Favor[IT]e

nAML: A New Revolutionary Way to Model Your .NET Applications!

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:35:10 GMT

Understanding the architecture and code in software application plays as major factors while building good software products. Having an easy to understand visual notation, not only helps architects to model the system efficiently, but also helps developers to quickly implement that, as well as it helps the re-engineering process to easily adopt the architectural model with respect to new requirement.

A new visual modeling technique, termed as “nAML” (.NET Application Modeling Language) is being introduced which overcomes the limitation of typical modeling languages by providing revolutionary way within a single space to describe an application system with its structural and behavioral, as well as physical and logical components. It illustrates real world samples, from user interface experience, .NET specific language (such as C#) classes to database level SQL commands, to let software architects and developers to have a clean model for the future system. One of it’s the most powerful objectives of this new visual language is the besides an easy way to model the system, the target model will require near to zero knowledge on notation semantics from reader aspect.

Primary Objectives

The primary objectives of nAML can be considered as follows:

Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems with structural and behavioral components.
Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems with logical and physical components.
Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems from top to low level.
Provides a single space to visually describe a part or whole of one or more application systems.
Extremely simple and easy understand and learn from readers and designers perspective.
Concentrates on .NET applications, with its related logical and physical entities (user interface, application logic, business logic, database etc).

Links and Downloads

Here is the nAML project site: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/nAML
Download the latest specification, examples and Visio 2003 Stencil for nAML tutorial from here.
Download Visio 2003 Stencil for nAML from here.

Technorati Tags: architecture,modeling,.net,asp.net,development

"Rock You!" rocks! Creates awesome slide show!

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:19:14 GMT

RockYou! is really nice. I created a sample slide show there, pretty much quickly. Really cool. The good thing is you can use your hi5, facebook, friendster, myspace pictures while creating slide shows.

Create Your Own

Technorati Tags: slideshow,tool,picture

Wikimapia: Describing own place!

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:42:29 GMT

I become a fan of Wikimapia with in few minutes, after checking it! How easy to find out your desired location and can mark it with your own words if you wish! Being combined with Google Map, this site enables to browse any place in the world via web, without installing Google client side software. The picture below shows my sweet home using wikimedia!

The concept of "wiki" is to enable users to put their own text in site content, so being integrated with Google Map, it lets you to mark any area. However there are both ways for these marking provided by the users, as "Approved" which are voted by community users (and shown in white border) and "Non-approved" which are shown in yellow border.

I think this is really cool and waiting to get some more features and updates (more closer look etc).

Technorati Tags: wiki,map,tool

Few Enhancement Suggestions for GWB

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 09:15:54 GMT

GeeksWithBlogs is becoming on of the most popular provider in blog space. I really wish for the best for it. Recently I noticed some of the great enhancements is being implemented here, which will definitely increase it's popularity among bloggers and readers. Besides there, I have some other ideas which can be considered:

1. I wish to have the full source codes available in zip for some code related post. Definitely I would love this type of feature, to have a single place where i can share my source codes and post along with it's explanations in my posts.

2. Besides the post integration in community credit, there should support where my submitted articles in GWB will be automatically approved in community credit in article category.

3. It would also be great to be submitted my post automatically in dotnetkicks, dzone, digg etc site

4. I am a Microsoft MVP. GWB are contemplating creating a small “MVP” badge to proudly display on MVP's posts. I definitely liked this idea.

5. The popularity will be greatly increase among bloggers, where there will be a good chance to be paid for the bloggers contents (of course based on quality and popularity). Some of sites already started implementing this idea. I think GWB can do that.

6. Should have some good support about cross posting. I do noticed some of the bloggers in GWB already left to other spaces (such as blogs.asp.net, msmvps/blogs etc). Having this support will also enable the current readers to get the posts of those bloggers.

7. I do post all of my tech thoughts in GWB. But I noticed www.asp.net is not accepting my articles or posts for its daily article section, as it is published in a blog site. GWB can do something for this.

8. Windows Live Messenger has some support to chatting in web sites. It would be fine to have group chatting with the readers and bloggers.

Technorati Tags: blog,openion

I Become a Community Credit Member

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:58:35 GMT

Thanks to community credit to consider me as a member! Being a member of community member, my posts in GWB will be automatically be approved for the credit points. Thanks to GWB as well as to support for this cool stuff!

