Jeffrey A. Miller: .NET, Web Services

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 01:59:17 GMT

Website Organization Strategy. Good tip. [Robert McLaws: BoyWonder.NET]

Ray Ozzie's Early Groove Architecture Stories

Wed, 14 May 2003 03:10:37 GMT

Here's a good story of a critical decision gone right.

Tue, 13 May 2003 20:41:27 GMT

The SOAP/XML-RPC/REST Saga, Chap. 51. (SOURCE:"timb")-A lucid, easy to understand explanation of SOAP, XML-RPC and REST. Bravo, Tim!
<quote>
Today Dave Sifry of the excellent Technorati announced an API for the world. The API, as announced, is about as purely Webby a thing as you can imagine. Dave Winer pushed back, suggesting a more SOAP/XML-RPC kind of approach. This is maybe the single central issue in architecting Web apps right at the moment, so I think it's OK to take a few more whacks at the supine equine. Furthermore, I think the issue is simple enough that anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, ought to be able to understand it. So I've provided an introduction for the non-geeks who read ongoing, all three of them, and looked a little more closely at the Technorati situation.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Publisher shake-up

Fri, 09 May 2003 05:36:25 GMT

Rockford Lhotka's site mentions some shifting in publisher ownership. Much to my surprise Wrox Press has gone belly-up. APress and Wiley have moved in to cast lots for the scraps.

APress has purchased the bulk of the Peer Information (including Wrox Press) titles. Wiley purchased the Wrox Press brand name and 36 titles, and now the liquidation of the assets is complete with APress buying all remaining assets.

Rocky's book, Visual Basic.NET Business Objects is sold out on the major online retailers.

3500 copies of the book were printed by Wrox Press before they went bankrupt. From what I am hearing, these are sold out so Amazon and bn.com no longer have them. It is possible that you may find a copy in a physical book store, but otherwise I am afraid we'll have to wait until the first Apress printing of the book.

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:28:09 GMT

Revisiting the Virtual Press Room.

Phil Wainewright

I've just subscribed to Phil Wainewright's archive of press releases at looselycoupled.com. (PR folk take note: I subscribed voluntarily to this feed.) An analyst and writer focused on Web services, Phil has built an application that publicists can use to post their press releases to his website, which in turn flows them out as an RSS feed. ... [Jon's Radio]

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:10:58 GMT

Stop The DataGrid Madness. ASP.NET comes with a lot of server controls out of the box. One of them is the DataGrid server control. It offers some good packaged functionality, but it suffers from a lot of shortcomings. For some reason, many ASP.NET developers feel compelled to introduce hack upon hack to get the DataGrid to handle the features that they want. [The angryCoder Blog]

Tue, 22 Apr 2003 19:43:19 GMT

FoxPro On Linux, Drama Ensues. bltfast32 writes "I don't know how many people have been following this, but this is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Whil Hentzen, prominent FoxPro and ... [Slashdot]

C# XML-RPC client

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:05:27 GMT

XmlRpcCS 1.8 [freshmeat.net]

An C# XML-RPC client and server for .NET applications.

Mainframes Never Die?

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 14:18:24 GMT

TechRepublic: CIO Update: Future of the IBM Mainframe Looks Surprisingly Good [Linux Today]

Hmmm...

What I hated about the IBM mainframes was that a lot of the organizations that relied on them were staffed by stuffy, old-school programmers unable or unwilling to see the value in doing anything new with technology. Many times it was obvious that they were hoping to coast on their current skillset in their current job until retirement.

Forget trying to teach an old COBOL jockey about object-oriented techniques. Heck, even event-driven programming was a stretch after eating-drinking-sleeping top-down procedural programming all your life. I know COBOL programmers who insist that too many separate paragraphs leads to excessive performance overhead. You're kidding, right? What about code maintainability? Oh, right, I forgot. You're only interested in job security.

I once made the mistake of complaining about a COBOL program that I had to maintain and modify for Y2K. I said to my manager, "Man, this code ugly, and there's no documentation or comments to help." It turns out that he was the primary author of the code. He said, "Jeff, if I'd have documented all of this stuff, I'd be making $20,000 less than I am."

Don't get me wrong. I understand COBOL. I used it for close to six years between college and three years of dreadful jobs that included it. Now, I don't even include it in my advertised skillset. Yeah, I could still go back and write a PICTURE clause if I had to. Ironically, I wrote a utility in Turbo Pascal and then Quick BASIC 4.5 Professional to generate PICTURE clauses for me.

What I don't like about COBOL is its monolithic style. All variables are global. Encapsulation and modularity are hard to come by. There is no support for parameter passing to in-program functions. Dynamic arrays are a pain. And, if you're data is not fixed-length in every instance, you may as well tear your hair out manipulating variable-length strings. Don't believe me? Just try presenting a "Last Name, First Name" on a report. You'll have to munge it up with the STRING statement DELIMITED BY SPACE (or some similar junk that I've thankfully forgotten). Sure, you can call other programs by way of a LINKAGE SECTION, but please! That's a lot of crap to go through just to introduce some modularity and reusability.

