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Showing posts from November, 2012

The ridiculous interview experience

I have encountered a few interview questions which I feel strongly enough to talk about.... 1) List all the scenarios where a stack overflow exception can occur . 2) Difference between mutex and lock ? These two questions seemingly different are in the same category - I work on shitty code either I wrote or I inherited from someone else - tell me whether you know about what happens in shitty code. The problem is that if you are a great programmer and you write great code, you may have never have encountered such scenarios before - your knowing or not knowing about this in no way indicates how good you are. I joined the job where they asked the mutex question and rewrote the entire code - their implementation was totally wrong and how they were trying to solve the problem was also totally wrong. Mutex was not the way to go. You are not a less capable resource because your code and design is so good that they did not have the flaws which you needed to know about to succeed in this...

Normalization in class libraries

This is a document I wrote a long time ago.. http://sdrv.ms/RVZcrr

StringBuilder explained...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3564906/how-the-stringbuilder-class-is-implemented-does-it-internally-create-new-string http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2365272/why-net-string-is-immutable I liked the second link more, because the whys are always very interesting.

Why services like Azure are the future.

I first user Amazon EC2 and then recently I am using Windows Azure hosting my site todayamerican.com on it. At first I used it just to understand why this is so popular and people are moving to the cloud. Many companies may use Amazon EC2 but I see that a lot of IT departments may want to deploy private "clouds" on VM's because of the low running costs. However, services like Windows Azure I feel are more useful because using the cloud as a remote desktop I feel is not really utilizing the full value of it. Even with a web service API, ultimately you still have to deal with installing stuff on these machines and then you realize this is nothing other than your data center sitting somewhere else. The best thing about Windows Azure which any developer or company would like is the fact that applications developed for Azure can be pushed to the cloud without worrying about VMs or servers. And, as an icing on the cake, Windows Server 2012 now allows you to setup an Azure l...

Azure projects erroring out after upgrade to october 2012 SDK?

Go to the properties of the azure project you use to publish to azure and in the first tab, click on upgrade to fix the problems. Errors: Unable to import module Diagnostics. No manifest was found schemaVersion invalid

Just because you know the physics does not mean you will be as good as Michael Jordan

I have faced this prejudice almost my entire career. Somehow, for some reason people tend to think that if you know microscopic details about everything you will succeed in the macroscopic world, because you "understand" mode. In reality, what I have seen is that people who know the most minute details usually stand like scared deer looking at the headlights of an approaching car when they see a real world problem. Why is this? I had to spend sometime blogging about this, because this is a widespread problem. The problem is that, when a platform is built, it is good to have some knowledge of it but diving into an unnecessary level of detail can lead you to wrong places because technology changes very fast - what you assumed as truth in v1.0 might be totally wrong as to how they implemented it in v4.0. What you learned in Java cannot be applied as-is to C#, and wherever you read otherwise, the existence of the garbage collector does not mean you can totally forget about ...