Technorati Tags: community,blog

Started using Feedburner, Twitter and Good bye to Google Ad Sence

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:52:38 GMT

Just started using Feedburner for my site rss, along with the integration support from GWB. It works fine! From now my Feedburner RSS URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/joycsharp.

Also GWB provided support for Twitter, which I have also started using. I think Twitter is going to another nice Web 2.0 feature. Nice stuff!

Also, I said good bye to Google Ad Sense, as I have seen it's not providing enough profit (0.23 USD in 30 days!) for thousands of page loads. I wonder how Google do billion dollar business with it. Anyway, that's upto Google, but i really didn't want to make by visitors waiting to load Google Ads.

Technorati Tags: blog,twitter,rss,personal

Using Windows Live Messenger in Your Blog

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:36:47 GMT

I was really missing one necessary feature for my blog (as well when I am reader of other blogs). That is to have a way to chat with the readers or the poster.

As Windows Live Messenger in one of the most popular IM, having it's support to my own blog will enable lots of my readers to get connected with me. You can see below how easy it is to have a chat with me thru my blog! The same can be happened for your readers of your blog! Ha ha ha!

You can do the same by creating necessary html, available at: http://settings.messenger.live.com/Applications/CreateHtml.aspx

So here my BLOG messenger goes.....

Technorati Tags: blog,chat,technology,live,.net

5 Things About Me

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 18:23:00 GMT

Thanks to Ferdous, as he has tagged me! Here are 5 things about me.

1. Although I am writing computer programs now by profession, once upon a time, I wrote literature and news in local newspapers. My parent really didn't like it, as being a "Bengali writer" will not give me a bright future. Well, I got admitted to computer science under-grad course, where I first leaned how to use computers, by the year 2000! Primarily it was a bit confusing area for me, but very soon programming became a great choice for me, found that it is not less interesting than writing literature, lolz. Any way’s, still I have the same passion on writing literature, since it creates a wonderful world in my mind! Hoping on the coming days, I will get time to concentrate on that as well as, by going parallel with my program writing.

2. Besides programming and literature, my other favorite subjects are philosophy, psychology and space science. I believe, everybody should have own philosophy, regarding his own integrity, life style and surroundings. In my life, the best philosophy is Socrates' "Know thyself". On the other hand, Psychology is really an interesting area, where we can know how many varieties can reside in different peoples, even in one person! Space science? Huh! When I learn something related to it, I find how tiny we are and get lost in the endless universe. It's really a strange feeling.

I don't feel any interest about sports most of the time. Eventually I am not good at sports at all :D

3. Honesty and respect are two basic thumbs in relation for me. Personally, I try to be that best to my friends, relatives. I have very few friends at all, but when I find lack of honesty and respect in my friends, it really hearts me. I have suffered a lot in past for that. Any ways, recently I find that, rather continuing an un-happy relation, it is better to say "good bye". As a person, I am very emotional and my only expectation to my nearest persons is, to understand and respect my emotion.

~~I am 27, and still unmarried. Hope my best, in near future I will get a really nice wife, who will be my best friend.~~ Interestingly I got married with in 1 month of this post. My wife is Leuza. We both love each other truely and really good friend of each other.

4. Two things which change my mood better always, are music and perfume. I believe these are the gifts of god. A wonderful music or nice perfume gives me a soft touch of heaven!

5. Traveling is another favorite thing of mine, which can be thru air-plane, car, risk-shaw (a three wheeler human driven tri-cycle, which is very common in my country, Bangladesh), even though thru walking. But among those, my best ride choices are risk-shaw and rocket! Regarding place, natural beauty is my first choice however!

While traveling alone, my thoughts get spread on sky, and it's really helpful for me to think deeply to solve complex problems.

Here are my favorite tagged blogs:

Nikhil Omar Shahed Jeff Scott

Few Words From A Fresh MVP

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 04:39:00 GMT

One of the famous quotes of Socrates that drives me all the time is: "Know Thyself". Around the world there are lots of things which might be in your interest on not. Knowing yourself doesn't only mean to find your choices, it also includes the facts, which don't belong to your choice as well as!

