Sunil Urs

Its been 3 months since I released “GRE Buddy”. GRE Buddy is a very simply to use Android application that helps you prepare for GRE, GMAT & SAT Vocabulary. The response has been really great with over 15000 downloads and counting. GRE Buddy is now listed among “Top Free” applications in the Android Market Place!! Thanks for all the support and feedback.

GRE Buddy is designed mainly for people who are busy and want to improve their English Vocabulary in free time. Hence my primary focus has always been on usability and simplicity. It has a wordlist of over 5000 words to learn from.

Instruction to use:

• Flip through the words to learn
• Click on words to (un)hide meaning
• Star the important words
• Review starred items
• Test your preparedness by playing the newly implemented Quiz Game. This is one of the best ways to trains your mind to recall quickly.

Though this application was initially meant to help SAT/GRE/GMAT aspirants, it can be used for various other exams like GMAT, TOEFL, IELTS, MCAT, ACT, etc. You can even use it to improve your general English Vocabulary. Just carry in your pocket and learn whenever you find time.

Feel free to post comments and suggestions.

There is more to development than just writing code. I started programming when I was 17 and over a period of time I learnt that development is not just knowing some algorithms and coding syntax. It is more of common sense, motivation, discipline to learn, guts to question oneself and the wisdom to make good choice. It takes a lot of conscious effort to be a good developer.  Though I have written the article by keeping developers in mind, these principles are equally applicable in other fields too with little or no modification.

Don’t get emotional about your code

First and foremost rule about writing good code is that, you should not get emotional about your code. At any point in time, if it requires you to throw away your code because it  is not scaling up elegantly or if it has not been architected well, be ready to scrap the code and rewrite. During the initial days of programming I used to resist rewriting the code but soon I realized that the habit just screws up the project. Usually you’ll realize it after few weeks or  months when things have gone worse. I have seen the same with most newbies. Whenever I find that they are following wrong coding practices, I usually ask them to rewrite and they start resisting it by trying to fix the code there itself. Actually they are just getting emotional about their shit-code on which they have put days of effort.

So if you are not ready to throw away the shit-code, then it is like you don’t want to clean up the mess at home after the party just because you’ve spent so much time in messing things up!…

Being a human, whatever you repeat again and again will become your habit. So if you don’t cleanup, it’ll become a habit for you to live in the dirt. You’ll start liking the dirt. Your choice…

Join Startups during the initial stages of your career

Startups are the best places to learn. There you’ll find the real work and also real people with the right attitude. You will have a chance to learn directly from the top management like CEOs, CFOs, MDs, etc. You will get a chance to interact and learn from them. People like them will not be successful in life just because of luck. They are successful because they are smart. They are successful because they know stuff. It requires lot of discipline to grow a company and make it big. Every word they speak will carry a lot of weightage. Their words are like gold mines which are not accessible to you in a large organization. And they do take time to impart good principles in you because a company’s growth is always dependent on its employees.

Art of learning

When you are discussing something with a knowledgeable / successful person, you can do one of the below three in the order of priority regarding what the other person suggests.

• Think and Accept
• Think and Reject
• Just accept – Makes sense if the other person is very knowledgeable / successful and if you cannot spend some time to think.

What you should not do is, not to think and simply reject. I don’t want to elaborate on this, but most of the times we forget / reject things without giving a thought.

“Knowing things and ignoring them” AND “Being ignorant” are different

When you are learning something new, try to learn as much as possible at the conceptual level. Go an extra mile and find out what all are possible and what are the best practices. You don’t have to remember the coding part. But just try to remember what all exist. Then ignore things which are not required for the time being.

Learning more never hurts in a long run. If you know that something exists, you can always get back to it and learn further whenever required. You can easily get code examples online. But if you don’t even know that it exists, then that is a problem. You may end up reinventing the wheel or find a round about way which is not so good.

Note down things in a book

Whenever you are writing code or discussing something with your colleague, make it a habit to note down the points in the book and solve it point by point. Don’t rely completely on your IQ. It ditches you at wrong times. So, never go for a meeting / discussion without notebook. Note down things and get back to them later. Have a task list and put a check mark besides the completed tasks and carry over the rest for the next day.

Writing down tasks on a paper requires guts. People are scared because it reminds them again and again about what they have not done. But if you discipline yourself a bit and complete your tasks on time, that will give a lot of satisfaction and boost your confidence level.

With Visifire you can create nice looking Silverlight chart within minutes. Let me explain you in simple steps.

First of all you require Silverlight 2.0 installed on your system. You can download it from here.

Download and extract the contents of Visifire Charts package into a directory in your SERVER. You can download it from here. Visifire is Open Source and free.

Visifire requires the data in the form of XML. XML for creating chart is simple and intuitive. Minimum basic XML required looks like below

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts">

</vc:Chart>

The above tag corresponds to a chart element. But there is not data to plot. For now you need not worry about “vc:”. Just remember that you need to add “vc:” to each element.

Now let me add some data into the chart. First I’ll create a Column Chart showing Sales details for a fictitious company, for the first four months….

Then I’ll show you how easy it is to switch to other chart types just by changing One Word!

<vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Column">
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Jan" YValue="160021"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Feb" YValue="207223"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Mar" YValue="225542"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Apr" YValue="248827"/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="May" YValue="273432"/>
</vc:DataSeries>

Above is the Revenue details for my company. Each value that you are required to enter is a DataPoint and a set of similar DataPoint represents a DataSeries.

Now I require a Title for Chart. So I will create a Title tag.

<vc:Title Text="Company Revenue Details"/>

And finally a Title for the AxisY.

<vc:AxisY Title="Revenue" Prefix="$">

So now I have all the data ready to create my chart. So the next thing is to put all the data in one place. So here is the final XML code.