Now, we could argue that some "innovative" (not) companies have revamped COBOL to put a new face on an old language. But I say that it's not really COBOL any more. Micro Focus tried to introduce Object COBOL in the mid 1990s. Now Fujitsu has introduced a .NET compatible compiler. No thanks. I don't feel like arguing about the merits of COBOL. I hope Fujitsu sells a ton of the product. More power to them.

Anyway, as far as the platform itself goes, the IBM mainframe is very robust and well-engineered. A system administrator friend of mine told me that they took an IBM mainframe and carved it up into about 1,000 virtual machines and ran virtual Linux servers on a couple of the VMs. Now that's cool.

GoogleBoxing

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 17:59:48 GMT

Display the result of a Google query on your blog in a special box by using the Google API. You can integrate Radio UserLand and Frontier by using Google Glue. The Google API is a web service.

From my journal

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:50:00 GMT

OK, don't take this post as whining, but, after all, it is my blog, and I can come off as whining if I want. Between working two jobs and other home duties, keeping up an active weblog is difficult. If I have something profound or brilliant to say, I usually wait until Wednesday, so Dean might just pick it up for his Thursday technoCache over at blogs4God.

I haven't been posting quite as much as I would like. I have, however, been journaling. I currently use TreePad to maintain several spaces that keep my equivalent of the Franklin Covey Daily Record of Events. I often journal things that might make good blog entries. In fact, I often tag entries with some kind of designator to describe the type of post/entry. One of these tags is [Blog]. This means "I don't have the time to blog this right now, but I'm including it in my journal for blogging later."

OK, so here are some of my [Blog] entries from March:

BoyInk - I enjoyed the content I found during my brief visit--especially the article, "Church Websites - What We Don't Know." He also had a telling encounter about customer service via email. (Couldn't find a permalink, but the date was February 22, 2003).

blogs4God describes the process for "cache of the Day."

I don't remember why I visited wibsite.com, but there are plenty of great one-line zingers on the blog there.

I have a big mouth. I'm constantly reminded of that. Foot sandwich is a regular part of my diet. Here's a post at blogs4God that gives some good advice for those with similar problems.

While searching for help on how to manage multiple versions of the .NET framework, I stumbled on this article with a good explanation of the version probing process and this blog with some very useful .NET stuff.

Dean on table-less design.

More to come later, as I dump my journaled blog entries.

What's the deal?

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 01:37:33 GMT

So why is Microsoft so opposed to nesting like-named elements? For instance a folder element containing more folder elements? Their operating system has been based on that concept for over 20 years. Sure, internally, the FAT doesn't necessarily break it down hierarchically other than to point to other folders by using some kind of reference that determines the relationship, but what's the difference?

This is frustrating. Microsoft Visual Studio displays the message, "Although the XML document is well formed, it contains structure that Data View cannot display. The same table (navpoint) cannot be the child in two nested relations. See, they conceeded that my XML data is well-formed. What their basically saying is, "Since we insist on fitting hiearchical data into a relational metaphor, you are not allowed to use GUI editing on your XML data." Sounds like a limitation in their perspective and thinking. They chose to force the relational model. They chose not to provide a means to edit data in a grid format despite its "irregularity."

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 02:09:36 GMT

"Open Spectrum FAQ" [Daypop Top 40]

Recipe for Greatness

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 18:03:11 GMT

The disruptive Web. If you're creating a Web service that you hope will have a disruptive impact, the lessons are clear. Support HTTP GET-style URLs. Design them carefully, matching de facto standards where they exist. Keep the URLs short, so people can easily understand, modify, and trade them. Establish a blog reputation. Use the blog network to promote the service and enable users of the service to self-organize. It all adds up to a recipe for recombinant growth. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]

Here is a provocative recipe. I wonder what we can cook up. I wonder what he means by "self-organize." I certainly do a lot of organization on my own, and I'm always looking for ways to improve.

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 01:07:55 GMT

Note to self: Visit this site later. SOAPBuilders is a community involved in some effort to advance SOAP implementations and interoperability.

Web-based ASP.NET Enterprise Manager for MSDE and SQL Server 2000

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 03:30:26 GMT

I found an interesting open source project that fills a hole in the Microsoft strategy for MSDE. It's a third-party open source web application that enables much of the same functionality that comes with SQL Server Enterprise Manager. It is available in C# and VB.NET on the ASP.NET Enterprise Manager page at SourceForge.

Wonderful WSDL

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 22:37:00 GMT

A guide to WSDL if I ever have time to read it. Ironic, since this is supposed to be the Busy Developer's Guide to WSDL 1.1 or something like that.

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 05:26:48 GMT

SSL. I'm working on what's hopefully the last problem for PocketSOAP 1.4, which is related to SSL on PocketPC. The timeout support recently added uses select, so I was dismayed to read this post about problems with SSL and select. sigh. [Simon Fell]

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 05:23:58 GMT

WS-*. Sam has notes from Don's earlier webcast on WS-Routing, WS-Coordination & WS-Tx. I just wish the quality of the actual webcast was better, it peaked at around 100-110 participants, but the audio quality was poor & choppy all the way through. StreetFusion used to handle webcasts with way more participants [at least an order of manitude more], without any audio glitches. [Simon Fell]

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 22:30:15 GMT

Microsoft drives .Net into car dashboards. Company working on version of Windows CE for automobiles [InfoWorld: Top News]