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In continuation to my previous post , I’ll add some more techniques which can be used for information gathering.  Prototyping:   Prototyping allows to gather information by faking the production environment. In this technique, quite a lot of tools can be used to collect information, such as software programs to monitor/record mouse clicks or keystrokes, camera to monitor visual activity, etc.  Basically, what type of tool should be used is solely depend upon what type of information you want to collect. The cost of prototyping might be high because information gathered from this approach can be easily validated with a reason that prototyping is experimental rather than the responses received from users.  Note : Prototyping is preferred in the scenarios where it is impossible to shadow a person. Prototype can help you to get below sort of information:  Use of technologies, tools and applications.  Verification of workflow.  Customer specific quality requiremen

In continuation to my previous post, I’ll add some more techniques which are popularly used for information gathering. Interviewing : While on one hand shadowing provides an effective means to discover what is currently being done in the business, but on the other hand it does not provide all the necessary information. Another flaw of shadowing would be, it is not suitable for getting information about long-term activities that extent weeks or months along with the processes that requires very less or no human intervention. Hence, we can look for other techniques like interviewing. Interviewing someone is the one-on-one meeting between project team and the user. Here quality of information totally depends upon interviewee and the interviewer. The interviewer can ask a wide range of questions as compared to shadowing mechanism. These questions can be from basic information to difficulties to limitations of the system. During the interview process, the interviewee can give some i

This time rather than writing on some technology or solution, I thought to write on one of the important phases of SDLC which is nothing but requirement gathering. To be more specific, this article will be more about collecting information about business requirement. What are the various sources to get and understand most of the portions of any business requirement. It’ very important to understand that, information can be gathered from many standpoints. It can be from Business front, Application front, Operations front, Technology front , and may be many more. So, while gathering information, one should have a clear vision on what kind of information they are looking for. Let’s have a look at few of the well-known categories: B usiness – Goal of business, Service offerings, Products, Financial Structure, etc. Application – Productivity tools, interaction with business application system, Code Modules, etc. Operations – Identify the information’s origin, information’s consump

Recently I got a requirement to generate an XML on the fly with some defined schema. I know this requirement looks very simple in first sight, but actually it was not. The XML which was to be generated was having a very specific format as it was supposed to be the input for some 3 rd party tool. So, it means, it should be fully compliant with the prescribed XML node structure. Just have a look at the below schema: <sl:RandomWindow xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:sl="http://www.ShwetaBlogs.com/Window" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.ShwetaBlogs.com/Window wwRandomWindow.xsd">   <Title>First Window</Title>   <Border>Single</Border> </sl:RandomWindow> Below are the classes I created for serialization purpose: By using the XmlElement and XmlAttribute classes I was able to generate most of the required parts of the XML as shown below:   But the only th

If you are working on Visual Studio 2017 with update 3, then you might have come across the error 'The SDK ‘Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web’ specified could not be found' in netcoreapp1.1 for both web and console. Unfortunately, I also landed up into this situation. So, one straight forward and temporary solution could be to edit the project file manually from Project Sdk = ”Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web” to Project Sdk = ”Microsoft.NET.Sdk” and re-open the solution. Everything will work fine as expected. So, what are the reasons behind this error? I explored many articles on MSDN forums as well as looked at github link and the primary reasons which are causing this error are: Workstation is still holding an old preview version of CLI 1.0 Installed CLI version is correct but its path is incorrect. Solution : Uninstall all the older versions of CLI with 1.x as SDKs with version 1.x can break things Verify the value of PATH- Open the developer command prompt and verify the value o

One can enable IIS logging by going to IIS Manager and checking the Enable logging checkbox. So, it means if IIS logging is enabled, then each and every request made by the client should be showing up in the IIS log. Isn’t it? But by any chance, if the request is not present in IIS log then the most probable reason would be either IIS was not running or may be request was not made. But this statement is not 100% correct. Because whenever any request is made to the server, first it routes through HTTP.SYS then it comes to IIS. So, if anything is not visible under IIS logs, then one can see the logging for HTTP.SYS which is HTTPERR . The most common errors logged here are related to timeout or service unavailability. The next question would be, where these logs are exactly saved? You can find HTTPERR under C:\Windows\System32\LogFiles\HTTPERR

Recently, while working on one of the web project, I came across a situation which ate up my almost an hour. Concern was, my IIS express was not launching automatically on running my web application from Visual Studio 2015. I tried various solutions like, ran the Visual studio as an Administrator, changed the port, disabled the firewall, reset the IISExpress folder. But no luck :( Then I thought, let's give a try by deleting the temporary folders which were created by Visual Studio and guess what? That worked for me.   The culprit was the .vs folder which was the hidden folder in the project's root directory. One of my colleague checked-in that folder by mistake and as I was fetching the code for the first time, it came on my machine. Actual felon was the .suo file which was inside .vs folder. This .suo file contains user specific settings. Hence same user settings didn’t work for me.   Solution - Deleting .vs folder did the trick :) Happy troubleshooting !!!