Monday, July 16, 2007

Banana Nut Bread

It’s not strange I’m posting after two months. The last two months were very progressive and I’m very excited to write that bakingdelight is almost 75 % completed!. I’m dying to write all the details of this development but I think I need time to compose all the details in the form of effective posts. Today I’m here to post something out of the theme of this blog. As the name of this blog goes for baking, so many of my college fellows were anxious to see baking recipes here. They were linking this blog to original bakingdelight.com...
This Saturday one of my class fellows said “Please try to post something on your blog...” I felt as if she is asking me to post some baking recipes. So finally I’ve decided to use today’s post for a very special recipe of banana bread. This banana bread is special in many ways.
About three months back when I was pulling my hair to figure out the way to start working on bakingdelight’s DAL (Data Access Layer), I took a break for 2 days and one evening I tried a special banana bread recipe to see if this time my baking sense works, as my baking sense most of the time doesn’t work !
Out of my surprise the bread turned out very well, I guess I really deserved a break...
So you girls get a good cup of tea and some chocolate chip cookies to enjoy today’s recipe.

Banana Nut Bread

Ingredients:
The wet ingredients are: two ripe bananas, 6 Tbs. melted butter, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, and two large eggs. For the dry ingredients: 1-1/3 cup flour, 1/2 tsp. baking soda, 1/4 tsp. baking powder, 2/3 cup sugar, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/2 cup chopped walnuts.

Directions:
Start by preparing a loaf pan by buttering the bottom and sides. Lightly flour the pan and tap out the excess flour. The loaf pan should be around 5 in. by 9 in. (13 cm by 23 cm) in size - a little larger or smaller isn't a problem.
Mash the bananas, melted butter, and vanilla extract together. Lightly beat the eggs together
Mash the banana mixture with the eggs until smooth and well blended.
Pour the banana mixture onto the dry ingredients. Add the walnuts.
Fold the ingredients together until no more white flour is uncovered while folding.
Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for 55 minutes at 350°F.
After 55 minutes, the loaf of banana bread should be done. A wooden toothpick inserted into the center should come out clean. Set the pan on a wire rack to cool for ten minutes
Remove the loaf from the pan and let cool on the wire rack. Serve warm or fully cooled. The loaf can be wrapped in plastic and stored at room temperature for about four or five days.
The bread goes awesome with a glass of milk or a chilled glass of water (I prefer water).




You can see more phots here


Do try this bread and let me know how it turns out. Let me end this post with some more sweetness, below is the photo shown of “Suji ka Halwa” (Semolina Pudding). Today morning when I was planning for this post my younger brother came with a plate of Halwa, he cooked himself.


Suji ka Halwa

Saturday, May 12, 2007

I wish I had a verbal Blog !

I guess I would have been posting twice a day if I had to speak at my blog! I'm too lazy to type day to day details of my project.
Finally I've got a way to atleast post on weekly basis. My Wireless Communication class has shifted from 10:45 am to 1:00 pm, so I've decided to use that time to blog!
Today the lab got closed for first half an hour (due to some stupid tech. reasons) so I'm only left with half an hour. The second half an hour I spent in the cafeteria ;)
Okay, let me talk about bakingdelight. Up till now nothing is going good. The diagrams on which we had been working for the month of April are rejected by our external supervisor. These were use cases and sequence diagrams. I was myself a bit confused about some diagrams. I wasn't sure if I was following the standards. But I wasn't expecting such a "rejection". I talked to my internal supervisor to talk to the external that most of our work was according to what we had been taught in our OODA (Object Oriented Design & Analysis) course.
So what am I upto about my diagrams now? I've decided to follow the book "Building Web Applications With UML". I don't know when people will realize the fact that building web apps is not the same as building desktop apps. I hope the book is gona solve most of my confusions. I've seen people talking about this book on specialized UML forums.
Second thing, I've decided that I would start the development while working on design. May be some times I would be developing first and then going back to the design document to document what I did. So that would be a "what you can do" approach rather than a "what you should do" approach.
I wish I could find some more people like me who are facing such documentation issues for their college projects so that we could disscuss the solutions together.
Hopefully will be posting on next saturday.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Use Case Model

Working on documentation stuff is not much fun! But thats the part of the project which determines the fate of your application. During the last two days we had been working on Use Cases of Bakingdelight. I've worked on first three Use Cases today. Uptill now I don't find any bugs in these diagrams but I think I'll find some during the QA phase of the Use Cases. According to our Project Plan document, the deadline to complete Use Case Model is April,16.
My semester break is also ending on April,16 !
Most probably I'll submit some of the Use case Diagrams in the next post.





Monday, April 9, 2007

Learn Visual Studio & Learn Expression

I guess, the next few posts will be about the design process of Bakingdelight. But today I'm going to tell about the resources I'm using to design and develope bakingdelight.com.
Let me first tell you about the tools and technologies I'm using to develope Bakingdelight.

For development:
ASP.NET with C#
SQL 2005.
Tools:
MicrosoftVisual Web Developer

For design:
Microsoft Expression Web
Photoshop CS2

I had no experience with ASP.NET. I worked on my first dynamic web application project in classic ASP. I'm with Visual C++ background and didn't know much about C# but Bob Tabor's video tutorials really helped me to learn C#. And now I'm learning VWD and ASP.NET through his tutorials.
LVS, www.learnvisualstudio.net, is one of the best sources to learn visual studio and other Microsoft's technologies. Another good source of learning on LVS, is its Forum. The feel of LVS forum is really different. You can say its a heaven for newbies !

www.learnexpression.com is on its way to deliver video tutorials for Microsoft's Expression Products. Currently all the videos @ LE are free to watch. So if you want a quick start do watch these videos.

The other resources are Microsoft's Virtual Labs and Webcasts and Expression tutorials on EW site.

Below I'm pasting all the URls of the resources I've talked about. If you want to know more about any of the above resources, Google it !
LVS:
www.learnvisualstudio.net
LE:
www.learnexpression.net
MS WebCasts:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/SearchResults.aspx?culture=en-US&evtTyp=3&evtTypHero=3
http://www.learn2asp.net/
EW
http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/events-training/training-videos.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/expression.mspx

Sunday, April 8, 2007

How do we use UML for Web Applications?

This didn't come in to my mind when I was studying UML in my software engineering course. But when I started thinking which UML diagrams do I need to use in my documentation for bakingdelight, I found myself completely confused because I didn't know that Web Engineering is completely different than traditional Software Engineering!

All of my confusions got cleared when I went through some extremely well written articles and papers on this topic. I found that web engineering is a new science in itself.So if any of you is confused with this issue must read those articles.Infact one of the objectives of this blog is to share the development of my project with those of you who are working on their first (big) web application project.

The URLs of these topics are given below. I've also found a good book by the author of the topic "Modeling Web Application Architectures with UML".The details of the book are also given below.

So after having a basic knowledge about Web Engineering, I'm ready to use UML effectively. I know reading such articles and then using the ideas described in the articles in your project is just scratching a surface. You learn more when you apply what you think you have learned.


Modeling Web Application Architectures with UML: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/320000/317677/p63-conallen.pdf?key1=317677&key2=6115606711&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618
Web Engineering: Introduction and Perspectives:
http://www.idea-group.com/downloads/excerpts/01%20Suh.pdf
Lightweight Modeling of Dynamic Websites using UML:
http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/cs/ag-engels/Papers/2002/WebEngineering_CR_RealFinal.pdf
Extending UML to Model Navigation and Presentation in Web Applications: http://www.pst.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/personen/kochn/ExtendingUML.pdf



Book's details:

Building Web Applications with UML (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series) by Jim Conallen