Sam Gentile's Weblog

	Friday, October 25, 2002

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

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

	Thursday, October 24, 2002

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

	Wednesday, October 23, 2002

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

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

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

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

PocketSOAP 1.4 beta 1. Now available, get it whilst its hot. [Simon Fell] 1:32:43 PM

	Tuesday, October 22, 2002

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

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

Overdue congratulations are in order for Pactrick on pregnancy #3! 12:22:41 PM

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

Extreme XML on MSDN has an article on Reverse Linking. 12:11:11 PM

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

	Monday, October 21, 2002

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

Jeff Prosise's Cameo @ the CT .NET SIG. A synapsis of Jeff Prosise's ASP.NET talk... [Just The Facts] 11:37:40 AM

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