Emad Alashi’s Blog

Lately OData (Open Data protocol) is gaining a great momentum, everybody is talking about, and in fact it deserves all this fuss. OData is a protocol through which you can share data provided as ATOM or JSON formats by exposing URI’s to be invoked via HTTP, check the FAQ for fast information.

One of the interesting things is that the protocol provides various options through the URI to query all sort data; conditions, ordering, filtering, smart selection, …etc, in addition to very smart linking between exposed entities.

So hereby I provide the data of DotNetArabi through OData on the link http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc for the sake of fun and for anyone who might find it useful. I used the Entity Framework for this purpose since it was the easiest, you can find a very helpful information here.

To start playing around check:

http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc/Guests
http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc/Episodes?$filter=AudioFileLength gt 40

I hope you find it interesting.

Last Saturday we had a SharePointSaturday event here in Jordan, in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Oleson and Michael Noel for DotNetArabi.

At the end of Joel’s valuable interview, which can happen only in a life time, I stopped the recording by hitting the “Stop” button, simple. Surprisingly, instead of stopping the recording, Audacity just froze! I could hear myself screaming inside “NOOO!!!”, I guess even Joel heard that! the whole machine stuck that I had to force it to a Hard Shut down.

But knowing Audacity as a great piece of software, which really is, I hoped that I could still retrieve the recording. I rebooted and started Audacity again, and here comes the so refreshing alert at the start:

“Some projects were not saved properly the last time Audacity was run. Fortunately, the following projects can automatically be recovered”

THAT is a successful software! of course I lost portions of the recording still, but I can’t complain; I have most of the interview. So, When you design your software, DO make sure you don’t crash gracefully only, but yet to recover correctly from the crash.

After publishing 8 episodes of DotNetArabi, I think it would be nice to share on this blog how it goes and what equipment needed in the process. But before we begin, dear reader, note that I am not an expert, I am still in the beginning of the way, though it’s going good so far.

  My working machine is HP dv 6700 laptop, my first trials with recording was with simple microphone like the ones you use for chats; recording in winter made things smooth, but when summer came a long the heating problem became obvious in the low quality of the audio recorded, in addition to the higher target I needed anyway, so a different measure had to take place.

I looked for an audio device that would clear the recording of any noise that is caused by the internal electrical and the fan. I had different options then, but the most interesting one was the MobilePre USB audio interface which I finally got. It takes analog inputs (2 of which are XLR) and transforms to digital signal view USB.

Of course it appeared that it is over bloated than what I really needed, but I liked it anyway and produced the quality I looked for, though if you are going to record voice only, I believe there are other devices with lower cost.

To complete the set I got myself two XLR Microphones, not fancy ones, 15 JD’s each (about 22 US $) and that was it.

Now on the software side I use Audacity, I find it the best free audio software.

After all that, you’d find it surprising that you still need to use the Noise Removal feature in Audacity. And by that you can have your own podcast

Episode 5 of DotNetArabi podcast is published on www.dotnetarabi.com

Mohamad Meligy talked in this episode about ORM (Object Relational Mapping), he explained in details how they work, why we need them, their advantages and disadvantages, and listed some of the known ORM engines.

لقد تم نشر الحلقة الخامسة من دوت نت عربي على www.dotnetarabi.com. تحدث فيها محمد مليجي بإسهاب عن
الـ ORM (Object Relational Mapping). مفصلا ماهيتها، و كيف تعمل، و حسناتها و سيئاتها، و ذكر كذلك بعضا من المكتبات البرمجية  منها و حسناتها.