Martin Kulov's Blog

VORT-EX is the virtual CEE Remix event that Microsoft just started today. Join us at http://www.microsoft.com/vort-ex/ to see live the keynote of the event at 19h BG time (18h CET).

Tomorrow (19 Nov) is the second day of the event. I am very happy to find out that Chad Z. Hower a.k.a. "Kudzu" will also give a session on XNA.

You can find the full agenda here:

http://www.microsoft.com/vort-ex/agenda.aspx

In order to watch the show, you need to have Silverlight installed and must have Live ID.

Labels: Events

Microsoft just recently released a program call BizSpark. The program is oriented to companies that are starting their own software product development or “service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business”. So if you are hosting company, web shop or outsourcing company – this one is not for you.

I find this program amazing since it gives access to many MS product which otherwise are just not possible to get if you are small startup company. What is also great is that the program is free to join, yes, FREE, and there is $100 exit fee which is just absolutely nothing for what you get.

Except the business orientation requirement, in order to be eligible you need also the following:

• Privately held
• In business for less than 3 years
• Less than US $1 million in annual revenue

And finally here is the list of all the benefits that you get:

Design, development, testing and demonstrations rights with regard to:

• All the software included in the Visual Studio Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN Premium subscription
• Expression Studio (Version 2)
• VSTS Team Foundation Server (Standard Edition)

Production Use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed by the startup during their participation, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to products including: Windows Server (all versions up to and including Enterprise); SQL Server (all versions); Office SharePoint Server; Systems Center, and BizTalk Server

This is actually the first time Microsoft is giving TFS Standard Edition almost for free (Workgroup edition included in MSDN Premium is for use of max 5 people). A good sign to the development world.

Labels: Rants, TFS

It is just one month before Sahil Malik comes to Bulgaria. Sahil has a very popular blog at blah.winsmarts.com discussing Microsoft SharePoint.

Sahil is coming to Bulgaria between 24th and 28th November to teach Advanced SharePoint 2007 Development for 5 days intensive course with hands on labs. 

Sahil is a very good professional who writes code every single day. His course materials are prepared based on his personal experience and all the demos will show how to handle in practical situations. This is the best way to learn the technology from one of the best professionals in the world.

Here are few of the main accents from the course agenda:

• Site Collections
• Object Model Basics
• Features vs. Solutions
• WCF in SharePoint
• Architecture for Web Pages
• Deployment Best Practices
• CAML Basics and LINQ
• WCF Bindings
• Silverlight in SharePoint
• List, Libraries, Content Types
• Search in SharePoint
• InfoPath
• Workflows
• User Profiles
• Branding MOSS
• Business Data Catalog
• SharePoint Security
• Excel Services
• Reporting Services in SharePoint

If this outline looks interesting for you, makes sure that you register in good time, since space is very limited.

Another chance to catch Sahil is on a user group presentation, that same week in November. Details will be announced soon.

Labels: Events, SharePoint

If you are reading this in your RSS client, it means that you have updated the RSS feed of my blog. Thank you for your interest. Soon the HTML look will also be updated to match the kulov.net style.

Also expect even more posts about future technologies from MS and tips and tricks for your daily work.

Many development oriented event activities in Bulgaria and close region will also be posted more often here.

Labels: Rants

Labels: Rants

Labels: Debugging, Events

For a third year in a row DevReach 2008 is going to be the most popular, technical and fun conference to attend. The line up of speakers is just outstanding and I am not going to name them here since I have to write them all :). Check out the speakers and sessions pages. There are total of 40 sessions divided in 4 tracks: Presentation, Business, Data and 'Architecture and Practices'. Do not miss the fun and of course the opportunity to learn from world's best speakers. Register now and save 20% until 15^th September for only 80 euro.

Labels: DevReach, Events

Tomislav Bronzin and Andrej Radinger, two great guys from INETA Europe Board, are delivering a very deep technical training on mobile technologies in Zagreb next month. The conference is called Mobility Day 2008 and it is all about empowering your mobile experience. It does not matter if you are developer, IT professional or manager, the conference will fit all your needs. It is organized in three tracks – Business, Development and ITPro covering various aspects of mobile application development and integration. Tomislav and Andrej have immense knowledge in this area and I would highly recommend attending there.

The conference itself is on 9^th of September in Zagreb which is not so far from Sofia. Imagine also taking the weekend before to visit the wonderful Croatian coasts … :) Priceless (as a commercial says :))

For more information visit Mobility Day 2008 web site.

UPDATE: The link to the site is corrected now! Sorry about that.

Labels: Events

Tomorrow I am going to attend a Risk Management Course in Sofia organized by RammSoft. The course will not only show Risk Management theory but we are going also to participate in a sample project in which we will try to identify the risks, evaluate their probability and after that a discussion on how to avoid them. I love when the practice is much more than the theory, so I am glad that I registered to this course. Also I must also add that I personally know Mike from RammSoft from a long time ago and I am pretty sure that the course will be executed well and will provide me with good value.

What is this risk management about? Risk management is not something new in the area of Software Development Lifecycle process. It is basically trying to identify the possible risks so you can be proactive in the way you manage your project so that eventually you will lower the probability of their occurrence. If after all the risk appears, your decisions taken earlier can isolate the impact of the risk so you do not threaten the whole project. In today's demands, clients ask for shorter and faster deliveries. In such small time frame, if something delays your project for a week or two, you are in huge trouble. Although small projects are much easier to plan, the risks that may happen in such a short time are often the factors that makes small projects so hard to deliver on time.

Why should you, as a software developer, care about this? There are many risks in a software project that require very deep technical knowledge. It is probably only you in the whole team that is aware of them. Knowing how to handle such issues, or at least how to identify them, will help you do better job and will benefit to the whole team.

Labels: Events

Yesterday I bumped into a strange Operation Aborted error. I really did not where to start looking for this error. I tried running the web site with first chance exceptions [1][2][3] turned on, running a script debugger and HTML validator but without any luck. Seems that the error is IE app related and you have to debug the IE process itself in order to find it. I did not want to go into that muddy waters so I run a more deeper search in google and I found the reason.

One of our third party components was generating HTML on the fly while the DOM is still being created. In short the problem is that scripts that are not direct child of BODY cannot modify the BODY element while the DOM is still being created.

You can find detailed explanation on the great Infinities Loop blog and in BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted" (KB 927917).

One possible solution is to put a setTimeout call for about 0.5s which calls your script at the time when (hopefully) DOM will be ready. I would not recommend this approach in general though.

For some reason the script which was marked with DEFER attribute, obviously was not deferred until the page is loaded. The problem was detected while running IE7.

[1] First and second chance exception handling (KB 105675)

[2] How to Stop on First Chance Exceptions - Visual Studio .NET 2003

[3] Demystifying first-chance exceptions (Part 1)

Labels: Debugging, Tools and Tips