Treatment of insubordination

Yesterday I met probably the most insolent insubordination ever: one of developers in my project has asked for good recommendation from customer and kindly got it without notifying any superiors.
And (!) tried to use it in contrary to managers' bad opinion about his performance.

Some people would just benefit from being fired a couple of times.

ISTQB Certified - Foundation

Just a citation:
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Congratulations!

Dear Mr. Turevskiy,

You have successfully passed the examination to ISTQB^® Certified Tester, Foundation Level.

You scored 35 out of 40 possible credits.

This equals 87,50%.

To pass the exam a minimum of 65% was necessary.

We wish you all the best for your professional future. The certificate will be issued and sent to you within four weeks after the examination fee has been paid. If you have paid by voucher or in advance the certificate will be issued and send to you within four weeks after the examination date.

Kind regards,

Your Certification team

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Yes, I am a PM, not test engineer, but one should know how the activities he manages are done from inside.

Also, learning itself was very usefull to arrange my knowledge of SDLC and fill out the gaps in terms and processes.

Hello PMI

Recently I have started the PMP preparation training and certificatuion preparation.

What I did yet:

• Training with Spider Project in Kiev, Ukraine (http://spiderproject.com.ua)
• PMI membership: pmi.org and my own PMBOK

So I will put here all the news, links and ideas I have related to the PMI and their activities

PMP certification experience (sorry in russian) http://pmi.org.ua/ru/articles/test

Certification price, procedure and other questions: http://www.pmi.org/en/Certification/~/media/PDF/Certifications/pdc_pmphandbook.ashx

New Agile certification from PMI practice advises: maybe sometimes in future...
 (sorry in russian) http://pmi.org.ua/ru/articles/9067004

Android NDK setup for Eclipse IDE

Here is a guide that helped
http://mhandroid.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/using-eclipse-for-android-cc-development/

NDK Android Eclipse

ASP.NET application does not work: 0x80070021. This configuration section cannot be used at this path

After reinstalling the Windows, Suite ASP.NET application does not work: 0x80070021. This configuration section cannot be used at this path

Unexpectedly help comes from Microsoft Knowledge Base:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942055/

See case #9

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/145/how-to-use-locking-in-iis-70-configuration

Editing the %windir%\system32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config helped.

Error message:

HTTP Error 500.19 - Internal Server Error

The requested page cannot be accessed because the related configuration data for the page is invalid.

Detailed Error Information

Module	AnonymousAuthenticationModule
Notification	AuthenticateRequest
Handler	PageHandlerFactory-ISAPI-2.0-64
Error Code	0x80070021
Config Error	This configuration section cannot be used at this path. This happens when the section is locked at a parent level. Locking is either by default (overrideModeDefault="Deny"), or set explicitly by a location tag with overrideMode="Deny" or the legacy allowOverride="false".
Config File	\\?\C:\Dev\531Patch00\Root\Web\Logon\web.config

SQL 2008 setup error: Rebuild the performance counters of a SQL Server 2005 or 2008 instance

It happens if you changed the language of your system using MUI.

Here are the pills:
http://www.sqldev.org/sql-server-setup--upgrade/error-on-install-performance-counter-registry-hive-consistency-check--statusfailed-89399.shtml

Importance of order

Hi.
Just what I understand while trying to update a super-customized database came from client to our newest version:
There can never be too much journaling and logging!!!
Every megabyte you spent for detailed history of your application life can save you hours of your life those you'll damn hundred times otherwise.
Think early :-)

Self-hosted WCF service with SSL certificate security

Spent the whole day trying to force my self-hosted service to respond.

Finally what has helped is two lines below to execute (port, certhash, path and user name are up to you. Not sure about appid yet :-) ):

netsh http add urlacl url=httpS://+:2202/PatientService user=DOMAIN\user

netsh http add sslcert ipport=0.0.0.0:2202 certhash=ea81a9b4c330247f966d23d7e21266171f92cd47 appid={4EF5AB95-0A11-43b1-842C-51D56687CC7A}

Now need to understand - WHY??

Dynamics magic in C#

Just Wow! :-)

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/dynamicincsharp.aspx

Trying Word 2010

See how to post directly from Word

SQL Server 2008 setup: Error "Restart Computer Failed"

When trying to install SQL Server 2008 I found that it requires me to restart computer even after I did it two times.
It was really bad.

However, there are kind people around!
Especially here:

http://www.sqlcoffee.com/Troubleshooting051.htm

So the reason was in pending after-reboot file copying requested (and never performed)

I believe this might cause some mistakes if you really have pending files, so make sure to reboot first.

