I have not posted anything regularly on this blog so I'll officially suspend it. I will later continue or create another blog but I'll say something here.

I've been using for the past hours Microsoft's Exception Management AB. It has nothing to do with what I expected it to do.
I was expecting a way to typify exceptions, layer them and possibly take some actions upon it but I was so wrong.

This application block simply "registers" the exception with publishers. It almost seems like configuring a logging block, it fealt awfully similar to using log4J and configuring it.

I didn't like it and I surely don't recomend it to anyone!

I found an online version of the most definitive and important book about introduction to algorithms. This masterpiece has almost every foundation necessary to get into the world of Algorithms and altough I have the book itself for almost a year, I haven't had time to read it appropriately.
You can buy it from Amazon here or read it online here.

Every month IBM poses a complex - at least for me - math problem for people to solve. They are normally interisting problems but I don't have the math knowledge to solve them.

Maybe you can, check it out here.

Visual Studio Team System will cause a revolution in the way groups work with .net technology.
A neat little feature is Web Testing. It allows to record and perform test to our webpages simply and efficiently without all the problems we had with Application Center Test.

Check out this post by Josh Christie.

I've been using the SQLExplorer plugin for Eclipse, a JFacedBC-based database navigation tool, for the last month and it rocks.

I've been working in different places and with different database vendors - MS SQL Server, Oracle and Informix - and some software implicates inter-operating all these vendors.

The UI of this program allows me to develop my java programs and mantain active connections to all databases - actually allow connection to virtually any datasource - and see my table, test my query. All of this well integrated in my eclipse workspace. Really worth a try.

https://sqlexplorer.dev.java.net/

Vacations have ended for more than 2 weeks now and I'm back to the regular pace at work.
I will also try to post more regularly some things

TopCoder is the world's largest Online Programming Contest organizer. I've been competing there for almost a year and I can only say that it is very very very interisting for anyone trying to gain some algorithmic knowledge or simply for people trying to challenge themselves.

There are non-paid competitions on a weekly basis and multiple competitions a year (Open, Colleiate challange, etc.) with really large amounts of money involved. In each round of a competition each contestant has 75 minutes to solve 3 problems - a easy (250 pts), a medium (500 pts) and a hard (1000 pts). As time goes by the points of each problem decreases.
After this phase, there is a short intermission followed by a challenge phase where each player may see the code other players in the same room wrote a challenge it against the reference implementation. After all this, a series of system tests is ran.

It really is easier to just drop by the geekiest site on the web without slashes or dots :)

After being totally wasted with work in the last couple of weeks I took a week off with some friends to rest and have some fun.
I'm back now and will try to keel the blog updated.

I'm joining Peter Provost's petition for Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System.

It's completely incredible how one can leave out unit testing as an integrating phase of software development. It doesn't matter if my team is following XP programming, unit testing is part of the coding phase. Like someone commented, choosing not to include unit testing capabilities nowadays is like choosing not to include a debugger in all VS 2005 versions.

C'mon Microsoft, don't make me loose the fatih in what seems an excellent line of products.