Roman Korchagin

Need a difference tool that can find moved lines. Do you know any?

2008-06-20T07:45:00Z

There are heaps of commercial and free difference tools available. Only few of them can find moved blocks of lines. At the moment I'm only aware of WinDiff, WinMerge and Compare It. However I need to be able to "jump" between move source and destination and only Compare It allows it. I also need to generate a report that distinguishes moved lines from simple insertions or deletions. None of the tools do that. Is that a very weird requirement?

If you know a good tool that can reliably find moved lines and generate a report let me know, it will be appreciated.

RTF and Culture

2007-07-15T10:26:00Z

From what I can tell RTF and Culture do not mix.

If you have English culture selected in your regional settings, create a document in Microsoft Word and save as RTF, then double values (in custom document properties) will be written as 123.45. When you open this document in Microsoft Word it seems to use the current culture. So if you culture is English, the document will load okay.

If you happen to have Russian culture and save the document as RTF, the numbers will be written as 123,45. This is because the Russian culture usues comma as a decimal separator. Again, if you open this document in Microsoft Word while using Russian culture, there will be no problems.

However, if you try to open an RTF document with 123.45 in Microsoft Word on a computer with Russian culture, or try to open a document with 123,45 in Microsoft Word on a computer with English culture - the value will be imported incorrectly. In one case I got it as 12345.

Note that there is no indication inside the RTF file as to which culture was used when writing the file.

My conclusion - there is no way out in this case. This bug seems to have survived in RTF and in Microsoft Word for over 20 years?

NUnit Thoughts

2007-07-14T05:07:00Z

Here is short blurb on our experience with NUnit. Goods and not so goods.

We are using NUnit for Aspose products on our team. We've been using it from the start. Aspose.Words for .NET at the moment has around 5000 unit tests.

Aspose.Words is a class library and to run the tests, we have its project settings set to fire up NUnit Gui executable and pass Aspose.Words.dll as a command line parameter. When NUnit Gui starts, it loads the Aspose.Words.dll debug build that contains all unit tests together with the main code.

Running NUnit Gui this way allows us to step into debugger easily (just put a break point in code and the debugger will stop there). Having tests compiled into the same assembly allows us to test internal classes and methods (we have a lot more internal classes and methods than public ones).

Since there are so many tests and running all of them takes long time (around 10 minutes at the moment), most of the runs throughout the day are "local". We run NUnit Gui with checkboxes in the tree shown and we select the branches of tests that we want to run. Sometimes (after update and before checking) we run all unit tests of course.

Test Selections are not Persistent

One seriously missing feature in NUnit was the lack of persistence to the selected tests across the test sessions.

I code, then I compile and fire up the project (starts NUnit Gui with my dll loaded in it), then I select some tests (out of 5000!) and run them. If something fails, I close NUnit Gui, go back to my code, fix it, fire up the project again and have to select the same tests again! This is a frequent cycle, dozens of times per day.

How could that be this feature is missing from NUnit? Am I the only one suffering from this? I remember searching and asking in NUnit forums some time ago, but nobody seemed to have this issue. Do you guys enjoy reselecting your tests each time or am I doing something wrong?

We have modified NUnit 2.2.8 to automatically persist test selections between NUnit Gui sessions and were happy ever since.

NUnit Gui Slow Startup Time

Aspose.Words.dll with around 5000 tests causes NUnit Gui to spend about 10 seconds starting up on a fast machine. This is unacceptable since I want run my tests many times per hour.

Splitting Aspose.Words into smaller dlls - don't want to do this at this stage. Prefer to have as few assemblies as possible (in fact we have three assemblies during development).

Run NUnit under profiler and found some ugly code. For example, UITestNode is created far too many times. By design, there should be one UITestNode object per one Test object. However, the profiler shows that for 4800 unit tests there are over 55,000! UITestNode objects are created. Apparently UITestNode objects are created in the "recursively on recursively" mode :) Fixing that should half the loading time. The other 5 seconds are spend loading tests from the assembly, will look into this too.

