09 June 2004

Websphere and IIS Best practices ???? Websphere and IIS Best Practices Here's a strange plea for help. Has anyone out there ever come across any whitepapers or articles on Websphere and IIS best practices?     10:07:32 AM    comment [] Vanished without a trace? Vanished without a trace Carl Franklin said about me, in this week's DotNetRocks that I'd written a bunch of books and then "vanished without a trace". It's my fault he said that, and it's a darn sight better I guess than saying "sunk into obscurity", or "crawled back into some dark hole somewhere". I had emailed him to say hi and signed off the bottom of the email with the line "That guy that wrote a ton of books for Wrox Press, then vanished into Obscurity/Consulting". Anyways, until I muster up enough energy to get off my lazy behind and add the rest of the links to this blog I thought I should explain a little about where I've been and what I've been up to. The last book I wrote for Wrox was actually nothing to do with Windows or VB. I wrote a tome called "Beginning GTK+/GNOME" which covered GUI development under Linux using the GTK/GNOME framework. It was a bit of fun and a pet project of mine that Wrox were kind enough to let me pursue in book form. I'm better now though and back in the world of Windows. That book was some years back (1999 I think, or maybe 2000), and a couple of years back I switched to Apress as my publisher, writing ADO.NET : From Novice To Professional. The title idea cam eafter watching Disney's The Emporer's New Groove, and I actually wanted to use Zero To Hero guide, but for some reason they changed it. That book was supposed to be followed with a Server Side RAD book, and then a Design Patterns book, both of which got cancelled at my request after I failed to make a dent in them because of problems in my personal life (one of which was working at Enron). These days, I'm a consultant and evangelist with Edenbrook in London, but I'm still writing, and really ramping up the writing side of things at the moment. I've been writing flight sim articles for the past couple of years for PC Pilot magazine here in the UK, but I just started work on a new ADO.NET book for Apress. I also have plans for something to do with Tablet PC though at this stage I can't say just what. To be quite frank the first part of this millenium has been totally crappy for me on a personal health, security and finance front (not helped by working at Enron, nor by Wrox going under), and that kind of knocked me back there for a while. Things are really looking up now and if everything goes the way I want it to you're not that far off seeing a sea of Peter Wright books on shelves and perhaps even a speaking engagement or two in the not so near future. Wish me luck. 8:27:15 AM    comment [] The Framework is the star The Framework is the star Jason Bock (fellow Apress author and all round code-dude) has an interesting item in his blog about language choice in .net. It seems Microsoft have been receiving complaints that too many code examples are in C# and so they decided to redress the balance and add a lot more VB.NET examples. Jason makes a good point though when he says "People, c'mon! If you call yourself a .NET developer, you should be able to read both VB .NET and C#. " You see, most of the code examples that people look up in the online help and on MSDN center around the framework itself, not the language in question. If you are trying to find out how hard it is to use, for example SqlConnection, is it that tough for VB developers to translate SqlConnection dbConnection = new SqlConnection( connectionString ); to Dim dbConnection as SqlConnection dbConnection = _ new SqlConnection( connectionString ) I think not. The whole thing about .NET is that the framework is common across all .NET compliant languages. C# code is not that terse (especially when it's written to demo something clearly) that a non C# programmer couldn't understand it. Even if you do have a lot of problems with C#, just go pick up a short intro to the language to find out how to create objects etc and you'll be just fine. Focus on the framework, not the language - the language is the least of your worries when learning .NET.     8:08:43 AM    comment []

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