Tim Knip continues to push the envelope on building hybrid Groove web applications. So, Dave, still see Groove as a closed box? Tim took the product and started building applications using our GDK. And it should be obvious that its a powerful and extensible platform, with lots of room for scripting and modifications.
8:57:30 AM
I've been spending some more time recently with .NET. Its a joy to program to. The async web services proxies leave something to be desired though. When I use this model ie. BeginFoo, EndFoo, I don't get to see the Soap faults. I haven't been able to get the right exceptions. If I use the sync version it will throw a WebException (or is it a SoapException?) but with the Async model I'm getting System.IO.Exception when it tries to read the result data.
Another annoyance: some classes have thread afinity. They will only accept certain operations on the thread that created them. The obvious example is UI objects. So if I want to populate a UI control based on the result of a web services call I need to either call the service synchronously, which is dumb because my UI thread will block, or use System.AsyncCallback. The callback comes on a background thread, and then I have to marshal over to the UI thread using Control.Invoke. I would much rather have a system like Groove's model where I create a proxy object to use as my AsyncCallback so that it gets marshalled for me. There is probably a way to do this, but I haven't found the black magic yet. Come to think of it, the black magic in Groove's libraries is pretty crafty...
8:49:53 AM
Haven't been reading blogs or blogging them for a while. Just checked in at center of the blog universe to hear that Dave has been ill. Here's wishing him a speedy recovery and definitely stay off the cancer sticks.
Meanwhile, life as a front line developer has had me a little stressed out lately. I've been suffering from insomnia for almost two weeks now. I called my doctor and he said he could give me an appointment on July 8. So I freaked out and walked into a hospital and acted crazy enough (wasn't much of a stretch) until they gave me something to knock me out. So now I've been able to stay asleep until about 2 a.m. Its weird for me, because ever since I had a major health crisis about 5 years ago (not as serious as Dave's) I have been super mega healthy guy. I even recently gave up caffeine (it was harder to do than cocaine). My mind just won't shut down. I even did a 50 mile bike race in Cat 3-4 and still couldn't fall asleep.
The worst part of this experience was that I had to DNS at the Fitchburg-Longsjo Classic stage race this week. I designed my training program to peak for this event, but I guess I'll have to try again next year...
