Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog

	Saturday, October 05, 2002

Make Your Existing Perl Apps .NET-compliant 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

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

	Friday, October 04, 2002

.NET Rocks Interview: Mark Anders ASP+, WinForms, BCL 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

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

Office PIAs Revisited 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

A message for Dreamweaver Users ROTFL-) 2:27:38 PM

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

Another VSIP product: Visual Workbench 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

	Thursday, October 03, 2002

NUnit 2.0 Released 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

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

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

Server-Side Asynchronous Web Methods 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

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love C# 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

Real World Web Services - it rocks! 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

Don has surfaced Don sent me email last night and then he surfaced. 1:54:43 PM

Wow! Lots of interest 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

Web Services Threat Detection. Web Services Threat Detection A while back in another life, we considered the idea of a real-time threat detection system for our web services. The idea was we could build (or buy) an infrastructure component that could analyze the incoming bit stream, detect anomalies, and react appropriately. [Greg Reinacker's Weblog] 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

	Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Announcing Groove Experiments shared space and work 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.   3:07:04 PM

	Sunday, September 29, 2002

Observations on CIL books. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 8:13:54 PM