[ Note: this does not work for all test cases. You may also want to try regexp as "[A-Z][a-z]+”, for matching any continues uppercase letters too (e.g. AnkitJainFROMIndia >> Ankit Jain FROMIndia) ]

Jon Galloway points out a tricky method for C#.

Ever heard someone saying “this software sucks”… I love such moments. It makes me laugh, not for the user, but for the poor developer! Users are innocent, they are not concerned about technical details. A software is there to make life simpler and hide complications of a task. It’s your responsibility to make it intuitive and meet users expectation on first impression, rather showing unnecessary (modal) alert boxes or irrelevant (technical) details. You don’t need to be a Usability Engineer. Just,

• stand on users’ shoe and think what is annoying
• don’t take negative feedback as an attack on you and your beliefs.
  Rather it’s a feedback on your understanding about how much you understand your users. In short never reject/resist on feedback.

Nobody hates software more than software developers and nobody distrust software more than software developers. Scott Berkun has written a good post about why software sucks. ( I have heard software engineers saying that they don’t trust online money transactions. Heck !! Do you need President to meet you and ensure? )

Here is what I think you should target as first step:

• Any tasks that you think user should perform by reading Help/Documentation, MUST be automated.
• Even an single unnecessary alert box annoys. Features should be available with less no of clicks. Still this is very subjective matter to discuss. A simple guidelines is – only system errors or exceptions should raise alert-box, tiny information should be modal-less dialogs (or like balloon pop-up).
• users never read entire screen. Default values chosen or default selection of check-boxes makes big difference in a long run.
  E.g. while filling an online form a default selection of check-box “subscribe me for spam mails”. Who does read entire form before clicking submit? None. But it affects your reputation in long run.
• Never hesitate in picking a useful (cool, awesome, sexy, astonishing, amazing! ) feature from competitive software. Ask a simple question – Does it add value to your product? You won’t like this argument, but this is truth. The success of Web is a tiny ‘view source’ feature. Well, this is a fast moving industry where we learn from other, we improve over time. You never blame the world for borrowing tabbed browsing from Opera (originally by NetCaptor). It’s a matter of accessibility, and understanding what your users like and what they dislike is a key to success.
• Don’t recruit incompetent programmers, because a incompetent programmer creates two new jobs a year. If you have a few already, either trains them or fire them. (Sorry pals)

- ankit
( and finally, this is a 100th post on this blog. Happy Blogging! )

Of course you can write –

if( true )
   return;


What if you could simply write return. This helps in testing a function quickly. As a good programming practice we always remove all warnings from code, and such unconditional return statements can be rectified later.

1. Download SDB. Extract it into some folder.
2. SDB works with SUN Java only. Ubuntu has GNU Java installed by default. You need to install SUN Java and set it as default.
   [Note: you know why this point is important? I wasted 1 hr when I did same setup second time. Later I realized I was using GNU libgcj (gij/gcj). For god's sake, someone please kill gcj...
3. Create a database for SDB in MySQL. I did using phpMyAdmin. Let’s call this database SDB2.
4. Prepare a store description file. It serves as config for SDB and contains information like where to connect. You will find one such example file in the SDB directory. Here is an example for the description file I have used:
   @prefix sdb: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/2007/sdb#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix ja: <http://jena.hpl.hp.com/2005/11/Assembler#> .
# MySQL - InnoDB
<#store> rdf:type sdb:Store ;
sdb:layout "layout2" ;
sdb:connection <#conn> ;
sdb:engine "InnoDB" ; # MySQL specific
.
<#conn> rdf:type sdb:SDBConnection ;
sdb:sdbType "MySQL" ; # Needed for JDBC URL
sdb:sdbHost "localhost" ; # or the IP address of the database server
sdb:sdbName "SDB2" ; # MySQL database name
sdb:sdbUser "username";
sdb:sdbPassword "password";
sdb:driver "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" ;
.

5. Set environment variables:

   SDB installation directory –
   export SDBROOT="/home/ankit/tmp/SDB"

   Path to MySQL JDBC commector jar which contains com.mysql.jdbc.Driver class.
   export SDB_JDBC="/home/ankit/tmp/SDB/mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar"

6. Required tables must be created in database before we can use it. Run following to initialize SDB2 database. This creates 4 tables inside SDB2.
   bin/sdbconfig --sdb=sdb.ttl --create
   If this fails, somthing went wrong with settings. Check them again.
7. Next you can run test suit to ensure everything is working fine.
   bin/sdbtest --sdb=sdb.ttl testing/manifest-sdb.ttl

   In my case one testcase failed stating -

   Failure: Unicode-5(com.hp.hpl.jena.sdb.test.junit.QueryTestSDB): Results sets not the same

I decided to write this as the SDB wiki does now contains clear steps to follow. Hope your semantic (web) application ROCKS !