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts">
    <vc:Title Text="Company Revenue Details"/>
    <vc:AxisY Title="Revenue" Prefix="$">
    </vc:AxisY>
    <vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Column">
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Jan" YValue="160021"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Feb" YValue="207223"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Mar" YValue="225542"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="Apr" YValue="248827"/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel="May" YValue="273432"/>
    </vc:DataSeries>
</vc:Chart>

I’ll save the above XML into a file and call it as “data.xml”. Now you just have to reference this XML file from within the HTML page to get a chart. So you need to add these lines of code into your HTML page. make sure you have extracted Visifire.js and Visifire.xap in the same directory as the HTML page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="Visifire.js"></script>
<div id="VisifireChart">
    <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
        var vChart = new Visifire("Visifire.xap",500,300); // Visifire path, width, height
        vChart.setDataUri("data.xml");//xml file path
        vChart.render("VisifireChart");// DOM element in which chart is to be rendered.
    </script>
</div>

And you are done. This is how the chart looks.

Visifire Charts Live Demo

Now you can change the RenderAs attribute in the DataSeries to Doughnut, Bar, Pie, Area and see the chart type change.

Also change the looks of the Chart by adding an attribute “Theme=Theme3″ to the Chart element.

In the next session I’ll be writing about some more cool features of Visifire.

Open Source Silverlight Charts, Visifire 1.0 Beta has been released. It has been released under GPL. With Visifire, you can create and embed charts in your web pages within minutes. You need not have any Silverlight knowledge to use these charts.  The input is XML containing data and the API is JavaScript.  So if you just know a bit of HTML and JavaScript, it is enough.

We started working on this project when Silverlight 1.1 Alpha got released. So most of the code in this project uses Silverlight 1.1 features. But soon we are going to refactor the code to make the best use of Silverlight 2.0 features.

Currently Visifire features 14 types of charts including Column, Bar, Pie, Area, Stacked, Doughnut, etc. Soon we’ll be coming up with more varieties. You can see all available charts in the Chart Gallery.

Looks are good and it comes with 3 built in themes and a variety of ColorSets.  You can get a quick understanding of some of the best features through the Chart Designer. Though Chart Designer does not feature all the possibilities of Visifire, it can help you in creating the charts very quickly. Once you design the chart, you can get the required XML data for your chart. Chart designer also gives you the embedding script. So not much HTML knowledge is required.

Here is a video showcasing the charts available in the gallery.

Soon I’ll be writing more on this explaining many of the features , tips and tricks with Visifire.

Here are a few changes that you need to do to port Silverlight 1.1 project to Silverlight 2.0.

After 3 days of hustle with my previous code and thousands of errors in that, finally I was able to port my Silverlight 1.1 project to Silverlight 2.0. But still it doesn’t use all the cool features provided by Silverlight 2.0 like Grids and all. But I hope to refractor my code soon for better performance by using Silverlight’s native controls rather than my own. While porting the code, few of the things I had to change again and again as I had used them heavily. So here I’ve mentioned a few of them and hope it’ll be useful for you guys.

This is by no way an exhaustive list, but it may help you to quickly change some of the commonly used code and get it running on Silverlight 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008.

1. As I mentioned in my previous article, you need to edit your previous project file.
2. Change HtmlTimer To System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer
3. HtmlPage.Navigate(link) To HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri(link))
4. You can directly use Static function HtmlPage.Document.GetElementsByTagName to get DOM elements.
5. You can directly use HtmlPage.Document.CreateElement("Div") to create DOM elements
6. XamlReader requires xmlns unlike Silverlight 1.1. XamlReader.Load(“<Canvas/>”); To XamlReader.Load("<Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"/>");
7. FontWeights enumeration has been changed to a static class FontWeight.
8. Change System.Windows.Media.Color.FromRgb(118, 118, 118) To System.Windows.Media.Color.FromARgb(255,118, 118, 118)
9. this.MouseLeave += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) To this.MouseLeave += delegate(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
10. this.MouseLeftButtonUp += delegate(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) To this.MouseLeftButtonUp += delegate(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
11. In MouseEventHandlers, e.ctrl To ((Keyboard.Modifiers & ModifierKeys.Control) == ModifierKeys.Control)
12. ActualWidth of Silverlight Control

    System.Windows.Interop.BrowserHost.ActualWidth; To

    System.Windows.Interop.SilverlightHost silverlightHost = new System.Windows.Interop.SilverlightHost();

    width = silverlightHost.Content.ActualWidth

13. In Silverlight 2.0, Managed Downloader has been removed.So you’ll have to use WebClient.

For a complete list, visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189007(vs.95).aspx

I was eagerly awaiting for Silverlight 2.0 Beta and it did arrive. But there are a lot of breaking changes in this version as I expected. MSDN contains a list of breaking changes at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189007(vs.95).aspx

While trying to open the project in VS 2008, you will get an error:

The imported project
"C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\Silverlight\
Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets (or VisualBasic.targets)" was not found.

and you won’t be able to open the project. Click OK and let it load the solution.

In the Solution Explorer you should see the project listed but unavailable. Right click on it and choose the Edit option. The project’s MSBuild file will open. Now replace

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\v9.0\Silverlight\Microsoft.Silverlight.Csharp.targets" />

With

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\
Silverlight\v2.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets" />

Now you can reload the project after saving.Now you need to update the reference dlls with the new ones. So delete all the Silverlight 1.1 dlls referenced in the project and add the following new ones

1. mscorelib.dll
2. system.dll
3. System.Core.dll
4. System.Windows.dll
5. System.Windows.Browser.dll
6. System.Xml.dll
7. System.Windows.Controls.dll
8. system.windows.controls.extended.dll

Now you may have to fix other code related error. I’ll write about the soon…