناس بين البيانات الرسمية الصادرة عن المؤسسات الحكومية من جهة (نتيجة إدلاء شهود برؤية الهلال)، و المؤسسات الفلكية المتخصصة من جهة أخرى.

الموضوع -على عقده- بسيط؛ فلتحديد بادية هذه الأشهر الحساسة تعتمد المؤسسات الحكومية على شهادة مواطنين شهدوا برؤية الهلال، و هذا أمر طيب. لكن المشكلة أن لخمسين عاما خلت من الآن، كانت معظم تلك الشهادات خاطئة و ليس لها أساس من الصحة (و ما زالت)! لم يكن بالإمكان -من خلال الوسائل المتاحة للمؤسسات المسؤولة حينئذ- أن تتأكد من صحتها. كان يكفي أن يكون مسلما عاقلا بالغا راشدا، و لا يزال الأمر كذلك.

Free Collaboration Software

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:07:10 +0000

My previous employer Rapsyx decided lately to publish the light version of it’s prime product RapidOne as free software.

RapidOne in short words:

RapidOne Team provides a single application to handle communication, workplanning and resource sharing across the organization with a highly innovative storage concept organizing your data naturally

With the ability to add a whole set of CRM components depending on the version you choose.

Interesting? have a look at the free version here

NHibernate possible bug in IQuery.List()

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:09:15 +0000

recently, we had to clean the database from all the testing data, when an error similar to the following appeared:

The value "" is not of type “System.Nullable`1[System.DateTime]” and cannot be used in this generic collection

The code I executed was:

IQuery query = DbManager.MySession.CreateQuery("select max(dateObject.EndDate) from DateDomain dateObject");
IList<DateTime?> list = query.List<DateTime?>();

When I debugged NHibernate code, I reached to the following AddAll() method in the ArrayHelper class:

// NH-specific
public static void AddAll(IList to, IList from)
{
    foreach (object obj in from)
    {
        to.Add(obj);
    }
}

You can find the explanation of the error here.
Which brings us to the interesting question: why the implementation of IList Add method doesn’t consider the “nullability” of the T object? and why the parameter is of type IList?!

Software gadgets

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:18:20 +0000

In the early days when the Internet was Blog-free, my machine was light and clean, it was barely Visual Sutdio, SQL Server Express (then it was called MSDE) , Office, MSN and IIS. I always believed in the light clean machine, no goofy software around.

Then Blogs started to appear, and more interesting blogs had my attention like Scott’s and Omar’s, and with it I started to learn about new software gadgets. From that day, I am addicted!

رمضان كريم …Happy Ramadan

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 20:03:29 +0000

Happy Ramadan all, I hope you all get the best out of it, and may Allah grant you his acceptance and blessings.

Announcing open source project Bunian

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:14:57 +0000

What could be better, as an Open Source project, than a charity application! where your code is really worth something valuable; a smile on an innocent orphan face, or new clothes for a needy family in Eid.

Announcing new open source project Bunian; the excitement is indescribable! eager to reach with it a stage when it’s really alive, doing something good out there for needy people. I understand it’s going to take so much to drive a successful project, but with the right contributions from the right people like you…I am sure things will just work fine.

NHibernate Inverse attribute

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:22:26 +0000

I had to read documentation, articles, many blog entries and go into discussions with colleagues… all to get the root of this ambiguous attribute of NHibernate, it is trickey!
This blog entry is another trial to explain the attribute, but with taking one more detailed step into the explanation.

NHibernate is meant to persist objects as well as to manage their relations to each other, lets take a look at the following example of Parent and Child classes:

Mapping Enumeration of type int in NHibernate

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:45:38 +0000

I wanted to map an integer enumeration type in NHibernate, I googled “mapping enumeration in NHibernate” and the best explanation was of Jeremy Miller in his post here.

But as it appears (and according to my understanding) that the enumeration type should be mapped to a database column of characters type (varchar, char,…etc).
What if the database column was int? well…do exactly like what jeremy did except simply use “NHibernate.Type.PersistentEnumType” instead of “NHibernate.Type.EnumStringType“.

نعام

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:22:33 +0000

ذات يوم خلال الأسبوع الماضي، صدف أن استضافني صديق لي في منزله. جلسنا أمام التلفاز، ثم بدأت عملية القفز العشوائي التي اعتدناها – نحن كمجتمع – بين محطات اللاقط.

و في خضم المتعة العشوائية، استوقفت مضيفي محطة معروفة، كان يعلو منها حينها صراخ و عويل. و بنظرة منهكة، توجه إلي صديقي و سألني: “هل تعرف ما هذا؟” لم تكن الصور صورا إخبارية حقيقية، لكن كانت صورا من مسلسل…ثم سأل متنهدا :”هل سمعت عن التغريبة؟”، كانت علامات الاستغراب التي اعتلت وجهي جوابا كافيا له. فاستطرد قائلا: “إنها التغريبة الفلسطينة…تحكي قصة ضياع فلسطين!”.

How we decide what to have for lunch

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:09:26 +0000

Do you go through the same, time-consuming, frustrating discussion with your colleagues when you want to decide what to have for lunch? well…this is exactly what we have been going through where I work.

To solve the problem (partially, because humans can never totally agree! ), I made a small, quick and dirty web application; LunchPoll.

