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Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog
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Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
Intel Rich Client Series. I'd like to announce a new series of articles specially requested by Intel on the topic of making the most of the client tier. Topics include high-performance graphics, data and XML querying and filtering on the client-side, smart client deployment and more. Two articles are up now with more to come through the end of the year. Enjoy. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
10:46:08 AM 
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Rich Client Database Interactions with ADO.NET. Shawn Wildermuth and Chris Sells
"In the .NET Framework, rich clients can bring database servers to their knees, just like Web-based applications. But with the disconnected nature of ADO.NET, your rich clients can manipulate and analyze database data without impacting the database server. Once you have the data in the rich client, you can do high-performance analysis of the data—including sorting, filtering, and querying—without expensive server calls. In this article we will show you how to use DataSet, DataView, and XmlDataDocument to make your rich clients work with database data in a disconnected way." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
10:45:52 AM
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Multithreaded .NET Web Service Clients. Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells
"Unresponsive programs are extremely frustrating to use. Applications that sometimes freeze for a moment are a source of much irritation, especially if they don't provide any feedback on what they are doing, or how long it is likely to be before they start responding again. This behaviour can be particularly common among applications that use remote facilities such as Web services. This article describes how to maintain responsiveness in .NET Windows Forms rich client applications, even when invoking potentially long-running Web services, by using multiple threads." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
10:45:26 AM
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foreach is Your Friend: Part 2. Just when you'd thought you're learned everything there was to know about foreach in part 1, I've got more in part 2! This part (the final : ) discusses implementing support for foreach in your own custom types as well as how to patch holes in the framework where they forgot to add foreach support. Enjoy. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
Is Chris on a roll today?
10:45:00 AM
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Less Than 40 Seats Left at the Web Services DevCon. Register now for the Web Services DevCon, October 10-11 in greater Boston, featuring Don Box, Tim Ewald and keynote speaker Sam Ruby. In addition to amazing talks by Microsoft’s Web Services Program Manager, Keith Ballinger, and IBM Distinguished Engineer, Noah Mendelsohn, as well as wizened practitioners from HP, Macromedia and the W3C, all attendees receive exclusive SellsBrothers t-shirts available nowhere else. Register now! [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
10:44:12 AM
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Jim Allchin wants more consumer oriented Web Services.
"When we look out on the landscape, we don't see enough Web sites--and, in particular, customer-facing sites--that have XML Web services interfaces that people can take advantage of," Jim Allchin, Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows, told CNET News.com [via CNET News.com] [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]
Maybe if they implemented all of GXA (specs does not equal robust proven implementations) and had it out there in full, we would. Right now, there isn't enough of a robust infrastructure and services for consumer oriented Web Services.
5:37:12 AM
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Thanks to Clemens Vasters for clearing up a place of confusion for me on whether COM/Interop marshaling happens for COM+ components in the EnterpriseServices namespace of .NET or ServicedComponents. It doesn't. This would have been rather inefficient if it did. He says "Replicating a post to the DM dotnet list here. The most common misconception about ServicedComponents is that they require the use of COM/Interop and really everyone has bought into that belief. And it is simply wrong."
"The Enterprise Services team went a long and very smart way to separate COM Marshaling from COM Transport when they built System.EnterpriseServices and they've done it in such a smart way that only a few people seem to see that they did it. In fact, ServicedComponents make COM transport (including the LRPC mapping) an alternative way of transport that's deeply integrated with the Remoting infrastructure. However, the difference is that ServicedComponent will bypass the channel architecture and replave that with the COM channel architecture:
COM/Interop marshaling does not happen for ServicedComponents."
5:03:33 AM
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Wednesday, September 11, 2002 |
My wife and I just stepped out onto the dark San Diego balcony to observe a moment of silence at 8:46AM EST. I never wrote about this. My best friend from childhood was late to work in WTC because he missed his train by 20 minutes that morning. It saved his life. Man, I can't write anymore. What else is there to say today? Anything geeky would be nonsensical today. Guliani is reading the names on TV now. Can't write anymore.
8:55:42 AM
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Tuesday, September 10, 2002 |
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Monday, September 09, 2002 |
We're outta here off to America's Most Liveable City - San Diego for a week. I'll be working with one of my clients and then Sue and I will get some vacation time. Blogging will probably be non-existant or spotty at best.
8:31:46 PM
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Here is an article on .NET Enterprise Servers, particularly the ones (finally!) that are actually provide some .NET in them. I and many others have already waxed about the misguided marketing message that has taken BackOffice Servers and re-named them .NET Servers when they have nothing to do with .NET and confuse everyone. Hopefully this is starting to change.
7:25:20 AM
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This is way cool!! A detailed development article that shows how to build your own location-based services application in 30 days. Compact .NET PocketPC app that overlays your position on a MapPoint .NET map, using a CompactFlash GPS. Uses SQL Notification Services to send out MSN instant messages for ads or nearby users. Technologies used include GPS / NMEA, WinForms, Compact .NET, MapPoint .NET, SQL NotificationServices, MSN Messenger, etc.
7:20:07 AM
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Sunday, September 08, 2002 |
I notice that today someone googled today (as many other days) for VSIP.NET. I can't really talk about the specifics of VSIP but ONE thing it is NOT right now is Managed. All of VSIP is unmanaged plain ATL and C++ code. That's all I can say. You certainly can use the Automation model (in either C# or VB) from VSIP code as I demonstrated here on my blog but there are no native managed interfaces yet.
5:59:51 PM
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gnat's Journal: "I tried the local Starbucks. Apparently it has chromosome damage, for it must be the only Starbucks in the country without net access. I'll try the next closest one (one mile north). I asked the trendy gent behind the counter. He said "no", then said "I had a guy call last week. He asked if I was wired. I said `Yeah baby, I just had a triple!' Turned out he was asking about net access." So I've downloaded macstumbler (thanks for the pointer, Ask!) and will wardrive my neighbourhood and the area near Barnes and Noble today." The Starbucks here doesn't have access yet either. They said hopefully by the end of the month. I'd have to drive 30 miles to find another hotspot. :-( [snellspace]
Neither does the one here. The only one of 28 in Northern Mass/Southern NH that doesn't they say. And it downright is a pain-)
5:54:16 PM
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Binary XML.
Clemens Vasters, Ingo Rammer, and Brad Wilson are all debating binary XML.
I think they all agree that for long-term storage you need to leave it as text. For transient messages, Binary XML is a valid option in my mind. Especially when you want to send XML to a wireless device.
One thing that Brad mentioned was solving the endianess problem. I'm not sure why he put this as a con. This has already been solved in the XML 1.0 world. Take a look at UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32LE, etc. They have a nice 2 or 4 byte order mark (BOM) as the first 2 or 4 bytes of the data. This tells the processor the format and the endianess. In fact most XML parsers are smart enough to not need that BOM. Because the 1st character represented in XML has to be '<'; So I see this as a non-issue.
I have a couple of issues though after thinking about Binary XML in general -
- Is data still going to be represented as strings? I.e. I have the following fragment 10. To the human eye that is a number. So in my binary serialization do I serialize that as 1 byte for the value or 2 bytes (assuming UTF-8) for the characters '1' and '0'? Or even 4 bytes because it is a 32-bit integer?
- This relates to the first one - if I do serialize the data as its native representation (i.e. a 4 byte integer), aren't I requiring an XML Schema for that XML now? Do I have to have some type of embedded pseudo schema that says 'units is a 4 byte integer'?
Let's say we do continue to save everything in the binary as characters (i.e. 2 bytes for '1' and '0'). What is binary saving us? The <, >, and whitespace?
I haven't thought it all the way through yet. And these are some questions that I've raised in my own head. Maybe someone else already knows the answers. [News from the Forest]
5:51:57 PM
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Fustrated by a continual reluctance of my body to lose any more weight I decided to return to my old ways and declare a weekend of fitness. I got on the treadmill and did a 44 minute walk/run for 3.12 miles and 427 calories on Friday night. Then Sue and I had the good fourtune of getting lost in Nashua's Mines Fall Park for an hour walk. Still fustrated with no weight loss I picked up Runner's World magazine last night and on the cover is Running With the President - Secrets of Our Fastest President. This may sound corny but this story and this guy really impressed me. Almost 56 and he runs every day and runs 6 minute miles!!! He ran a 20:29 in the certified 3 mile course in the article. He mentions that it helped him give up drinking, lose ten pounds and deal with this years stress. He then says the thing that got me "If the President of the United States can make the time, then anyone can." How true. I got my butt up this morning and just peeled off a 45 minute run in the hills around the house.
9:39:06 AM
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