- ankit

For example, you may have GNU Java as well as Sun Java. (frankly saying, I hate GNU Java, aka gcj)

sudo update-alternatives --config java

[ Where can I see all installed JVM?
On Ubuntu, Java Virtual Machines are installed in /usr/lib/jvm. You can see java-gcj here which comes by default with Ubuntu.
]
- ankit

( Lucene can also be used to index database table rows. The advantage for having Lucene search instead of (database software’s) in-build full-text search engine is Lucene ranks search results based on their relevancy. For example assume you have a product table with <title , description> fields and you want to give higher rank to ‘title’ over ‘description’. )

A stopword is a language-word that has no significance meaning in a keyword based search system (e.g. Google). Lucene also has a set of such words for English language and these are simply ignored while analyzing/tokenizing text. You can find them inside org/apache/lucene/analysis/StopAnalyzer.java file declared as StopAnalyzer.ENGLISH_STOP_WORDS constant.

public static final String[] ENGLISH_STOP_WORDS = {
"a", "an", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by",
"for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it",
"no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such",
"that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these",
"they", "this", "to", "was", "will", "with"
};

You can also specify your own stopwords while indexing text. Use StandardAnalyzer’s constructor and pass a set of words as agrument. These will be ignored while indexing.

- ankit

Project Proposal

Social networks are a medium of easier communication, bounding and bringing people together. Any effort made to achieve this is highly appreciated by the community (of users). Event management is a recently discovered feature in social networks. Implementing this in WordPress will surly bring WordPress to a new height allowing users to create/share/participate/notify events. This feature has already been a part of LinkedIn and Facebook.

Following are few possibilities that can be included in WordPress MU/BuddyPress. Looking forward for feedback and prioritizing:

1. Event Organizer: allowing users to create, edit, delete events. In addition, time zone coordination and showing time in user’s local time zone, geo-location, etc.
2. Attendance: users can mark for their attendance. (e.g. interested, may attend, attending, not attending)
3. Search for upcoming events. This can be extended as event directory allowing location specific search, tag cloud / browse by category.
4. Roles: users can indicate their role for events. E.g. organizer, participant, volunteer, promoter/sponsor, etc;
5. Revision History: this becomes important component when we want multiple users (in addition to event creator) to modify/propose event details.
6. Discussion: each event will have a forum for users’ views. For simplicity this should be a flat blog-post comment like listing (or like Twitter’s update listing).
7. Tagging: free tagging. Or categorization of event (e.g. educational, cultural, get-together/party, conference, show, outing, etc . Categorization sometimes known as controlled tagging.
8. Group integration: if implemented in Buddypress, an event can be restricted to one (or possibly more) group.
9. Blog-post integration: while writing a blog-post, users can indicate associate events. And now, these posts appear on event’s detail page as ‘blogs that talk about this event’.
10. Notifications/Reminders: sending reminder emails to all interested. This includes users who have indicated as interested, attending, may attend.
11. RDF support: This is an effort to produce semantic data as machine interpretable. Event details should be encoded as RDFa (RDF/XML) using http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/ ontology.
12. Admin page: settings like to enable/disable discussions, notifications, revisions, etc;

Schedule of Deliverables / Milestones

1^st May to 31^st May: Design and Basic framework:

Before any code deliverable, it is necessary that we lay down a good foundation.

1. Brainstorming, discussion threads, design and then wireframes are required to set the project in motion and prevent unnecessary rewriting/modifications to the code. (as what I have observed on WordPress Dev Blog).

The first code-deliverable will consist of (in addition to the database backend) –

1. Event creation and edit page. (assuming an event is public and available to all)
2. Basic Upcoming events box (as widget/sidebar)
3. Event details page
4. (Optional) Event discussion: any user can post simple comments on the event page.
5. Installer script – included with the plug-in itself.

1st June to 30th June: Advanced features

I’m not finalizing what features shall be there in next milestones. It’s a community project and community’s feedback and rating priority to each feature plays an important role for deciding deliverables. In my opinion the next milestone should have –

1. Attendance (e.g. interested, may attend, attending, not attending)
2. User roles ( e.g. organizer, participant, volunteer, promoter/sponsor, etc)
3. Search and Tagging
4. Revision History
5. Blog post integration
6. RDF/XML integration

This is merely my opinion. Community’s comments and suggestions are welcomed. We (with mentor) should plan for systematic pre-releases. This will helps us in getting early feedback from WordPress community for features and code-reviews.

I do not have any commitments during this period. I have 3 months of free time starting from 1st of May.

Open Source Development Experience

I have not been a part of any open source project officially. I am willing to be a part of WP community.

Work/Internship Experience

I have 3 years of work experience in Web development (ASP.Net, PHP, WordPress and Drupal). In addition, I do freelancing work time to time to fund my studies. This includes PHP scripts and Drupal development. I have experience with version control systems too.

Academic Experience

I am currently doing M.Tech (2nd year) from IIT Kanpur. I am studying Comp Sci. and Engineering. My Research Interests includes: Software Design & Architecture, Knowledge engineering, Social Networks.

