Installed Ubuntu last week on my ageing P4 box, and I really do like it. It’s so nice to install something that is totally free, no costs, nothing. Awesome. I have some thoughts as someone new to Ubuntu: It’s so nice and easy Wow. What a breath of fresh air. Such a clean interface, and everything is just [...]

So, what is CPB? It's a social bookmarking site for blog posts, with voting, categories (called channels) and other cool features.

You can run Windows Vista for as long as 120 days without accepting its antipiracy product activation. Gregg Keizer, Computerworld Saturday, February 17, 2007 01:00 PM PST Windows Vista can be used for as long as 120 days without agreeing to its product activation antipiracy software, the company confirmed Friday. That’s four times longer than the 30 days [...]

Looking for a very different fully open source ESB? Then check out the beta of our ESB. You can see its features here and download it from here. Of course the source and JIRA etc. are all at the OxygenTank.

We spent a lot of time debating whether to even call it an "ESB" because of the usual complexity and baggage that implies. Ours is Apache Synapse plus some additional mediators along with a very simple to use AJAX UI to configure the mediation rules. So our "ESB" is really a mediation runtime which allows you to transform, route and manage messages. It has several trivial deployment models- the simplest being as an HTTP proxy server.

Check it out and let us know what feedback you have. Please use the JIRA to report back or use the mailing lists or forums.

Stefan Tilkov from InfoQ interviewed me via email on the topic of WS-* vs. REST .. I'm sure I'll be painted a WS-* fanatic by the RESTafarians now :).

Notes and photos from Microsoft's Vista launch @ BMICH, earlier today.

I was testing one of my custom channels this morning. And suddenly I heard my little man knocking my office door. When I opened it, I could not stop my self laughing... He had tried so many ways to put it on by himself and finally wanted someone to settle it for him :) (He's been playing near our closet for sometime but never came up with this idea before). 

My friend, Mike Vernal who is behind the Service Model layer has a blog now. Stay tuned if you want to *understand* the nitty gritty stuff in the SM layer and it's extensibility.

Welcome Mike!! :-)

Christian says WSCF 0.6!!!  Yes! We are not kidding! Go and grab it out! Also don’t forget to participate our cool thinktecture contest this time ;-)

A big kiss goes out to numerous people (angle bracket loving geeks) who made this announcement true. Thanks a million and well-done guys!

Keep your problems, comments, flames, rants rolling in at our forums.

Cheers

[From Don] I could not resist myself from adding a link ;-).

Debugging is an interesting topic which should be covered in more detail than just a blog post. However, I had to play ‘n figure-out something strange in one of the .NET Fx assemblies ;-). I used some cool tricks and thought about sharing them here. BTW: I spend a good part of my life with Reflector. But sometimes it’s very hard to track each and every function call and study the code until you get to where you wanna go (Sometimes I just do this for hours and hours for fun though ;-). Specially, reading through the SOAP stack (WCF) is one of my hobbies!!!).

Today I had a managed program which did not crash at all but did not provide the expected results. And that was just an optimized release build and no pdb was available. After going thorough it with the Reflector, I smelled something like a “first chance exception”. These exceptions are handled during the execution so that it won’t crash the app. However, this does not necessarily mean that all your troubles are gone. So take them serious when you debug something written by someone else ;-).
 
I started cordbg and instructed it to break whenever there is a first chance exception as follows.

>cordbg
>catch e on

Just as I expected it stopped at certain places… Then I wanted to observe my call stack to find out the exact method throwing the exception. So this was my next command.

>what

So when I found the actual method along with the parameters being passed, figuring out the rest was just a piece of cake with the Reflector ;-). In addition to that I used several other commands to see the locals, to step in through the code (assembler though) etc etc…

The reason I posted this here is: I think this is an easy way you can track the problems in the production system. Specially when your applications are live and you get limited access to the production machines and you cannot install anything in those boxes and when your client wants to find out what the hell is happening during their lunch break :D.

Finally, this post really compelled me to write an in-dept doc about hardcore debugging with various tools like cordbg windbg+sos etc… I’m really looking forward to that ;-).

Update: My friend Christian just pointed me this article. Simply priceless! And this is what exactly I wanted to do. So I just took it off from my list ;-).

Happy debugging!!! 

Axis2! Congratulations to the team!

Firefox extension is working.

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Couple of years ago, when  I had my old blog, I used to post tricky programming questions on and off. When I came across this a few days ago, thought this should give a life back to my dead blog :)

So kicking off with a brand new title and a very simple one for VB gurus!!!

        Try

            Dim a As Integer

            Dim b As Integer

            Dim c As Integer

            a = 1

            b = 0

            c = a / b

        Catch ex As DivideByZeroException

            Console.WriteLine("Divide by zero error!")

      End Try

What’s the output of the above code snippet? As I always say, real gurus can answer without actually running the code and of course they always explain why…. ;)