For this blog, and for the rest of this site, I’m using the Daleri Structure template by Andreas Viklund. Since I’ve ported it to BlogEngine.NET, I think it’s a good idea to publish it so that other BlogEngine.NET users can use it.

Διαβάζω ότι η νέα κυβέρνηση της Σλοβακίας αλλάζει την απόφαση που είχε πάρει η προηγούμενη και λέει τώρα ότι δεν θέλει να συμμετέχει στο πακέτο βοήθειας προς την Ελλάδα.

I’ve been working on the same project since January and up to recently we had been using Visual Studio 2008 with ReSharper 4.5. A few weeks ago, we upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 and ReSharper 5. I don’t know which one is to blame, but the IDE has become a bit slower. Two features in particular are really annoying:

Today I took again the 070-536 exam and I passed it once more, this time with an even higher score (861, while the previous time I had scored 838 points). I’m crossing my fingers that this time the testing center will not go bankrupt… hopefully within a few days I will get a notification from Microsoft verifying that I passed the exam. In combination with the 070-528 that I had passed on March, I should now have the MCTS .NET 2.0 Web Applications certification, which is my first certification!

Last Monday, after spending about a month studying daily in the train to work, I went and took the 070-536 exam at New Horizons testing center, in Rotterdam Alexander. I was nervous because there are a lot of topics covered in this test that I’ve never ever used, since I’m focused more on web applications. After 45’ minutes and 40 questions, I had succeeded! The popup window congratulated me and notified me that I had a scored 838 points, while the base is 700. Then I clicked next and that’s when it all started.

I had created a small web app in MonoDevelop that created a png image on the fly. Porting the app to Windows .NET 3.5 with Visual Studio 2008 was almost painless, but it did include two unexpected incident. The first one was… well the app didn’t run anymore, showing the dreadful “A generic error occured in GDI+”. A bit of a research lead to this article here. Apparently the problem occurs only with PNG images. The stream that you write the generated image to needs to be seekable and I guess in Mono the Response.OutputStream is seekable but in .NET it’s not. The solution is to use an intermediate MemoryStream to write the image to and then dump that stream on Response.OutputStream.

I made my first “hello world” Windows Mobile Phone application today. It’s called ScrumCard. ScrumCard is a simple mobile phone application that simulates poker planning for Scrum. So if you forgot your poker planning cards, you can use this app to show your team your estimate of the story points.

Η Ολλανδία κινείται σε ρυθμούς προεκλογικούς και προμουντιαλικούς. Στις 9 Ιουνίου οι Ολλανδοί θα ψηφίσουν για την κυβέρνησή τους και δειλά δειλά κάποιες προεκλογικές αφίσσες κάνουν την εμφάνισή τους. Από την άλλη, καθόλου δειλά, όλοι οι Ολλανδοί γιορτάζουν το επερχόμενο μουντιάλ. Αν κάποια δορυφορική φωτογραφία δείξει την Ολλανδία πορτοκαλί, δεν θα εκπλαγώ καθόλου. Όλοι φοράνε πορτοκαλί μπλούζες ή κάτι πορτοκαλί, παντού υπάρχει σημαιοστολισμός με μικρά πορτοκαλί σημαιάκια, γίνεται ο χαμός.

Since I’m hosting this website on my own personal home computer, I have the “opportunity” of worrying about my backup strategy. It won’t be the end of the world if something goes wrong, I have other documents that are far more important. But it’s nice to feel that you have accomplished something that makes you feel safe.

Τι άλλο θα δουν τα μάτια μου…