GuruStop.NET

Recently Oren Eini (A.K.A Ayende), wrote a couple of blog posts around hiring strategies. Like some of his other posts, those two got a lot of traction and opened various discussions in the developer community.

One of these discussions were initiated by some work colleague, who emailed some private list asking us what we think about the articles.

I highly recommend checking them out before continuing. You can see the titles tell the summary of what this is about really. What do you think of a statement like “If you don’t have pet projects, I don’t think I want you?”.

Well, this is what I’m trying to answer from my point of view in the following lines…

Disclaimer: This is from personal experiences

Since 2005, I have been working as a full time .NET developer even before uni. graduation. I have worked in both failing and successful start-ups, and various sizes of corporates/enterprises/you-call-them kinds of companies, with developers from different countries(Arab, U.S, Europeans, Chinese, Australians,…). Also, have been involved in developer community since 2004, and had some, and been lucky to listen to many developers (and managers) expressing what they think about our career.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Sydney 2011

If you are going to be around Sydney during beginning of July, there is a great technical event going around that will be going on July 2rd and 3rd.

http://www.dddsydney.com/

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Sydney is this year being hosted on 2nd & 3rd July. The developer conference, for developers by developers – with three tracks of great content covering a mix of ALM, Web, and general development topics from the best community and industry leaders!

On July 3rd we will offer you the opportunity to compete with others in building a proto-type application Windows Phone 7 Mango or the Kinect for Windows SDK and take out the prizes for the day.

Registration

The registration for the 2 days of the event is now open. You can choose to attend only one day if you like.

You can register for DDD Sydney at

http://www.dddsydney.com/Registration.aspx

Voting For Sessions

If you plan to attend DDD Sydney, you will love to know that you can help determine how awesome the event is going to be by voting for topics you want to attend from the pool of session submissions.

Introduction

Sqlite

SQLite is a file based database, or an embedded database that you can use without need for any special installation from your side. It’s a bit popular for non-LOB (line of business) desktop applications and even mobile applications like Android apps. It also has an "In-Memory" mode where there is no physical file used as a database, which is usually used in testing.

It has a similar syntax (sort of) to SQL Server. In Microsoft .NET world,, those using NHibernate are usually using the in-memory mode for applying unit testing or trying out NHibernate stuff, although Microsoft has its own embedded database called SQL Compact Edition (CE), which doesn’t seem to support in-memory databases (v4.0).

You can download the latest Sqlite database (v3.0) from:

http://system.data.sqlite.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/downloads.wiki

Since it’s not SQL Server, you need a special ADO.NET provider too. It’s called "System.Data.Sqlite"., which is very similar to the normal System.Data.SqlClient stuff. It’s included in the above download link.

NuGet

If you don’t know what NuGet is, go to www.nuget.org or check my old posts mentioning it, or if you are an Arab maybe check this post in Arabic.

Problem

Synaptics is the most common touchpad driver for laptops. However, Synaptics touchpad driver takes SO MUCH RAM, even when you uninstall the "Scrype" application that comes with most recent versions of it.

The 236 MB above is just a small number. I have set the process priority to "Low" to get only this. The default priority of the process is "Above Normal". If you are like me and rarely shut down your laptop, depending more on Sleep, etc.. this is going to bite hard because it just keeps growing….

Details

Here is one interesting discussion about it:

This forum is a gold mine for laptop owners. I might blog how it helped me in other more important issues.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/lenovo-ibm/565124-synaptics-touchpad-enhancements-using-over-512mb-memory.html

Form the forum I got a really nice tip:

The leak has been reported on Lenovo Forums, and has been reproduced on their end. You can roll back to an earlier driver. 15.2.1.0 and earlier don’t seem to be affected.

Note that I have an ASUS not Lenovo and still affected. The problem is with the recent versions themselves.