Needed to script the MS SQL database including data.

Strangely :-), but Microsoft did it well:
http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/11/16/sql-server-2005-generate-script-with-data-from-database-database-publishing-wizard/

Visual Studio 2008 also have such tool built in.

(However I am not sure about complex databases (like encrypted) yet...)

how can I set the authentication mode for a SQLServer from code?

Change
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\\MSSQLServer\LoginMode
1 = integrated only, 2-mixed

For you will need to use MSSQL.n, where n relates to the instance you are interested in. You can find the right value by looking at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\Instance Names\SQLame, and looking for the value that matches your instance name. SQL Express has an instance name of SQLEXPRESS, and the default SQL 2005 instance has a name of MSSQLSERVER. (on my box ...\Instance Names\SQL\SQLEXPRESS has a value of MSSQL.4)

From here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic439615-359-1.aspx

Good explanation of what "Company culture" really is

http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

PM Labs 2009 conference by Luxoft Training Center

Hi all,

Last Saturday (2009 July 25th) I've attended a quite funny event - PM Labs 2009 held by Luxoft Training Center, this year in Kiev. There way some issues, but generally it look like a most interesting PM community event in Ukraine - thanks Luxoft.

There was an assumption that it may be too headhunting-targeted, but it was rather an advvertisement of training center services those are not so imposing.

More info is here: http://www.pm-labs.ru/news/105

So let's go on!

Azure Cloud over firewall: HTTP protocol incompatibility

Hello there,

Just got a real problem - out corporative Squid firewall does not support HTTP 1.1 properly, and Azure data storage strictly requires it.
As a result, accessing Azure data from local application is not possible at all.
For example, log viewer application are useless.

And of course it is really hard to kick our administrators to change it.

Issue with parsing command lines containing path in c#

Hi!
Another strange detail of .NET/C#:
I needed to pass two pathes to c# command line arguments, and wasn't able to control whether they are ended with backslash or not. Really it was a C# post-build tool so arguments were passed by MsBuild. Final command line looked like following:
"C:\My Path\My Program.exe" "C:\First Path\" "C:\Second Path\"
However C# command-line parser treats \" as esacape sequence
so for this sample
args[0]=="C:\\First Path\" "
and args[1]=="C:\Second"
and even args[2]=="Path\"".
Absolutely unacceptable, isn't it?
The only way to solve it I can see is to get the whole original command line from Environment.CommandLine and have your own parser. Please remember that this value includes executable name as well that may be or may be not quoted too.

Some explanation is here:
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/conversation.aspx?messageid=31268633&threadid=31268617

Converting Word document to clean HTML

Just got a request to convert our User Manual from Word 2007 to nice HTML format. As you may know Word provides really ugly formatting when exporting to HTML. There is another option named "Filtered HTML" that provides much cleaner one but still not acceptable.
I tried different approached found from Google - exporting and cleaning by Tidy, manual replaces, even using Gmail preview function (send document to GMail account and use preview on site).
Still looks ugly. I did not try DreamWeaver funcion for Word HTMl cleaning yet, maybe found one to try.
If it didn't help - need to copy-paste without formatting and format manually :-(.

Really Format Manual seemed to be the only possible solution - did it finally in Expression Web I had at hand. Funny tool but still missing some important features like formatting copier.

Troubles accessing WCF service on Vista

Got this problem seconf time so need to describe it for future.
(Strange that there are so few comments on it found by Google.
Do any other developers use Vista? Or they know some secret way?
One of useful advises I met was "Get rid of Vista")

So, back to the problem.
I tried to debug by WCF service-based application on Vista
after succesfully running it on Windows XP.
However, it did not work.
First idea was to restart VisualStudio with Administrator permissions that is usual.
But it did not work again and gave smth. "is in Faulted state" error.

Magic words are the command:
netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:9001/ user=DOMAIN\user
Replace URL and user domain/name with your data.

More details are here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/598643/hosting-a-wcf-service-in-vista
and here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733768.aspx

By the way, thanks a lot for all the guys from http://stackoverflow.com/. Great job!

(Sidenote. Why is it so complex to request permissions elevation from .NET? I got samples from Microsoft here but it is very unconmmon anyway)

My Azure Crawler is quite working now, will publish it soon either if have time to improve or not.
Also, going to try cloud solution from Google and maybe Amazon but it seems last one have no free option, and I haven't internet-enabled card now (another big story)