Summary

NUnit is a great testing framework. Thumbs up for all the people who work on it.

However, I think you guys are overdoing the assertion syntax and the stuff (what I saw in the latest 2.4 I think is a clear overkill). A testing framework should be simple.

I'd rather see you spent more time on making the Gui more efficient and useful. Features and bugs like I mentioned.

Another bright idea: TDD is great, but even if all tests pass, there is still plenty of ugly bugs in the code. Step through your code too, it often helps.

Yet Another 64-bit Surprise

2007-07-13T11:34:00Z

Some of the Aspose.Words (and other components) demo projects and unit tests retrieve data from a Microsoft Access .mdb database. I've been trying to get everything working on Windows Vista 64-bit and was getting "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 not registered" error.

According to various articles this is due to the fact my project is compiled for the AnyCPU platform and runs as a 64-bit application, but there are no Microsoft Access database drivers for 64-bit.

The recommendation I found in the MSDN forum is switch the platform to x86 so the application is compiled and runs as 32-bit. The articles also say that Microsoft does not plan releasing 64-bit drivers for Microsoft Access Jet... That is there is no way to use Microsoft Access databases from a 64-bit application.

Ever since I switched to Vista 64-bit I had so many development related problems. I've been meaning to say that for long time - I became disappointed in Microsoft. The whole 64-bit and especially in combination with Vista is an awfull experience for developers on the Microsoft platform. I'm not sure why, but Microsoft has definitely lost it at some point. It became very frustrating to be a .NET developer. One more bumpy and rushed switch to new platform or new OS like this and I promise I'll go Java or change the career altogether. I hope Microsoft takes note.

One more thing: I see a whole new business opportunity here. Develop 64-bit applications that Microsoft has no plans of developing. What would you say if Aspose developed Microsoft Access Jet drivers for 64-bit and sold them for $899 a piece?

We successfully develop and debug ASP.NET 1.1 applications in Visual Studio 2003 on Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

2007-06-28T11:42:00Z

I've upgraded my development machine recently to Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit because we wanted to fully test Aspose.Words on Vista and on 64bit systems.

We have projects for both Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 as we build Aspose.Words both for .NET 1.1 and 2.0. Although Aspose.Words itself is just a class library (not an ASP.NET application) we do have ASP.NET demo application that ship with Aspose.Words. I had to get Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 with ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 working on the development machine, otherwise I would have had to go back Windows XP.

It was no big problem to get Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 working, the normal installation procedure plus SP1 did the job.

It was more trouble with Visual Studio 2003. It worked okay, but ASP.NET 1.1 did not work. Could not create or open ASP.NET 1.1 application in Visual Studio. I hunted the web and several articles really helped. I just wanted to summarize my successful experience hoping it will help even more people to get Visual Studio 2003 working well on Vista.

Here are the articles that helped:

1. http://www.iis.net/articles/view.aspx/IIS7/Hosting-Web-Applications/ASP-NET/How-to-Run-ASP-NET-v1-1-on-IIS7

I did install IIS Metabase Compatibility, .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 and ASP.NET Security Update for 1.1 as the article suggested. Although I did not do the other steps they offered.

2. http://citruslime.blogspot.com/2007/04/visual-studio-2003-web-debugging-on.html

I checked my account is in the Debugger Users group. Then I followed the steps outlined in the article they refer to (next article). I also adjusted ISAPI and CGI extensions in the IIS manager (running aspnet_regiis -enable did not seem to enable that).

After I created an ASP.NET 1.1 application using Visual Studio, I went to the IIS manager and set debugging and authentication settings like they suggested.

Debugging the application was still not possible at this stage. The error was "cannot debug because the URL is in the Internet Zone". I added http://localhost to the Intranet Zone in Internet Explorer secruty options and after that I was finally able to debug ASP.NET applications.

3. http://blogs.iis.net/brian-murphy-booth/archive/2007/03/09/how-to-setup-asp-net-v1-1-visual-studio-net-2003-projects-on-iis7-vista.aspx

This article contains the most important steps.

Disclaimer: Use at your own risk and sorry, I will not have time to help you with problems as debugging ASP.NET 1.1 application on Vista is not my main job.

Kite Mounted Camera - Take 1

2007-03-15T07:30:00Z

A few weeks ago I mentioned about getting a camera to mount on my kite. Now its here and today was the first try out.

The consumer technology is amazing (especially if you don't look at stuff for a while). It is only about 90x55x20mm, 7.2mp, 3x zoom, weights 160 grams, 640x480 video at 30fps, 4Gb memory card gives around 1 hour of video time. When inside the waterproof case, total weight 280 grams.

Kite: BEST Waroo 07, 9m.

Mounting method: a strap supplied with the waterproof case attached to the briddle in the center of the kite, the waterproof case taped to the center spar close to the leading edge.

Location: Auckland, North Shore, Shoal Bay.

Conditions: Rough, very gusty southwest, easily 12-25knots or more.

Results: It all works! Quality is great. However, I made a mistake of leaving the camera turned on while not recording. While I was attaching and launching the kite, the camera switched off due to power save mode. It is disappointing as some scary moments due to strong gusts could have been fun to watch again.

Here is a short compilation of what was filmed before launching and later on the ground.

Stay tuned for better footage!

Here is how it should look in the end (I hope my quality with 640x480 and 3x zoom will be much better than in these videos though).

Day Out Surfing

2007-03-13T00:24:00Z

Perfect day for learning surfing. Smallish waves, no problems paddling out. Great location Muriwai Beach. Highly encouraging mate. We are kiwi blokes.

Next one is me filming through a few nice waves.

Why life in New Zealand sometimes sucks

2007-02-24T21:50:00Z

I would like to mount a small digital camera on my kite so I can shoot a video with me kitesurfing. Done quite a bit of research and came up with an idea to use the following:

Sony Cybershot DCS-T10 7.2MP Digital Camera. It can capture 640x480 movie at 30fps, sounds good enough.
Sony SPK-THC Sports Pack for the above camera. We don't want any salt water or sand in the camera, do we?
Sony 4GB Memory Stick PRO DUO so I can turn the camera on, launch the kite and it will be enough for over 40 minutes of video.

All sounds easy and exciting, now comes the fun part:

Recommended retail prices (source http://www.sony.co.nz/products/product.asp) and actual prices in most of the shops in Auckland for the above equipment are:

Camera NZD$699.95 = USD$490
Sports pack NZD$199.95 = USD$140
Memory stick NZD$399.95 = USD$280

Total whopping NZD$1400 = USD$910.

Now, lets look at what other people have to pay for it. Amazon, new items:

Camera USD$275
Sports pack USD$78
Memory stick $105

Total USD$458.

Shipping will be is $30 at best.

What is the extra USD$452 that I have to pay for? For the grass that is greener?

And almost forgot to add that the Sports Pack is not in stock in New Zealand. The quantity is zero and it will take 4-6 weeks to arrive after the order is placed. That will be the end of summer when I'm not going to need it anymore...

Three Earthquakes in Three Hours

2007-02-21T18:38:00Z

There's been three small earthquakes in Auckland yesterday, just in the space of three hours, all in the same place.

We felt one at home, probably the biggest at 9:00pm, the that was 4.5. Watching TV and the sofa went gently rocking for a few seconds. The sequence of possible reasons was as follows:

The son playing with the cats.
The neighbours drove into our house, again (see below for this).
The earthquake.

Cats were relaxing and not rocking the house. We went outside, no trees or cars hit the house either. So it was a quake and we stayed for a few minutes outside amazed.

The interesting part is that Auckland is on a volcanic field and has 50 cones of extinct volcanoes and the media keeps us "prepared" for a new one to appear at some time and there is speculation about where it might come out. Three quakes in one place so quickly made me worried we are going to wake up with a new volcanoe in the morning that is only 40km away from us.

Now, in the morning, looking from the Orewa webcam East, the quake originated 30km out to sea, exactly this way, I'm happy to report no new volcanoes so far.

By the way, this is the place where we go out kitesurfing in easterly winds and you can occasionally see me and other kitesurfers through the web cam. These is a set of Lee's pictures from Orewa.

Here is a TVNZ article about the quakes.

Regarding the neighbours driving into our house, thanks to the tree that saved us and the driver. That happened a few months ago and felt like a small earthquake too.

Back from a short break in New Caledonia

2007-01-02T20:33:00Z

My family is back from a short holiday. We went to New Caledonia for the New Year. It is the closest tropical place from New Zealand, only 2.5 hours flight.

We stayed at the Coral Palms Island Resort (Google Maps link) which is located on a small island about 5km from Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia.

Accommodation

I must say the accommodation and the setting is great. It is a nature reserve and wildlife is everywhere. From the walkways over the water and while snorkeling we saw no less than 50 different types of fish, a shark, stingrays and lots of sea snakes. A family of four sea snakes lived just next to the entrance to our bungalow, thankfully they were pretty shy. There were many birds, including some duck-type birds who were actively seeking mates during the night and making horror-movie sounds.

As you can see the little island is only about 50m wide in its narrow part and about 800m long.

This is the room where we stayed and the view from the room.

You could step from the room out onto the beach right away, but watch out for snakes. Although in the end we almost learned from the locals to largely ignore them.

Kitesurfing

When looking at the place from Google Earth I couldn't stop thinking the place would be nice for kitesurfing and took my new Waroo kite with me. The place turned out to be GREAT for kitesurfing.

There is plenty of space and it works almost at any tide. For some reason, the tide is not too big here. It seems to be knee-deep at low tide and waist deep at high tide. The bottom is patches of sand mixed with patches of grass. There are no sharp corals or rocks, but booties are good to have anyway.

There were heaps of kitesurfers coming by boats from Noumea just to this place. We had over 30 kites in the air at times. The place to launch is somewhat limited, but it is flat and works well and there is no shortage of place on the water.

The wind was onshore all the time, 17-23knots, all day throughout. It was a bit lighter in the morning, but very constant afterwards. One could kitesurf all day. I went out every day I was there. Waroo 07 turned out to be a great kite and I advanced heaps. I spent two summers before with a Naish Boxer only to learn how to get going with reasonable success. This time in the span of 3 days I managed to learn to go upwind, retrieve the board upwind, gybe heel first and toe first and had success with some simple jumps!

Other kitesurfers were mostly lighter (French) people and used 7-10m kites. Only a few were 12m. I had only 13m kite with me and it was the biggest kite on the beach, yet being Waroo 07 it worked so great.

No, this is not me. I don't jump that well yet. Noumea is in the background.

Noumea

On the way back home we spent one day in Noumea. For one friend of ours, Noumea was the dream place she wished to lieve in given an opportunity to choose any place on Earth, so we approached the city with an expectation it will be very cute and nice place to live in so maybe we could consider retiring there. But sadly the expectations didn't hold.

To my taste it is too dirty. Dog ***, bottles, broken glass, cans etc quite or lot of it even on the famous Anse Vata beach. There are only 3 reasonable beaches in the city, yet the busy roads are very close and the grass area is too small.

Well, maybe I'm too harsh. But I'm comparing with Auckland, it is 5th ranking city after all on the quality of living survey. The list must be pretty right then, although I don't see moving myself to Zurich anytime soon!

The State of Confusion

It is all in the heat. It melts down your mind and body. Initially you notice the difference between you and locals. After several days you slow down yourself and don't care anymore. Here are a few funny things that we noticed while we were "alive".

Our bungalow had about 10 light switches and they all were wired using some "fuzzy" logic that we never fully understood. It was very hard to turn on the ceiling fan - it only worked when a very specific combination of light switches was on - it required all three of us working hard in every corner of the room simultenaously.

A wending machine at the airport had the usual Coca-Cola, 7Up etc cans on display. But after dropping the coins and pushing the button - you always got something else - not what you wanted. All lines in the wending machine were mixed up.

A popular T-shirt in New Caledonia reads:

...some business name...

No Service
No Repairs
No Accessories
No Finance
Cash Only and F...k You!

So, if you a after a great tropical place for nature tourism or water sports - all thumbs up for New Caledonia. But if you expect great service - you might just get total confusion.

Piha Activities

2006-12-24T05:26:00Z

We went with friends for a bit of surfing at Piha a week ago. It is a great place, not only for surfing, just a great place. A few more friends joined us later on and we went for a walk to see the rocks and waves. Two of them went pretty close to the waves, dangerous stuff.

There are always reports of fishermen being swept to the sea from those rocks. But they went anyway. I was filming two fishermen that were coming up when a good sized wave struck and you will see after the camera moves the two guys get a good wash.

Search for Piha on Youtube.com, there are few more clips by others.

December, Summer is Here

2006-11-29T05:29:00Z

In case you forgot, some of Aspose employees are living upside down, having summer in December, and overall, doing lots of things differently.

Just to tease you all, summer is very nice in New Zealand, I love it, and it is here, almost.

Although I plan to work a lot as usual, it is a very relaxing feeling anyway. We are going to catch a lot of time at the beach and in the water since it is all so close. Kitesurfing and a bit of bodyboarding is in order. No need to take a vacation when work is a permanent holiday.

December is a time when Pohutakawa is flowering. Search Google Images for "pohutakawa" to get a better idea.

Here is one linked:

And another one from a friend of mine http://nz.net.ru/daily/251/

Have a nice Winter!

This blog has moved to a new URL

2006-10-29T21:47:00Z

This blog has moved to a new URL. All further posts will be in the Aspose.iCalendar blog.

Moving to a New Blog

2006-10-24T21:56:00Z

This blog is about Aspose.Words Releases and other useful posts about Aspose.Words from its developers.

This blog started out as "individual" (under my name), but because our development team grows and we would like several developers to be able to publish useful information about Aspose.Words, we are starting a new blog that is a team blog.

For all further posts, please go to the Aspose.Words Blog.

Aspose.Words Development Celebrates 3 Years

2006-10-23T05:05:00Z

It is about this time of year in 2003 we started work on Aspose.Words.

Aspose.Word 1.0 was released in December 2003. Now, after 3 years of hard work, we've just released Aspose.Words 4.0.0 for .NET.

Here are some statistics from the Aspose.Words project:

205K lines of C# code.
Over 170 public members in the API.
1,110 classes in total.
Over 2,450 unit tests.
Approximately 2,200 documents for automatic regression tests.
2,888 threads and 12,466 posts in the support forums.

Aspose.Words has come a long way. From a minimalistic reader/writer for Microsoft Word documents, it has grown to provide:

Comprehensive support (we estimate over 95%) for the features of Microsoft Word documents including shapes, graphics and OLE objects.
Reliably read and write Microsoft Word 97 to Microsoft Word 2007 DOC files.
High-fidelity convert to RTF and WordprocessingML.
Read and write HTML and XHTML.
Convert documents to PDF (when used with Aspose.Pdf) with a great degree of fidelity to Microsoft Word.
Populate documents with data from various data sources.
Add document content and formatting easily, using a "builder" like approach.
Programmatically access individual elements of the document and their formatting.
A Java version of Aspose.Words that is closely ported after the C# version.

I would like to thank everybody who helped Aspose.Words to succeed:

Customers, who provided invaluable feedback in the support forums and helped us to gather a great database of test documents.
Aspose.Words developers and support who worked very hard and smart.
All other teams at Aspose who provided help and resources.

Looking forward for more exciting features from the Aspose.Words team.

Tip: Did you know that when you purchase a license from Aspose, you actually buy a 1-year subscription that includes free upgrades to any new versions for 1 year. With Aspose products, it is always a good idea to upgrade whenever possible because we are very active at development. It is a good chance that your subscription has not yet expired and you can get Aspose.Words 4.0.0 for free.