The user (Active Directory user, it works on Windows Authentication) would go to the home page, select the available poll:

Track your financial status

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:25:55 +0000

Lately, I have been living a financial chaos; I couldn’t tell how much money I had in the bank, lent to friends or in my Pocket! (ok the last one was exaggeration…I could count it anytime :P).

I decided to put an end to this, so I started looking for a software to track my financial status; went through many solutions starting from Excell sheets passing by GNUCash, AceMoneyLite , and ending with Microsoft Office Accounting Express (the latter makes me want to start my own business! wow).
Nothing seemed to meet my simple requirements of …just…tracking my money!

When a family dies in a car accedent!

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:14:46 +0000

On friday, my mothers cousin died in a car accedent on a highway; he, his wife and one of his 3 kids died in the accedent! the 2nd child is in comma while the 3rd survived.
It was shocking! the last week he was enjoying the holiday at his family’s place with his three kids!

The more we live, the more it’s obvious how iferior this life is! the things you loved most could very easily disappear in one glimpse, and in a so hurting way! that’s why we should not cling to it at all, of course we do our best to live it right, but not make it our goal at all. Paradise is there waiting for those who submits to Allah and live through the path he showed by prophet Muhammad.

Are code comments important?

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:02:50 +0000

From the very first day I have heard about Agile development and I have been hearing things like “code comments are not such a good thing”

The main idea behind that is that the code should be self explanatory; giving functions good names and splitting concerns into different functions.

But what about the “why”; why this certain code is written this way? why not do it that way? and this is what I have gone through today!

In the memory of Srebrenica genocide

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:32:29 +0000

Can the mind imagine how brutal the man kind can be!!

The last couple of days was the memory of one of the ugliest genocides took place in the recent history, with 8000 people killed mercilessly in couple of days!

The frightning side of the story is that it was under the supervision of the so called “The United Nations” (UN)!
Is it surprising? I thought so at the beginning, but after the spread of the news about UN forces abusing children all over the glob , it isn’t any more!!

New laptop

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 15:10:35 +0000

This is my first post from my new laptop HP Pavilion dv 6755ee 😀

Overall, I am happy with what I am experiencing till now, except for:

1- The fans opening is placed at the bottom of the laptop, which causing it to go on high temperature fast!
2- There is something wrong about the text in some applications in Vista (like visual studio 2008), it’s somehow blurry, I googled it and found some posts that didn’t help; suggesting to take off ClearType or set a dpi option that is already checked!

Using FeedBurner

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:26:00 +0000

I have been trying to figure out how the stats that WordPress provide works while hosting my blog, I FAILED!…or did they?

It was not a straightforward thing, I would click on a stat number that says I had certain number of views on one post today, I would click on it to see the chart is empty :S.

Anyway, I am using FeedBurner now to see if things get any better.
So if by any chance you have subscribed to my blog, please change the feed address to the following:

My “Introduction to NHibernate” presentation and slides

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:34:04 +0000

I have delivered the presentation I talked about in my previous post here.

Actually it was pretty simple and straightforward, the slides them selves don’t have code content; all the code was shown in VS directly (I always found it better to see the code in its really environment to better understand).
The attendees were handful, but if felt really great when they expressed how excited they were about the whole thing.

Columns’ case-sensitivity in NHibernate

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 09:29:44 +0000

The other day I wanted to create an HQL query to retrieve data from one object (WorkOrderFault) that has many-to-many relation with another. so I created the following:

ISession session = NHibernateOrmSessionFactory.CurrentNHibernateSession;

IQuery query = session.CreateQuery(
    "select wof from WorkOrderFault wof join wof.WorkOrderTechnicians as tech where tech.Id = 43334");

IList<WorkOrderFault> objects = query.List<WorkOrderFault>();

The query ran successfully, and I got my results.

Then I wanted to use paging and get certain amount of results starting from certain record, so I added these two lines directly after I instantiated the IQuery object:

Suspecting already used code

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:37:12 +0000

In one of the modules I am working on, my unit tests used to take tremendous amount of time (4 minutes per test 🤢. I inherited the NHibernate config file from previous NHibernate test module that was used somewhere before!

At the beginning I thought that this is something common when you use NHibernate with rich applications, so I didn’t pay much attention, but then it became a real headache.

What is next

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:14:36 +0000

Ok, now I am facing a hard decision; what to do next in my technical life?

In order to reach for better decision, I drew a mind map using this wonderful online tool Mindomo, it’s like the following:

Those nodes are the things I think I want to study/do most.
I marked the most important ones with the red, yellow and then blue flags. Then marked the ones I need to do most urgently with 1 being the most urgent, 2 less urgent and so on.

Builds while deployment

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 16:20:45 +0000

In my company, we are working on this big GRP project, lots of pages, projects and workflows, soon we are delivering some modules to the customer.
So today, while trying to test a workflow that we have been working for days, something weird happened; the users of the workflow didn’t exist anymore!!

After searching for a while, it appeared that we are delivering some modules, and real data needed to be deployed on a database especially for deployment, basically the Users table was the primary table! so as simple as it gets…they created the new database and changed the users we used for the real users (along with the hierarchical structure of the employees).
Ok…that’s fine for now, but the problem is that they wanted us to work on the new data; the action was that they changed the users on the development database on our development environment!