Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog
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Saturday, October 12, 2002 |
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Web Services DevCon really rocked!!
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 Ruby's Keynote Online
Sam has posted his keynote online. 10:56:21 PM
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DevCon II becomes BlogCon I
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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Brian Jepson's Notes from Day 1 of Web Services DevCon II
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: COM Interop tonight at Microsoft Waltham
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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The Revival is about to Begin
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
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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Gartner grades Web Services Standards
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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No-Touch Deployment in the .NET Framework
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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Creating an Extensible Windows Service
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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Groove Experiments First Public Report
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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Collaborative Extreme Programming
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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Axis 1.0 Release
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 Software Engineering Category
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:
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Winfessor and Tipic Collaborate to Deliver .NET Jabber Instant Messaging Development Tools
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, 2
Using Images and Files with SQL Server: Parts 1, Part 2 8:27:59 AM
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Tutorial: Creating Visual Studio Add-Ins
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 continued
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 continued
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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Dinner with Ingo and Katja in Boston
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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Last update: 10/13/2002; 7:54:17 PM .
