Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

Southern California Rock & Roll Code Camp is being held on June 28th and 29th at University California San Diego Extension. I'll be presenting following three sessions at the code camp.

• Aspect Oriented Programming in .NET, an Introduction with ASPECT.NET
  
  Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) deals with factorization in code i.e. separation of common concerns, specifically cross-cutting concerns, as an advance in modularization. AOSD has been a popular trend in development for quite some time in other programming environments and IDE’s however it’s scope and exposure is limited among .NET developers. This session is focused on getting developers a deeper understanding of what AOP is all about and how to use it in their everyday development. Aspect.NET is the framework used for this presentation.
  
  
• Collaborative Filtering 101 – An Introduction with SQL Server 2008 BI
  
  "We have recommendations for you!". How do movies, social networking, books and e-commerce websites make recommendations? What algorithms and techniques are used behind the scenes?. In this session we will discuss collaborative filtering. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is defined as profiling or classification of information based on specific entity relationships i.e. making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting likelihood information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of CF approach is that those who agreed in the past tend to agree again in the future. For example, a collaborative filtering or recommendation system for music tastes could make predictions about which music a user should like given a partial list of that user's tastes (likes or dislikes).
  
  
• Using ASP.NET MVC to build a blogging engine in 60 minutes or less.
  
  MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application's implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers. ASP.NET now has built-in support for MVC style development and this session is an introduction to using this technique for building a sample application, a blogging engine. This session will elaborate on differences between traditional ASP.NET post-back style development versus the routes and REST architecture based thinking around MVC.
  

Hope to see you there.

This is a TIP, Twitter Initiated Post. Yes, the following message from Scott Hanselman was the tipping point for me to write this.

“ 4 of the 10 largest sites on the internet are ASP.NET. Live.com (#3) MySpace.com (#5) MSN.com (#7) Orkut (#10)”

This weekend at a social event, friend of a friend (fof) brought up an interesting topic; their company which shall remain nameless is moving away from ASP.NET / SQL / Win 2K3 to JSP / JBOSS / MySQL / Linux platform because apparently someone have told them that ASP.NET does not scale. Also, they have been having slowness issues with their website during the time of high traffic. They are in movie business so slowness during high traffic means loss of revenue when people cannot buy tickets and have to go for alternatives. But of course it has nothing to do with the underlying technology so I had to ask the obvious, "Was it designed to be scalable?"

A prototype which works on two machines may not be the perfect solution for large scale websites when no single point of contact can be a bottle neck, you have to make sure that the connections are handled properly and threads are available when needed.

So I had to defend the ASP.NET honor, counter that false belief therefore I tried explaining to the fof that this view about ASP.NET being unsuitable for enterprise systems is completely untrue. ASP.NET scales just fine, and that’s why four out of ten largest sites are in ASP.NET despite the fact that other platforms have been around longer and competing with free is a lot harder even with all the ROI results you can get. So it might be the configuration, connection pooling, number of open thread or a multitude of different issues which might be causing the problems they are having and can easily be resolved by an independent review.  Also, these issues can happen with any platform. I hope I am not starting a religious war here between .NET and Java web technologies but the truth is, they are both equally fine. Being a developer focused on Microsoft technologies, I have my personal bias towards ASP.NET. I have seen it working perfectly and there is enough empirical evidence to back up this claim. Some of the good ASP.NET optimization tips can be found here.

And here is an excellent Morgan Stanley guide on Internet Trends describing this and other zeitgeists; must see.

The Square Root of 3

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed

Model View, Model View, Model View Controller
MVC’s the paradigm for factoring your code,
into functional segments so your brain does not explode.
To achieve reusability you gotta keep those boundaries clean,

....

It's a good one!

Yahoo! Research Projects

• Yahoo Machine Learning
  http://research.yahoo.com/Machine_Learning
• Computational Advertising
  http://research.yahoo.com/Computational_Advertising
• Search Technologies
  http://research.yahoo.com/Search_Technologies
• Log file parsing Engine - Pig is an Apache incubator open-source project: http://incubator.apache.org/pig/
  http://research.yahoo.com/node/90

The Next Generation of Neural Networks

Aspect Oriented Programming: Radical Research in Modularity

Externalizing web Service Documentation

Dr. Eric Ackerman, director of MS program at NSU was able to capture some amazing images of total lunar eclipse today. Check out the photos here especially the ones with the ray of green light; this is what he had to say about it.

