Mihailo Lalevic
Software Architect at DeCare Systems Ireland
Homepage: http://mlalevic.wordpress.com/
RPC Method Call Crashed COM+ Application – But Which Call Was That?
Posted in .Net on September 7, 2012
Recently, while testing our COM+ application it started crashing with c0000005 – Access violation. This is VB6 COM+ called from C# application. The funny thing is, dllhost.exe crashes due to the error but there is no indication which method call crashed it.
Since it is multi-threaded application C# logs loads of RPC Unavailable errors once the COM+ crashes, but nowhere I could find original point where the crash occurred. Actually the thread dies and even if debugged in VS the debugger doesn’t break on this unhandled exception as one would expect, even though it breaks on all other – RPC Unavailable exceptions.
So, the first task in this case, for me at least, would be to find what method is called when the crash occurred. When facing something unexpected like this I resort to WinDbg which I know just enough to get by analysing crash dumps. Necessity on couple of other occasions made me learn the basics so here are some notes.
QCon London 2012 – Retrospective
Posted in Architecture, Conference, Database on April 2, 2012
After couple of weeks of letting things settle a bit after QCon London 2012 has anything stuck with me? Have I learned anything? Was it worth? What did I learn and did it prompt me to extend my knowledge in certain areas?
My response would be: Hell yeah! to all of the above – I learned loads, met lots of interesting people, exchanged ideas with people working on different projects, in differently organized teams – and it did prompt me to action! My TODO list is gigantic with things to check out, try out, read, consider as an alternative, question. Quite frankly, that’s what you want after a conference, what would be the point going there and come back with nothing to say/think about.
QCon London 2012 – Day 3
Posted in Conference on March 10, 2012
Today was the final day of the conference. It has been a long week, but nonetheless rewarding. It was a pleasure being here and I feel I learned a lot during this time. Today, I planned to be mostly on Big Data/NoSQL track, with small brakes for some Working Distributed and The Rise of the Functional Programming.
The key note was given by John Allspaw and was about Resilient Response in Complex Systems. Read the rest of this entry »
QCon London 2012 – Day 2
Posted in Conference, Uncategorized on March 8, 2012
Just got back from another day at QCon London 2012. Previous day was very good, but this morning I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the sessions, and surely it was a mixed bag. Originally, I’ve planned to see Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About, but since Martin Thompson’s introduction to Finance track was so good I thought to give it a go.
Key note for today – Simple Made Easy, by Rich Hickey – author of Clojure. Read the rest of this entry »
QCon London 2012 – Day 1 of the Conference
Posted in Conference, Uncategorized on March 7, 2012
Today was the first day of the conference, and it was a very good day. I must say it largely met my expectations. I was part of the day on Architecture track and part of the day on High Availability. But lets start at the beginning and the key note. Btw, no photos, my phone camera is useless 
QCon London 2012 – High Expectations
Posted in Conference, Uncategorized on March 7, 2012
I am in London this week for QCon London 2012. Expectations are high and I hope it lives up to it. So far so good, I have to say. I have been on two tutorials so far and if quality is kept at this level I should be in for a treat.
Data-Driven Unit Testing using Excel in Visual Studio
Data-Driven Unit Tests are very powerful but, it seems to me, rarely used feature in Visual Studio. Although they are not suitable in all situations they can be of a great help. Personally, I used them to drive testing of business rules. In one of the scenarios I had 9 parameters and they had about 900 possible combinations. I was able to cut the number of possible tests and I did so, but the point is that in some scenarios just typing in test data into source code is very laborious and error prone and can be easily avoided.
Read the rest of this entry »
WCF and interoperability – Consuming REST Services
Posted in .Net on January 13, 2008
With [tag].NET Framework[/tag] 3.5 came new version of [tag]Windows Communication Foundation[/tag] – [tag]WCF 3.5[/tag], bringing us very useful set of new features and one of them is out of the box support for REST style services. Now it is easy to create and consume REST services, so without further delay lets do some real world interoperability example – consuming [tag]eBay[/tag] [tag]REST[/tag] API.
There is simple WPF application in the attachment with all the code to do some simple search and presentation of the result: eBay Search Application Source Code
Start using new C# 3.0 language features in 5 minutes
Posted in .Net on December 18, 2007
[tag]Visual Studio 2008[/tag] and [tag]C# 3.0[/tag] are coming with lots of new features, new language constructs, etc. That’s all super but it takes some time to get into it. However, there are some cool stuff you can start using in 5 minutes and I’ll just put a list here with just really basic examples.