Why WordPress

WordPress is a state of art for software for blogging. Other open source CMS offers just basic blogging features. I am associated with WordPress for the last 4 years and passionate about it. My WP blog is hosted at http://ankitjain.info/ankit running v2.6.

Summer of Code is an exciting opportunity for me. For my WP blog I have done basic customizations. This includes post specific advertisements, customizations of theme file, etc. This opportunity gives me an official chance to contribute to my favorite Web application. Such open source development experience and time to time guidance from mentor will surly help me to understand and boost passion, binding with community and coding standards.

Thanks,
- ankit

1. The Identity Selector dialog box is displayed only for SSL protected pages. Therefore you are required to deploy your application on a Web server and install a SSL Certificate.
2. Windows CardSpace does not work with Self Signed Certificates and will die horribly. These certificates do not have CRL field. It contains a URL that CardSpace will check for the revocation list.
3. For ASP.NET developers there is Toolbox control written by Christian Arnold. Add this to your Toolbox and you won’t need to write a single line of code. Watch demo.
4. When you use CardSpaceLogin controls you must run application over SSL. The application pool also need to be run under Local Systems identify; otherwise w3wp.exe process will not be able to retrieve server’s private key. In such case you may end up with error stating Keyset does not exist. Note: This is not advisory if the application pool is shared with other Web applications. [ Edited: Refer Barry Dorrans comment for more details.]
5. When using Information cards there is nothing like passwords.
6. CardSpaceLogin controls are integrated with your identify providers such as Forms Authentication. For example: If you use Information Card to register a user, his details are reflected in the identify source.

Here comes the purpose of this small add-in. It provides search within history comments and find a particular change-set instead of traversing the whole list. The plug-in goes one step forward and facilitates free text search in change-set fields. For example you can use change-set id, username or even date-time as search keywords!!!

The major steps involved in developing this add-in are:

1. Writing an add-in for Visual Studio 2005,
2. Getting file history from Team Foundation Server (TFS),
3. Look for the selected item in the Visual Studio IDE,
4. Free text search along with the tools to compare two files.

Visual Studio 2005 provides templates to build add-ins in few minutes. Refer www.devx.com for step-by-step guide for building Visual Studio app-ins. Additionally, you can download Visual Studio 2005 Automation Samples for detailed code illustrations with documentation.

Once you have completed the Visual Studio Add-in wizard the IDE generates Connect.cs file and dumps some code for basic functionality. The next step is to retrieve history from the TFS for selected file. Refer my previous post, Fetching file history from TFS to find out how to fetch file history objects from Version Control Server.

Moving forward we need to find out the currently selected item in the Visual Studio IDE. Visual Studio exposes various properties/objects allowing you to query almost any UI controls and get their status. The following code first finds the active window. If it is Source Control Explorer and then looks for the selected item within the same.

The following code is to compare two source code files and show visual difference. There is an API provided for the same.

Once the add-in is installed, it appears in the Tools menu within Visual Studio 2005. Open Source Control Explorer and select an item. Launch the add-in from Tools menu.

When you search for the history of a File, you can also compare it with the local version or the latest version in the source control. These option are avaiable as context menu.

Following steps are required only if you download the code and try to deploy the solution to have hands on with the code.

1. Copy the TFSHistorySearch.AddIn file to %userprofile%\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins\ directory.
2. Update the full path of the assembly TFSHistorySearch.dll under Extensibility/Addin/Assembly x-path.
3. Add reference of TFSHistorySearch.AddIn as link to the project.

Download Source code & Installer: TFSHistorySearch.zip ~700 KB
Download Installer only: TFSHistorySearch-Setup.zip ~400 KB

Implemented by: Jagdish.Vasani [at] Gmail [dot] com

- Ankit

C# 2.0 + ADO.NET = LINQ = C# 3.0

In simple words Language Integrated Query (LINQ) exposes the power of SQL queries within C# syntax. This technology along with its tools allows you to connect to SQL database, extract metadata, build typed datasets/classes (using C# Generics) and make you use them along with C# syntax using just two lines of code. And not necessarily SQL databases, it can execute on any collection type.

int[] numbers = { 5, 4, 1, 3, 9, 8, 6, 7, 2, 0 };
var lowNums =
     from n in numbers
     where n < 5
     select n; Console.WriteLine("Numbers < 5:");
foreach (var x in
lowNums)
{
    Console.WriteLine(x);
}

Have a look at Linq Project @ MSDN and 101 Samples all to sense this. Here in this short -n-simple post I’m just showing how to do things for databases stored as *.mdf files and generate wrapper classes.The LINQ preview includes SqlMetal.exe, a utility to auto-generate a strongly-typed C# DataContext class file from an SQL Server 2000 or 2005 database’s metadata with this execution syntax:

$>sqlmetal.exe /namespace:NWind /language:csharp /code:Northwind.cs c:\ Northwind.mdf

- Ankit