December 2003 - Posts
Lately, as a majority of the homeless bloggers from GotDotNet have moved to weblogs.asp.net, I see more and more bloggers adding a special [MS] tag after their names to indicate to the readers that they're Microsoft employees.
In addition, the main feed of weblogs.asp.net now has separate feeds for post from non-Microsoft employees and for post only from Microsoft employees. It seems that reading posts from people from the b0rg could polute one's mind, hence the warnings.
Excuse me guys, but even if I'm a Microsoft employee, I won't add the [MS] tag to my name. Blogging about .NET is an activity of my own, it's not part of my job. I blog about things I think interresting or relevant about .NET and computers and technology in general, I do this by passion, not by obligation or by contract, even when I refer to things that I do for Microsoft as part of my job.
I think that I'm enough involved in the community to not to have to apologize to be a Microsoft employee :))
In my previous post, I introduced Sami, and I mentionned a bunch of the crazy hacks he did on .NET. Less than three hours later, Sami posted a new entry on his blog. In this post, Sami explains that he managed to copy a bunch of files from the Longhorn PDC build to a regular Windows XP, cnahged some system DLLs here and there, and managed to have Avalon working on XP.
Technically speaking, that's no big surprise to me. I always saw the Longhorn PDC build as a "Technical Preview", which is some kind of a working prototype. With a system expected for 2006/2007, that's obvious that what we got at PDC was a "thing" based on XP and half way between XP and the final Longhorn. What is more interresting is that Avalon - in it's current preview state, at least - looks to be quite well isolated from the rest of the system. Remember also that what we got in the PDC build was not complete.
My understanding is that the development teams that are working on WinFS, Avalon and Indigo are neccessary working on today's systems, Windows XP to name it. So, obviously, current pre-alpha builds of each of these three Longhron pilars have to run on Windows XP. I do not understand how it could be otherwise.
That reminds me of a rumor of an Avalon for Windows XP that I heard from various PDC attendees. Anyone has more information about this? Anyway, it looks like Avalon won't be a "Longhorn Only" technology, since a future release of the TabletPC system - which by the time will probably be based on Longhorn - is expected to support Avalon, and a version of Avalon that supports digital ink, as reported in this article on Microsoft Watch, by Mary Jo Foley, who is generally well informed.
[Update] : Chris Anderson has posted comments about Sami's hack, and explains why it works today, and why it won't tomorrow. Chris has also given clarifications on how the teams work and on which OS they develop. I must admit that my assumptions above are pretty wrong. Thank you, Chris!
Finally, Sami has joined the "blogs fashion victims" group as he says. Sami now has a blog, but he will mainly post entries in French. For those of you who do not know him, Sami Jaber is the guy who created one of the best - and probably *the* best French speaking .NET related website : DotNetGuru, back in January 2002.
Since then, Sami and the growing team of writers and contributors have created a very very rich set of documents, covering all the verious aspects of the .NET platform and doing a one to one comparison with the equivalent things in the Java J2EE world (COM+ vs EJB, Remoting, Objectspaces, ...). Other articles have covered early tests of JLCA, third party tools like O/R mapping tools, Halcyon Inet, Pascal Belaud's OlyMars, etc...
Later, DotNetGuru has been investing a lot of time and efforts on the famous TSS benchmark, and provided it's own version of the .NET Petshop with a better implementation than the one originally used for the first benchmark: Petshop DNG. They have also investigated the SOA space and have created the Petshop SOA. Another subject of interrest at DNG is Aspect Programming. They've provided a tool called AspectDNG. