Sam Gentile's Weblog
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Thursday, October 31, 2002 |
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There has been an earthquake in Southern Italy. Right now we're pretty scared as it was centered in the Campobasso area where most of my wife's family is from and where some of her cousins live. My family is in the Abruzzo region, which is actually quite close and where there were some evacuations as well, so scared there too. Calls being made... Update: Whew, everyone in Campobasso, Fossalto, Terelle del Sannio, and Boiano is OK...although the earthquake was very strong and they are fearful of after shocks..... 1:06:02 PM 
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I would like to urge everyone working on web-services related activities, from REST to GRID, from security to choreography, to consider writing up your experiences and/or views and submit those to the WebServices track of WWW2003. This track will have a combination of peer-reviewed papers and invited talks, and I am sure real-experinces papers will be an important part of this. The deadline for paper submission is November 15, so you have two weeks to write down you thoughts. The track is chaired by Steve Vinoski (Iona) and Paco Curbera (IBM Watson). I am on this program committee and on the pc for the performance and reliability track. I will propably do a paper exploring whether ws-coordination is indeed a good basis for constructing complex distributed interactions. Details once it is finished.[All Things Distributed] 12:41:47 PM
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Larry further gets to the heart of the matter on what Unit Tests ultimately mean: "Yes!! That's the key. [Sam Gentile's Weblog] The thing is, "unit testing" is almost a misnomer for what's going on; an xUnit test is as much about expressing requirements as it is about reflecting the inherent capabilities of the software module...When you have tons of such things and "you trust them to be solid" what you're saying is not so much "This dramatic refactoring does not change the inherent capabilities of the 500 software modules comprising it" as "This dramatic refactoring does not change the value delivered to the client." And that is a very good feeling to have." Yes, and this is what enables you to "faster" and apply "Continuous Refactoring" and have confidence at the same time in XP. Richard also talks about the importance of using unit tests. 10:09:45 AM
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Thinking in .NET: "Compare that to Microsoft's model, which is to give someone the job of finding and facilitating the transfer of useful technologies into the infrastructure of the .NET platform." [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog] 10:00:03 AM
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Interesting Benchmark. More ammo for the anti-EJB crowd [Don Box's Spoutlet] 8:13:55 AM
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RSS/2.0 Spoken Here. The grand RDF love affair fades... [Don Box's Spoutlet] 8:13:36 AM
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MSDN has a new article on using asynchronous business objects with Windows Forms 7:51:36 AM
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002 |
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Planting a seed. [Sam Ruby] Brilliant. 11:28:37 AM
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Microsoft unveils .Net speech platform. Technical preview leaves no doubt about entering a new market [InfoWorld: Top News] This has taken a while. I remember being exposed to Speech.NET almost 2 years ago while in Redmond. 11:25:54 AM
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Unit tests. There's nothing like doing drastic refactoring to the implementation of a class when you trust the unit tests to be solid. It's so much easier. [Jon Shute's Weblog] Yes!! That's the key. 11:24:29 AM
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O'Reilly has announced OnDotNet. At first glance it apeared to be a renaming of the .NET Dev Center until I found Shawn's editorial: "The goal of ONDotnet.com is to create a destination for the .NET community by ensuring content that is immediately applicable to working and weekend-warrior developers, while not ignoring the future of .NET and all of its related technologies (e.g. Web Services, GXA, XQuery, etc.)." Having Shawn as the editor is fantastic. Shawn has been in the trenches for years and as the ADO Guy has been dispensing valuable knowledge for years. Congrats! 8:32:03 AM
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Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |
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Jason is working on another book. If it is his CIL Programming and .NET Security books are any indication, it will be another fine addition to the library. 4:00:23 PM
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The consistently excellent Dino Exposito has a nice introduction to .NET Remoting. Unfortunately its in VB.NET but he's a great writer and teacher and it looks good. 3:18:40 PM
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Wow! Peter has joined the CLR team at Microsoft. I knew there were some big changes coming in this life but not this. This is awesome. It combines his passions in research with his in the CLR. Starting November 4, I'm going to be joining Microsoft as a Program Manager in the CLR team, doing my bit to "ensure that the CLR remains the most innovative multi-language runtime in the industry". Specifically, I'll be working with both the internal compiler teams and the external academic research community to help identify, evaluate, prototype & productize future enhancements to the CLR. Formerly described by me as my Dream Job, it is a perfect fit for my interests: it involves a high-ish % of externally-facing work interacting with the research community and speaking/writing about the CLR & Rotor, lets me spend time working at the systems level with the CLR & Rotor, and requires me to stretch my commercial software development muscles again after almost 2 years of shipping mostly prose and slides. Most importantly, the job gives me an opportunity to actually *impact* the platform I've spent the last couple years of my life working on. 8:51:25 AM
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Monday, October 28, 2002 |
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Pet Shop 2.0: Java vs. .NET. "My reading of this report is that .NET kicked Java's hinder in every single measure, from through-put and responsiveness to lines of code and lines of configuration required to build and run the app." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] That seems to be most other .NET bloggers reading of it (as well as others), so you have to start to wonder why some companies and IT shops continue to choose badly in the face of a lot of overwhelming and accumulating evidence. Not only do you get constrained to one language (well C with JNI for legacy) but you get to write more of it, have less features, less flexibility, and oh yah, by the way, its going to run a whole lot slower. It starts to become "Doctor, why does it hurt so much when I bang my head aggainst the wall" and "Well, stop doing that." 7:40:57 PM
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Part 3 of the very good and useful Introduction to IL has appeared with focus on debugging. 7:18:30 AM
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Sunday, October 27, 2002 |
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WIN-DEV - Part 2. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric] with pictures 10:28:03 PM
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Tim Ewald makes the case against SOAP Section 5 Encoding which the WSI-I was very smart to exclude and prohibit from their basic profile 11:39:32 AM
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Boy, AT&T Broadband has not been doing too well lately, at least not in this area. After the problems Friday, we lost all Cable service (TV & Internet) in the entire city Saturday for 18 hours into today. At least it kept me off the net-) 11:17:20 AM
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Friday, October 25, 2002 |
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Werner Vogels reports that he is close to having a professionally hosted Rotor Community Site which would be a site similar to sourecforge for Rotor. He has worked out a contract with CollabNet, a professional collaboration hosting company, and Cornell. Exciting stuff! 2:45:40 PM
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I've been having really bad cable modem problems the last 3 days and mostly can't upstream. A very big (- The AT&T guys will have to put a Repeater on the pole tomorrow. I also have been real busy with work. I have also been in machine hell the last few days. For work, I needed to install a future version of VS.NET on a future version of some Microsoft OS. I took some excellent advice and installed VMWare to run that OS inside it. Its pretty cool and seems to have come a long way since I last used it. The problem is that I made the "regular" NTFS drive on my system writable from VMWare and then tried to install that VS.NET back on top of the existing one on that drive. Suffice it to say that everything got trashed and I saw literally hundreds of files indicies being rebuilt (- Then I was in this strange state where I couldn't uninstall VS.NET and I couldn't install because it said there was an existing installation! After 6 hours of work with some Microsoft setup guys, suffice it to say that I know much more about msiexec.exe, msiinv.exe and msizap.exe and windowsinstaller than I ever cared to know! -) 11:20:11 AM
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Thursday, October 24, 2002 |
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Peter has posted the slides for his excellent RESTful Soap talk at the recent WS DevCon. This talk was one of my favorites at the conference. I really felt that I didn't understand REST at all before. Now, I feel that I at least understand the major points. After seeing all of the "controversy" on the blogs and elsewhere, I really felt that Peter did a fine job of presenting both sides of the argument fairly. Peter's assertion that the intersection of the two circles between REST and SOAP is one that I believe now: there are valuable things to be gained from it. 7:24:09 AM
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Wednesday, October 23, 2002 |
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BEEP and web services. I do like BEEP and I don't think I'm powerful enough! [Don Box's Spoutlet] 11:00:25 PM
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The end of the conference season. Thoughts on the last two weeks at the Web Services DevCon and WinDev [Pushing the Envelope] "His observation that C++, Java and C# arguably move us away from where we want to be, at least in terms of flexibly manipulating data resonated in a very deep way, because it feeds directly into my own interest in exploring the direct use of XML in distributed systems. " 7:03:25 PM
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HOW TO: Use the ASP.NET Utility to Encrypt Credentials and Session State Connection Strings This step-by-step article describes how to use the Aspnet_setreg.exe utility to encrypt credentials and session state connection strings.[Adrian Bateman (VisionTech)] 1:34:09 PM
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Here are the slides for the presentation Mark Ericson and Dave Seidel from Mindreef gave at the recent Web Services DevCon. We will revise this entry shortly to add links to the tools mentioned in the presentation. [Mindreef.blog] 1:33:23 PM
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PocketSOAP 1.4 beta 1. Now available, get it whilst its hot. [Simon Fell] 1:32:43 PM
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Tuesday, October 22, 2002 |
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Fun time at Win-Dev. [IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development] John tells the story about our late night session, the "coming out" party for CLAW and makes all his slides available. A big thanks to John for the opportunity, the fun, and an intense AOP learning experience. 4:28:28 PM
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A brief article was just added to the .NET center of The O'Reilly Network which covers the basics of the System.Net.Sockets namespace. Defines what a socket is, explains the basics of DNS and finally touches on how data is sent and received. Not a bad article if you're new to socket programming or just new to .NET and want to get familiar with its implementation.[Drew's Blog] 1:15:46 PM
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Overdue congratulations are in order for Pactrick on pregnancy #3! 12:22:41 PM
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Jason Bock on an all too familiar ASP.NET story "So I'm learning a lot about ASP.NET these days. Unfortunately, there's also been some personal gnashing of teeth. When someone tells you that your new project is the ASP.NET project that an intern converted over from ASP but didn't finish and didn't come back to the company, that sends up a lot of warning signs in my mind. You cannot imaging how bad this was butchered. The intern basically took all of the .asp files and stuck an "x" at the end, moving the VBScript code into script blocks and didn't put Option Strict On. So I have late-binding everywhere, which sucks - that was one of biggest beefs I had with ASP! Of course, CDONTS-type mail and old-fashioned ADO was all over the place as well. I spent the last two days frantically re-organizing the site so at least it had type-checking, all code-behinds, ADO.NET-only, and menial exception handling (among other things). "12:20:38 PM
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Extreme XML on MSDN has an article on Reverse Linking. 12:11:11 PM
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Here is an article (first of a series) that provides an Introduction to IL. Drew points out Actually though, parts one and two are available. 12:06:55 PM
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Monday, October 21, 2002 |
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Essential .NET Security. Keith Brown, fellow DM instructor and security geek, is writing Essential .NET Security online - a draft ASP.NET chapter kicks things off. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] I can't think of anyone more qualified to write such book. As Keith has so aptly demonstrated in his writings, talks, courses, and work over the last few years, Keith has a superb understanding of all the aspects of security both unmanaged and managed. I am quite pleased and looking forward to this must-have book. 6:10:41 PM
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Jeff Prosise's Cameo @ the CT .NET SIG. A synapsis of Jeff Prosise's ASP.NET talk... [Just The Facts] 11:37:40 AM
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Ethan Brown recently introduced himself. He is veteran of many of our favorite mailing lists and is contributing code to the very fine Genghis effort with some code. He has a new .NET blog. So welcome Ethan to the community! 10:04:11 AM
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Saturday, October 19, 2002 |
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The .NET COM Interop presentation that I did for the .NET User Group of Greater Boston is now available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample source code. Warning! The source code is rough, simple and unpolished sample code to illustrate Interop concepts and is not complete nor intended for production use. Update: The presentation that I did for the New Hampshire .NET Users Group is also available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample code. 1:49:58 PM
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Friday, October 18, 2002 |
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What a night. So I went down to the Wang Auditorium - Boston University Corporate Education Center for our .NET User's Group meeting and got "hijacked" by John Lam and Ingo Rammer stalking the hallways after a day of WinDev. Since I had to give up free pizza to go with them, we all went out to some fantastic barbecue at Smokey Joe's in Nashua. John needed another PC to do nasty CLAW stuff to in prep for his talks tomorrow (today?) so we went back to his hotel room and just spent hours digging into his Runtime Aspect Weaver. I haven't spent much time with this before so I was really amazed at how powerful this stuff is. There is so much potential. I can think of many product uses for this: enforcement of Design by Contract, company standards, logging and tracing, unit test enforcement, and more. Of course, some of the way he implemented this is quite sinister-) and when he weaved onto (into?) System.Windows.Forms.dll, I thought it was the end of my PC-). It still seems to be working. Of course, the three of us shared war stories as well as talking about many things. Ingo has pictures in case my PC does break to blackmail John-) 1:38:43 AM
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Thursday, October 17, 2002 |
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Type Safety in a Loosely Coupled World. In which I'm inspired by Tim Ewald and come to realize that runtime type checking is a very good thing. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Sam amplifies on this showing differences between languages and pointing to his excellent essay Dealing with Diversity. "Until recently, most programming activities were mono-cultures focused around a language centric base. A much more successful model is emerging. One in which the service provider has an opportunity to suggest what data types it would prefer. This gives the intended consumer an opportunity to adapt if it so chooses. Ultimately the service provider will decide whether or not it can process the request as sent." 2:26:28 PM
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Ken Rawlings has been bothered by a few things in .NET recently. I will leave the combustable issue of the size of the runtime aside for now but one point he made I would like to address: I honestly don't have any idea where he gets this figure but I don't think its correct. Neither XP Server (whatever that is, I assume you mean .NET Server which isn't even out yet) or SQL Server 2000 is required for ASP.NET development. For that matter, neither is VS.NET. You do need IIS right now (although even that is changing). You can develop .NET on a $99 copy of XP Professional, grab the .NET Framework SDK and Runtime, and use Notepad. So far, I'm at $99. But I didn't even have to do that. I could have used my old copy of Windows 2000 or Windows 2000 Sever, or even NT4. So my cost would have been $0. ASP.NET applications do not require SQL Server. If you are talking about data applications, you are talking about a whole different cart of apples. An industrial strength solution for the data enterprise will cost money no matter if its is Oracle, SQL Server or DB2 and that is a whole class of applications. And MySQL doesn't go in that category with its current limitations. This is not ASP.NET development. This is data application developemnt. Even if one did factor in the cost of a development version of SQL Server, it would be nowhere near $6000. Whenever Microsoft comes out with anything, many are quick to leap to the myth added costs, whether they are there or not. Follow-up; Brandon Lee makes the obvious point for me: "Ken Rawlings is bothered by the cost of .NET compared to OpenSource solutions. The comparison seems unfair because the greatest cost is SQL Server vs. MySQL. These are not fairly comparable because SQL Server is a full RDBMS (e.g. transactions) and people in the market for SQL Server will not be comparing it to MySQL. So you really have to compare .NET/SQLServer to something like Linux/Apache/Oracle and the price difference disappears. Ken Rawlings is bothered by the cost of .NET compared to OpenSource solutions. The comparison seems unfair because the greatest cost is SQL Server vs. MySQL. These are not fairly comparable because SQL Server is a full RDBMS (e.g. transactions) and people in the market for SQL Server will not be comparing it to MySQL. So you really have to compare .NET/SQLServer to something like Linux/Apache/Oracle and the price difference disappears. " 12:28:02 PM
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Scott Seely, who gave an interesting talk, which may be the first time a Microsoft employee showed Apache Axis alongside .NET, has written a new MSDN article on a timely subject Understanding WS-Security. Of course, the hardest working man in the business has written on this as well as supplyinmg a toolkit. 11:30:34 AM
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Drew is back! 11:15:57 AM
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Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |
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Mugshots. Nice to see some faces behind the names i've been meeting online these last 10 days in the Groove Experiments space. Kinda reminded me of the Mugshot discussion on the Grooveforums some time ago. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog] This is the group of people I spent most of the two days with. It seemed like we had known each other forever. We also went out to dinner on the last night along with Steve Loughran who is one funny Brit-). His talk was even better than last years (and funnier) and it would do developers good to remember we have to deploy these bloody things. 4:27:11 PM
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Too Many Web Services. Here's the "Top 10 Reasons You Know Youve Been Hacking Too Many Web Services..." that Tim and I presented at the Web Services DevCon (which was very fun, btw). [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Ah, Geek humor-) 4:12:00 PM
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Monday, October 14, 2002 |
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Clemens Vasters is probably the most influential and one of the smartest folks I interacted with at the DevCon. He blew my mind a couple of times but one of the biggest revelations he gave me was convincing me of the importance and use of EnterpriseServices in .NET. Now, I knew they were there and I knew it wasn't like COM: dead but still COM+ is so 3 years ago you know? It was Clemens who convinced me that not only is a lot of that stuff useful but some of it is actually extremely vital and important. So thats where I'm going in my research. The other thing is that Clemens is not even remotely (pun intended) worried about speaking his mind and is extremely smart. So I read with interest today as he skewers Roger Sessions (quite overdue): "Roger Sessions writes about WS-Transactions in his ObjectWatch news letter and the article shows that he shouldn't. First, his "Shootout at the Transaction Corral" has the most confusing lead-in story that I've ever seen for a story about transactions. It starts with how to get breakfast from two places at the same time and how that is a real life coordinated transaction -- it may be so, but why make a "real life analogy" if that by itself is so far fatched that it's losing the whole point." and "That's a pretty short-sighted statement, because that says that a fortress (I personally prefer the cuter term "fiefdom" coined by the guy who actually came up with this model: Pat Helland) is always implemented as a homogeneous system. Not so: A "fortress" is a system which can very well be implemented as a heterogenous assembly of services implemented on different machines, different OSses and different platforms. If that's so, you will need AT to coordinate local, distributed transactions across, for instance, J2EE and .NET. Web Services are about interop, not the internet!" and: I can tell you what SHOULD happen. IBM, Microsoft, and BEA SHOULD redo their model and make three changes: eliminate the WS-C specification, remove the WS-T dependency on WS-C, and put atomic web service transactions (ATs) where they belong, in the trash. " Well, I think that Roger Session SHOULD try to understand web services, transactions and real world system complexity. Even inside the "fortress", interop counts. 4:56:22 PM
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Andres Aguiar's Weblog: "When we looked at the application, we were surprised. The database design was really bad. There were tables with no primary key, referential integrity constraint missing, etc. So, we wrote the article focusing in the database design. You can find it in PDF here (304Kb)"
4:49:04 PM
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Fawcette has an article on Dig Into WS-Security with the WSDK, immeditely relevant after Keith Balinger's talk.They also have an article on Use X.509 Certificates with the WSDK. Again, great timing-) 10:28:38 AM
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Ingo and I started doing some research into the Rotor implementation of Garbage Collection Saturday night/Sunday morning in my office. We dived down into the assembly (language that is) and found some things. However, we don't have enough data to form any conclusions yet. We willl be continuing this in the next few weeks and wil report what we find. 10:21:03 AM
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Sam Ruby: "The Mindreef duo shared a wealth of immediately practical advice. If you ever consider deploying a web service based solution with components from more than one vendor, these are the guys to talk to." The single best thing for me, though, was that there was clearly a very strong shared point of view among most of the speakers as to the primacy of data. If it wasn't for the data, why would we bother writing code? I agree wuth Dave on the shared view on the primacy of data. Its wonderful to go a geeky development confrence with a lot of different people from different campis if you will and having them all get down to the same something. BTW, I have been holding off on posting anything about MindReef's tool and I didn't give much beta testign time to Beta 1, but after seeing Dave's demo at the conference, I just must get Beta 2 and get going. This tool is fantastic. The WSDL "View" is fantastic taking that jumbled mess and showing me an "object view" among many other features. I was also impressed by Dave's talk and demo. Rairly have I seen such a balanced and fair talk, as they gave equal mention of many other tools. A job well done Dave. 9:24:43 AM
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Sunday, October 13, 2002 |
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12:36:11 PM
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My presentation at the DevCon. After the presentation, I had an interesting conversation with Sam Gentile about VSIP and related stuff. [Andres Aguiar's Weblog] Yes, we had a great conversation! This product not only totally rocks but its use of VSIP is beyond what I've seen anywhere else. I am really impressed. Rss-subscribed. 12:32:03 AM
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Saturday, October 12, 2002 |
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Hats off to one and only Mr. Sells and his great Technical chair, Mr. Ewald for an experience that just rocked on every level! It was technical to the point that my brain hurt but friendly and intimate at the same time. I dare say that it was even better than the last one. I have never seen a confernece where people just couldn't wait to talk to each other between sessions. People were all grouped, reaching out to share their experiences, making connections, excited by what they just heard. It was especially great to see the Axis community join in and having a wider audience this time. I have a lot more to write about this: the group of Groove Experiments guys I hung out, last nights dinner, the sessions but I want to mention two peak things with me: the ever gracious Mr. Box spending an hour with me yesterday drilling in on COM Interop questions and the amazing, cool, rocking demo that Clemens gave! His stuff just absolutely rocks! Go get it! Gotta go, Ingo just called and they are few miles away from the house, coffee brewing! 10:21:44 AM
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Thursday, October 10, 2002 |
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Sam has posted his keynote online. 10:56:21 PM
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The amazing thing is that the Web Services DevCon II is turing into BlogCon I. I have attached faces to so many faces of bloggers (over 15 so far). The really nice thing is that everone already feels close with one another, like we already know each other to some degree. Besides the usual culprits that I already knew well like Peter Drayton, Sam Ruby, Don Box, Tim Ewald, Ingo Rammer, John Burkhardt, Steve Loughran, and Jim Murphy, I have met Greg Reinacker, Brian Graf, Chris Kinsman, Clemens Vasters, Matt Croydon, Yassar Shohourd (whose book rocks and Congrats on Microsoft!), and of course Brian Jepson (its finally good to meet your editor!). It feels so much more intimate than last year and I think Blogs have a huge amount to do with that. 10:50:15 PM
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I'm falling a bit behind: it's awesome to learn that Sam, Greg and others are diving into some Groove experiments - particularly in the area of web services. Based upon what I've seen thus far, it's going to be really interesting to see what might be possible .. particularly in the area of aggregation and integration. Sam and Greg ... thanks! [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Thanks Ray! And a big welcome to Sam Ruby who has joined us! 9:33:46 PM
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I'm home from Day 1 of the Web Services DevCon II for the night and I see that Brian has already beat me to the wire with great coverage from day 1. A great read. 9:24:27 PM
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Wednesday, October 09, 2002 |
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Reminder: I will be speaking tonight at the .NET User Group of Greater Boston on COM Interop in .NET. I have a suprise "famous" guest who will be making his debut as a Powerpoint Slide Monkey-)). There will be other out of town guests as well. This is the third time I have done this subject in two months and I must say that the presentations have been totally different each time! The poor folks at the Tyngsboro Group had to hear me drone on for 3 hours and 10 minutes and 91 slides! The really good news is that I have totally redone my presentation and streamlined it into a much more powerful and cohesive story. Come on down and see if you agree. Would love to meet even more people. 1:04:53 PM
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Can You Feel It In The Air?. That's DevCon fever... [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Yes, I can feel the power, brother!. Can I get an "Amen"? -) 11:07:24 AM
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Microsoft's New Enterprise View. "MEC 2002 opened yesterday morning with a keynote address by Paul Flessner, senior vice president of .NET Enterprise Servers, that was packed with product announcements, demonstrations, and promises for the future." Apparently, Microsoft thinks that .NET Server's support for Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) Virtual Disk Service (VDS) are both really cool. Mr. Fetcher also demo'd the One thing that does sound interesting is "Greenwich" which is supposed to be an intranet, secure platform for doing IM. If I can use MSN IM to connect to internal and external IM accounts simultaneously, that'd be pretty darn cool. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] 11:05:32 AM
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What's New in Outlook 11. "With current versions of Outlook, losing a network connection or working with a slow or unreliable network connection produces horrible results. If Outlook loses its network connectivity, error messages pop up before Outlook freezes completely. Outlook 11 eliminates this problem. Details have not been fully released, but Outlook 11 will work in what is termed "cached Exchange mode." When a fat pipe (a high-speed network connection) is present, Outlook will run much like it does now, where headers and message bodies will be downloaded as new messages arrive. When Outlook detects a slower pipe, either a dial-up or a cellular modem connection, only message headers will be downloaded. If a user wants to display a message, the entire message body will then be downloaded from the server. Outlook's default behavior will be to work against its local cache." Yes, this is much needed. 11:05:07 AM
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Tuesday, October 08, 2002 |
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Movable Radio Template Missing Page Read Macro. I had 465 Referal hits yesterday. Today I have like 85, including one only on my home page. I know from other people that its been hit a whole lot more than this. The only thing that changed was the "Movable Radio" template. Is there some strange bug with that or is there some problem today with http://www.weblogs.com/rankingsByPageReads.html? Solution from Roland Tanglao : For whatever reason, the Userland web bug that tracks referrers is not in the templates. If you add it back, your referrer list will be updated. http://radio.userland.com/trackingHitsAndReferers Ok, I think its working now. Thanks Roland! Update: Now seems to work on all pages except my home page, ven though its in there in the template. This is so fustrating as you expect an "official" template would work correctly and like all the others. 8:08:51 PM
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ITxpo: Gartner grades the Web services standards. Analyst firm positive on most specs, although weaknesses remain [InfoWorld: Top News] "Beginning with SOAP, which received a grade of Strong Positive, the highest mark Perlstein handed out, he said that its strengths include broad vendor support, broad tool support, and is relatively easy to use.On the other hand, SOAP is still a specification, and as such has lots of security holes and scalability issues." 7:36:58 PM
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There is a new MSDN article on .NET's No-Touch Deployment: This article demonstrates an exciting new feature to simplify deploying and updating a Windows Form Smart Client using a Web Server. The Task Management sample application referenced in this paper is provided in Visual Basic .NET. (yuck) 8:50:11 AM
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Windows Services are difficult to create and debug. There is no user interaction by design, and the system usually has a hard time releasing the service once installed and ran. In the first part of this two-part series, Rob Chartier shows how to create an extensible Windows Service that accepts custom plug-ins and never needs modification. 8:47:38 AM
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Chris Brooks pointed this C# SNMP Library out to me...I wonder if it's better to go lightweight like this when doing SNMP or to go through WMI? [Scott Hanselman's Weblog] 8:41:03 AM
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Scott Hanselman is a kind new blogger with interests and links in .NET, as well as a visually appealing site. Welcome Scott! Rss-subscribed. 8:40:10 AM
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Monday, October 07, 2002 |
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A dozen or so of us have been tossing around a lot of great ideas in the Groove Experiments shared space. One of our concerns, of course, is how to seemlessly share our findings publically with a wide public mechanism. Tonight, we decided to re-focus completly in a new direction, one direction. We felt that instead of continuing to be somewhat abstract that it would be better to take one of our ideas, discuss it, form requirements, and start writing code! We have decided to focus on a Groove to Weblog interface. We do realize that there have been two previous partial implementations that we will be looking at: Tim Knipp's Blogger Tool and the Agora Groovelog. One of the members is looking into those two. We realize that this kind of dump from me here now is not optimal. Ideally we would like to have things available in real-time as they happen publically. Maybe this Tool or Solution will go a long way toward that. 11:37:58 PM
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Five of us are at this moment, working from five different places in the world in Groove Experiments doing the Requirements and Design of a Groove to Blog tool. Real time. Amazing. Talk about Extreme Programming! 9:58:24 PM
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Sam Ruby: "I'm pleased to announce the Apache SOAP engine known as Axis just had it's first release. Performance, interoperability, and JAX RPC compliance have been significant focuses of this effort. Download it here." Yay! Congrats Sam! Can't wait to learn more about this at the DevCon. 12:37:11 PM
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Calibrating Next Step for 'The Sopranos'. HBO executives are pondering how best to seize the moment for a series that is a cultural phenomenon on par with the most successful television programs of all time. By Bill Carter. [Headlines From The NY Times] I would go as far as saying The Sopranos is the best written show in 25 years. There are episodes of this (the first 3 this year among them) that rank up there with some of the best works of literature - surealism, deep examinations of the pysche, the relatiionship of parents and children, examinations of the soul etc. Don't be confused by this show: this is not just a simple mob show. 11:55:47 AM
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Physics auction nets half-mil for Einstein. Last Friday's Christie's auction of original physics manuscripts included original works by Einstein, Curie, Newton and other physics rock-stars. The Einstein (which included an early attempt to prove relativity) went to an anonymous bidder for $500,000. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 11:53:11 AM
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Purpose and Goals of the Software Engineering Category: I plan to start posting and writing about areas in Software Engineering of interest to me including:
9:55:06 AM
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Winfessor, a development firm for Windows collaboration tools, and Tipic, provider of Windows based Jabber servers, announce the availability of a native .NET SDK. Winfessor’s SDK supports both enterprise and mobile messaging while Tipic’s server provides secure corporate messaging for the enterprise. The combined tools allow developers to create collaborative applications that can be integrated with instant messaging from Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ 8:30:02 AM
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Using Images and Files with SQL Server: Parts 1, Part 2 8:27:59 AM
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Here is a very basic Tutorial: Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins. And I mean basic. If you have never created an add-in, this may be a great place to start. I didn't find that this tutorial added much to the just running the wizards or explaining much but its a good start. Leo A. Notenboom wrote an more thorough MSDN article here but its still not the complete story. I plan on writing an article or 3 in this area very soon. 8:24:52 AM
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Web Services Threat Detection. Justin has a response on this: "Greg is asking about something that is near to my heart - Web Services Threat Detection. Unfortunately the best answer I ever came up with is this - I couldn't do it in 100% code. It requires people. I could monitor everything that comes in (who, what, when, and from where). I could check whether or not they were supposed to be sending the particular type of message at that particular moment in time. So what did I end up with? Nothing tangible. Just a bunch of ideas. Maybe I'll get a chance to implement them at the next gig... " BTW, this is one of the topics we are taking up in our Groove Experiments space. 7:48:57 AM
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Server-Side Asynchronous Web Methods. From Sam - Server-Side Asynchronous Web Methods. Justin has some great follow-up: " That is a very good article. It explains something that I've never seen mentioned in the documentation[1][2]. ... This is an awesome paradigm. I always questioned why you would want to expose your database as a web service. And here you have it. I wish I had some perf numbers for you, but I don't. And I wish I could tell you that I've done with this MS SQL Server, but I haven't. I have done it with Oracle 9i using XSQL (proprietary technology) through Tomcat 4.0.x. It works GREAT. I loved it. The main problem I had with XSQL is that there is no native proxy generation code. I had to use HttpWebRequest and friends. Not terribly complicated, but not nearly as nice as the proxies that WSDL.exe generates for you. Now if you are only accessing one table with one query, making it asynchronous isn't going to gain you anything. In fact, it might hurt performance because of thread context switches. But if you have multiple queries to run and you can wait on the results, it is a really cool way to do it. " [1] - if anyone knows where in MSDN this is documented, I'd really like to see it. Let me know. 7:48:37 AM
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Sunday, October 06, 2002 |
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Sue and I just got back from a night with Ingo and Katja. Ingo has pictures on his site, including a picture of me (yikes!). You'll have to get through a bunch of scary assembly language code from the JIT compiler to get to it though which seems only appopriate-). But, seriously, Sue and I had a great time in the North End and Harvard Square. We got to talk about all sorts of things and I am looking forward to the DevCon where we can properly disect Rotor in the hotel room-) 12:51:22 AM
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Saturday, October 05, 2002 |
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Make Your Existing Perl Apps .NET-compliant: Learn how CPAN Perl modules can be made automatically available to the .NET framework. The technique involves providing small PerlNET mediators between Perl and .NET and knowing when, where, and how to modify. 8:34:44 AM
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CIL Programming. Peter Drayton recently made some Observations on CIL books. He summed them up very well. For most developers I think CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET would be the best buy because its an introductory text and is much more readable as a result. [Cook Computing] I'm also re-reading this book at the moment and agree as well. I did a lot of reading in the last few weeks myself and hope to get around to posting on it. 8:21:33 AM
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Friday, October 04, 2002 |
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Just got this from .NET User Group of Greater Boston: Mark Anders, Product Unit Manager for the .NET Frameworks Team (responsible for ASP+, WinForms, and Base Class Libraries) will be interviewd tomorrow afternoon (Saturday 10/5/2002) on .NET Rocks http://www.franklins.net/dotnetrocks.asp.If you want to ask a question please email dotnetrocks@franklins.net with your question and a phone number where you can be reached tomorrow. No cell phones No portable (cordless) phones 3:25:27 PM
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Port Dock Lockout. Good morning! Question: what's the most important news story to the West Coast today? Can anyone say "port dock lockout?" Yet MSNBC tells us about the trial of the guy who had a bomb in his shoes. That guy is not able to affect any of our lives anymore. The port workers are gonna put thousands of people out of work. All because they don't wanna give up their entitlements. I hate entitlements. They already have jobs guaranteed for life. I wish I had such a guarantee. And people wonder why unions aren't appreciated in American life? Fuck them. [Robert Scoble] [The .NET Guy]3:19:44 PM
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Remember those Office PIAs I talked about and how important it was that Microsoft start creating vital PIAs for Interop? Of course you do, I'm sure-). Well, now they have actually released a Primer on how to use them. 2:44:35 PM
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A message for Dreamweaver Users ROTFL-) 2:27:38 PM
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Matt Griffith: "That is the lamest argument I've heard. And I hear it all the time. Does anyone really believe that Microsoft is going to decide that .NET is a bad idea and go back to preaching the gospel of COM? " 1:49:36 PM
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In my desire to find other VSIP partners or users, I was drawn to AppsChannel, Inc, which is a VSIP Partner using VSIP to develop tools that improve developer productivity. I was initially drawn because of the Press Release today for Visual Workbench for Visual Studio .NET. According to the release, "Created by using Microsoft .NET technology and targeted from inception to the developer using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Visual Workbench uses a flow-chart metaphor to conceptualize and render a programming solution in one step. The resultant logic flow map is stored as XML and can be repeatedly used to generate in-context source code directly to the code editor window." Interesting. They also have some other cool tools like DevBrowser, and CodeDrop. Update: Hmm, one thing, they seem to have forgotten is to use VSIP to get on the VS.NET splash screen and in the About Box. 1:40:12 PM
