Martin Kulov's Blog

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

One of the servers I support was missing its performance counters. I wanted to run perfmon to see how the server is performing and instead of text names of all performance counter, I saw only numbers listed under Performance Object list.

A quick look in google gave a solution to this problem. All you have to do is to run this command in %windir%\system32:

lodctr /R

You can read more about it in How to manually rebuild Performance Counter Library values (KB 300956).

It worked for me on Win2003 64bit Intel machine.

Labels: Tools and Tips, Windows 2003