Knowing what I don't know

Well, so I need to know myself. As a technical guy, how do I know where I can be the best fit or where I can be comfortable to explore my ideas to create new but necessary things? One of our favorite poets, Rabindranath Thakur told "It's very natural to be ignorant about something. But it often happens that, we don't know what we don't know!". In this very dynamic era of technical world, it is very much true. Technology is changing very frequently, so as professionals, always we need to find out best fits among all of the changes. To knowing about "what I don't know" was my first step to go forward. Of course, community contents, such as forums, articles, blogs, newsgroups was a great resource for me in that case, by getting informed what the experts and professionals are thinking about the latest software releases and development practices. Going thru among those, I got the basic idea about what I don't really know!

Learning in-depth where I can be a best fit

After experimenting and picking my choices, the next phase starts! I need to learn those in more detail. One of my most favorite quote about IT professionals is "To fit with current tech trend, we need to know something about everything and we need to know everything about something!". In real tech world, the term "everything" can't be limited within a specific boundary. So it's better to consider the term, "everything" is "as much as possible".

Implementation

Now the third phase to explore as a good professional, appears. Use what you have learned in your projects/works. But apart from simply putting the learned things should not be the "only" concern for a developer. While implementing any external content that I just learned, I tried to keep my eyes open to examine it's affect in the production environment.

Turning to personal contribution over the contents

Either comparing with other alternative solutions or analyzing the solution with respect to other dependencies, I often got some new ideas, thoughts, techniques to modify the used solution for the current project or for the future project with different context. This process not only makes me intimate with the contents in more details, but also opens several doors to provide the best solution in appropriate context. Apart from my personal usage, these alternative or better solutions can also be a valuable resource to my community friends, along with providing them a way to think more about it!

The four phases, which I just mentioned are my usual way to expand my knowledge (and thus myself) in most comfortable scenario. Thanks God, technology is changing very frequently, and thus always I can discover myself in an infinite loop!

My MVP 2007 Award

Once upon a time, I was a freelance newspaper journalist. I first used PC when I was in the second semester in my Bachelor in Computer Science degree! As usually, I was a bit afraid, whether i will be able to fit in this "unknown" area. The continuous process to knowing me opened doors for me to find myself to be fitted here. Besides my reference books, my community friends were a great resource for me.

Passing previous 7 years was a great adventure for me! Getting matured with the community contents and tutorial stuffs, one day I found that, besides getting, I can put my contents to my community friends as well as. The most interesting thing I felt, that, besides getting contents from the community, there is a big "joy" to share own contents in return.

Microsoft awarded me first time as a MVP "Most Valuable Professional" in "Visual ASP.NET" category for 2007, with respect to my community contributions over the last year 2006. My MVP profile can be seen here.

Of course it was a big surprise for me to find myself in an expert community. Apart from other benefits, I feel the best thing, to get a broader scope to get in touch with the Tech gurus. Thanks to Microsoft to provide me a new path to go forward with more perfection!

Cheers!

Object Oriented Tagging : Adding Power to Web 2.0 Tags!

Mohammad Ashraful Alam — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 18:22:00 GMT

One of the basic consideration in web 2.0 concept is 'tagging' where any contents in the web can be associated with one or more tags, which can be shared among social community network. It lets others to find any content according to their chosen tag. Tag is nothing, but a way to categorize any web content. In real world, any visitor can quickly reach to a content thru it's associated tags, can thus get a basic idea about whether s/he will consider it to read/download etc. "Search" is older concept to help users to find any desired content, but "Tags" provides users to have an open track to find his own choice which has not been discovered yet!

I am really a tag lover. All of the Web 2.0 sites I am using, I am associating web contents with tags, which helps me to properly organize and structure those. Well, the real world is not bed of roses, so I started to get confused, as soon as my contents get larger. For example, http://del.icio.us is one of my very favorite site, which is a award winning web 2.0 site, dedicated for bookmarking urls. Using browser buttons of http://del.icio.us, I can quickly bookmark any web page that I was just visiting into my http://del.icio.us account, with the URL, title, comment, as well as associate appropriate tags, which I have been defined previously in my account settings. From the beginning it really helped me to keep track of my web studies. So life got easier, it's matter of few seconds for me to find any site of a specific category, that I have been visited and found useful.

The Real World

Unfortunately, I am really a nerd reader :P So with in few months, number of my bookmarks crossed couple of hundreds. It turns to a bit problem to me, to find any URL through tag/category, as some of tags already have over hundreds of urls. More over, there are few tags, with similar or nearer meaning (for example: software-development, .NET, C#), and while searching, I didn't get sure that, in which tag, I have been associated the content, that I am just searching for!