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Thursday, October 03, 2002 |
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NUnit 2.0 Released. From the readme: "This is the second major release of the xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities." "In the next few weeks we will be formulating the next release trying to incorporate as many requests as possible." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] 6:16:41 PM
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More than one way to skin a cat. Mayank Prakash's Web services architectures: Easier said than done is a great read. I especially like the fact that he draws a distinction between SOAP and Web services - two topics that most of the other magazine articles I've read seem to use interchangeably, and to their detriment. The guidelines in the article seem pretty sound to me, and pragmatic. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 4:14:35 PM
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Ingo has his First day in Boston. Today's been our first day in Boston. This city rocks! Yes, we know, that's why we live here-) Well, grew up there but up in NH now Let me tell you just one thing: if you like seafood and ever come to Boston, you really have to check out "Legal Sea Food" in Prudential Center (and two other locations). This restaurant really is great. Legal is the best seafood resterant in the country, period. Update: Ingo and I talked. Not only is he coming up to NH for leaf peeping, but he will be coming to my talk next week. Brian Graf also said he would be in town by then and coming! Man, its going to be quite an audience-) 4:13:47 PM
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Matt Powell shows how to make use of asynchronous Web methods on the server side to create high performance Microsoft ASP.NET Web services. 2:37:33 PM
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Lamont Adamas: "How I learned to stop worrying and love C#-After arguing for a long time that there's no difference between VB.NET and C#, the author is jumping on the C# bandwagon." Heh, thats me too. 2:23:44 PM
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I took Simon's most excellent recomendation on Yassar's (who, as Don told me, is now on his team) Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers. I rush-ordered this book, 24-hour shipped and read 1/2 of it yesterday. I don't know what to say that won't sound like I'm going to an extreme or paid by Yassar-) but this is the single best Web Services book I have ever read. Its clear, its real-world, it's focused on the right things and its even Keith's favorite Web Services book. Its approach is very readable yet thorough and I'm finally starting to understand Schema. 2:03:09 PM
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Don sent me email last night and then he surfaced. 1:54:43 PM
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Wow! Greg and I are just knocked out by the response to our Groove Experiments space announcement. We just about have a full house with all sorts of incredible ideas flying around. We already are starting to see the seeds of some valuable experiments and projects that will contribute to the overall community. I like to think of it as a Hive Mind. Its powerful. 1:22:47 PM
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Web Services Threat Detection.
What makes this harder is that the caller can disguise the request using character or parameter entities, or by using a processing instructions or xsi:include. The usual stuff when dealing with XML, you can't just do a binary compare to see if the document matches a signature you know about. Talk to Eugene Kuznetsov at DevCon, he went over all this stuff at the last one. Steve Loughran also mentioned that they had some interesting security holes to patch in the system he worked on, I think there was one that allowed a caller to download the server's password file by handing in the right XML request. Man, I wish I was going. Dang customers! Can't they wait a couple weeks to start beta testing? [Gordon Weakliem's Radio Weblog] Yes, Eugene Kuznetsov's talk was most interesting. It seems that there is a whole lot of research and work going into the hardware aspect of Web Services as well with sorts if interesting devices coming up. And Steve Loughran had some ideas in this area as well. Gordon, you're not going? Bummer. We'll miss you. 1:14:08 PM
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Wednesday, October 02, 2002 |
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Greg Reinacker and Sam Gentile would like to announce our creation of "Groove Experiments". We have been working and Grooving to flesh out some ideas. This dynamic shared Groove space has three main purposes: 1. Groove and Blogs. There are certain synergies between Groove spaces and weblogs. Let's enumerate and expand a bit on the possibilities. In particular, one great synergy, especially in the Web Services and .NET communities, is the initial posting of some technical idea or topic on a Blog and then wanting to get into a more "direct" and detailed discussion or interaction about that. Groove is excellent for that immediate phase of fleshing out and discussing the idea(s). So the first main area and discussion is around providing the ability to have detailed discussions about blog topics and explore the synergy further. 2. Groove and Web Services - We believe that there are some great ideas to be explored in this area. Let’s get them on the table. Maybe have a groove space aggregator that lets you see new entries for multiple groove spaces, so you can keep up with all the activity for topics on your blog. There are also plenty of areas of discussion on Web Services in general and where they should go. 3. Groove Platform Applications - We believe that the value of Groove is not in the existing tools but in the underlying Platform and the decentralized peer-to-peer communications mechanism that can create some really interesting applications. Let’s explore. This is something me and Greg have been working on. I want to emphasize that neither of us is an employee of Groove Networks and that this shared space is not speaking for Groove or sanctioned by Groove. We believe that there are fine areas of interesting research to be done here. If you are interested in participating, please email Greg or myself to be sent an invitation. Ideally, we would like to keep it to fewer than 12 participants.
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Last update: 11/1/2002; 8:38:11 AM .
