So I’ve had to build some reports with Siberix in the last few days and I had some less than pleasing results. I had a grid that was overflowing vertically but for some reason, the last row on the page would take 2-3 times more space than necessary.

After printing the page and looking at the results many times… something clicked when I saw the footer row that I had added. The blank space that was left was exactly the same size as my footer.

So maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s not but Siberix let’s itself some room on every page to render the footer “in case” that it’s the last page. No concept what so ever of where he’s at when rendering the PDF.

The solution? Make the footer outside the IGrid and it won’t glitch anymore. And yes, I tried to set the IFooter.Repeat to false.

I can understand that a product have bugs but the worst part is that it’s a paying tool and no community built around it like Telerik, ReSharper or other third party tools. My last try was with Stackoverflow but didn’t have any luck either.

Siberix, if you want to increase your sales, make sure you have a community behind it. Just a friendly advice.

Microsoft is mainly known for 2 things. Windows and Office. However, for programmers,  Microsoft is also know for many more projects/product like .NET, Enterprise Library, ASP.NET MVC, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint, etc.

Among the few tools that are not really known and publicised at the moment are the projects inside Microsoft Research. This is the land of Beta or "software-never-to-be-released". Either the project is too crazy(read: inovative?) or not useful for people at the time. But there is time where a tool stands out and need to be  talked about.

My friend Eric De Carufel recently talked to me about this tool called CHESS from Microsoft Research. He tested it and it allows for testing for those rare bugs that are only found when there is enough concurrency. Those bugs were tested before with stress test. Stress test are not supposed to be used for finding concurrency bugs but they are traditionally used for that too because when a system is under stress, concurrency happens.

CHESS is there to solve this problem. It includes itself among your unit test and try every possible permutation of code that happens asynchronously. This include race condition, dead lock, and what else exists (not an expert in multi-threaded applications).

Of course, I expect Eric to blog more about this amazing software that is coming from Microsoft's Trenches.

Want more information? Get on the CHESS website. If you want to find more interesting projects that Microsoft's genius are working on, visit Microsoft Research.

I found tonight an interesting site that built an application that insert the lyrics inside your mp3 collection.

It requires iTunes and the .NET framework.

It can be found here. I will rewrite the application in C#, improve the source and contact the author if we can put it in Google Code or Codeplex.

Enjoy!