"You can see a couple of images where I caught the momentary ray of green light from the Southern pole of the moon which is extremely difficulty to catch.  I was shooting at 6 frames per second during this exact time and the images with the rays of green light were caught in a couple of frames out of 300 images taken"

Great work doc!

'05 Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein (A Must Read - Hilarious!)

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp

A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming
Simulating a Swarm Algorithm in C#

Design Patterns in Dynamic Programming

Improving Face Recognition

Model View Controller (MVC) vs. Model View Presenter (MVP) (aka. no resemblance with AVP)
MVC or MVP Pattern – Whats the difference?

I’ve recently completed the following two articles for The Code Project. These are mainly based on my CalState Fullerton SoCal Code Camp talks.

Exploring WCF 3.5 Tools - WcfSvcHost and WcfTestClient
Disucssing use of WCFSvcHost and WcfTestClient for Service hosting and testing.

Publishing RSS and ATOM Feeds using WCF 3.5 Syndication Libraries
This article focuses on using the WCF 3.5 libraries namely System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace to create and publish an RSS and Atom feed from the same code base.

Enjoy!

I've recently purchased an space upgrade to my picasa account and the checkout process was, not surprisingly, based on Google checkout. Google using its product internally might not make headlines but it reinforced one of my long time established beliefs in software development about eating-one's-own-dog-food. If you don’t find value in your <T> (software as an example) to use it frequently and rely on it, you should not expect others to find it fascinating.




This is one of the problems I have with Microsoft Live i.e. I believe the main problem lies in the core of the search algorithm and results which turns people away. I was recently looking for Juval Lowy’s WCF 3.5 article published in the MSDN Magazine and here are the results from both Google and Live with the same search keywords. One brings me the pertaining and relevant info in a clean and concise way, the other does not.



That’s why I think YHOO purchase would not significantly give Microsoft an edge in the search space because its core competency in search R&D is not as strong as its largest competitor. Two mediocrities do not create one greatness IMHO. This further trickles down to other sources of revenue which heavily rely n search technologies nowadays such as web advertisements. And like my buddy Nauman said "Google could be the beneficiary here as this could start a mass exodus of talented developers if the deal go through."

Few days ago I’ve received INETA’s certificate for San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group on completing its two year’s.



This is a great honor for us and I’d like to thank everyone who has helped us through this journey. It seems like yesterday when Rob Walling and I started discussing about having a user group for San Gabriel Valley developers community in mid 2005 and with the help of Bernard Wong and other fellow community members, our first meeting took place in January 2006. It has been a wonderful ride since then. I’d like to thank our user group committee members and attendees for their help and support during these two years and hopefully we will be able to provide this service to the community for a longer period of time. Special thanks go to our committee members and patrons including but not limited to Antony Chhan, Neal Hardesty, Richard Trinh, Vipul Shah, Ben Pirih, C.J Wang, James Lin, Greg Cannon and David Wells.

January 2008’s meeting with Reza Madani on SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence was our 23rd meeting and we have a great line up for 2008 including Mark Miller from INETA, Gerald Walsh, Lynn Langitt, and Woody Pewitt to name a few.

Thank you all and have a wonderful 2008!

Adnan Masood

President & Co-Founder
San Gabriel Valley .NET Developers Group.

The slides, sample source code and links can be downloaded from here.

 
WCF 3.5 Code Samples, Links and Presentation Download

ASP.NET MVC Code Samples, Links and Presentation Download

ASP.NET MVC Presentation Videos (Jeff’s part of the talk)

From the user’s comments, it seems that my WCF talk was well received. It’s reassuring when seen from an independent observer. I’m planning to do a follow up on it in the San Diego code camp. Also, if any user group in the area wants me to deliver this or any other related talk, feel free to drop me an email.

Eric Simons, our director of QA and Offshore Development is visiting India right now and he is blogging about his experiences while there.

Interesting stuff! You can read it over here or subscribe to the RSS* Atom here.

*That strike through is a tongue in cheek little-endian war exclamation. Some may disagree with reason and I respect that.