So I started to feel that, I need to organize my tags in more intelligent way, so that for a long term period, all of my contents can be grouped together and found in much quicker time.

In the coming days, tags are getting more important place over the web, so we need to have some good concept and convention while tagging! Well, the popularity of tags lies due to its simplicity, so it will be used by the web users in very quick but un-structured way in the maximum time. That's great tho, you are free to choose your tags, but for important contents, "Intelligent" tags will really save lots of our time and effort!

Intelligent? Huh! Tags will be intelligent?

Well, tags can't be intelligent, it's true, but the fact is it can be designed and considered in intelligent way!

Object Oriented Tagging

Object Oriented concept has achieved a great deal of popularity among software developers in previous 2 decades. According to this concept, all real world entities, regarding a given context (or software requirements) are classified into separate areas and utilize each other as needed. One of the basic principal of Object Oriented technology is "Inheritance", where new classes can be inherited from super or base classes, that includes properties of it's parent class. This design idea facilitates the management of software architecture and codes very effectively, specially for large scale software.

When we have large number of contents (for example: URL, image etc), the associated tags can utilized in according to the concept of "Inheritance" to manage all contents properly. Here tags should be structured like the "Tree" data structure (root node, parent node, child node, siblings node etc)! For example, we have a base tag "Software Development", clicking on which will result all the contents related to software development. Now consider another tag, named ".NET", which is a sub tag or sub category of "Software Development" tag. Clicking on the tag ".NET" should list the result related to ".NET", which will include a sub portion of "Software Development" tag. Clicking on the tag "Software Development" will considers the contents all the sub tags of "Software Development", including ".NET" tag contents.

It would be great, if users can define the tree structure of the "Tag Inheritance" tree structure through the web application and thus create the life easy while putting the tags for a content, as well as searching contents through tags will work in much meaningful and faster way. If we have a built-in support for defining tag tree structure, it would take only one "Tag" defining a content in .NET, along with relating the content with "Software Development" tag category. Otherwise both tags "Software Development" and ".NET" needs to be considered with independent (and meaningless) relation among these two tags.

A Sample Structure

To understand the problem in deeper sense, lets go with more complicated example. Consider the following tag structure.

{Software Development} {Microsoft}

________________| |__________________________ ____________| |_________

| | | |

{...} {.NET} {...}

| |

__________________________ ____________________

| |

{ASP.NET} {C#}

In the given example, all ASP.NET and C# contents are in sub tag of .NET. But an ASP.NET content might not related to C#, can be VB.NET or other stuffs and vice versa. So they lies in the same layer. In this context, considering ".NET" tag, it includes all tags related to "ASP.NET" and "C#" tag, but "ASP.NET" tag contents don't include "C#" tag contents.

Also, .NET can be a sub category of "Software Development", as this is a software development framework. But "Software Development" tag might have other issues, which are not related to .NET. As well as, .NET can be a sub category of "Microsoft", as this is a development framework by Microsoft. But "Microsoft" tag might have other issues, which are not related to .NET. So considering the tag "Software Development" or "Microsoft" guarantees to get the content of ALL of their sub category contents (.NET, ASP.NET, C#) but not vice versa.

Solution

Besides the built-in support in web application, we can solve this issues by maintaining our own policy while define and implement our tags. After some brain storming, I found two ways, where this object oriented approach can be fitted!

1. Root level

While bookmarking, consider the lowest level, and DON'T consider the corresponding upper parents. For example, "ASP.NET". We will define the tree structure by creating a special bookmark for each parent node. In this case, in the web application, we need to have a support to merge the contents of tags, which can be used by any other users in later time though a labeled name for that merged list. For example: For the merged list of "Microsoft", we can define it as follows:

Microsoft = ".NET" + "ASP.NET" + "C#" + {unclassifield "Microsoft" list}

2. Node level

While bookmarking any contents, starting from the lowest level, all parents corresponding to that level should be marked.

For example: a content related to "ASP.NET" should be bookmarked as follows:

ASP.NET content = "ASP.NET" + ".NET" + "Microsoft" + "Software Development"

Technically this is the most easiest way, as we don't need any type of support in the web application. All we need, is just to have a flat set of tags, which relations will be maintained while tagging. The problem is, the user always needs to remind the hierarchy of tags. As this is relatively tough for the users to remind the hierarchy, this idea can be used only in special or important content, where we don't have any tree or merge support in the web application.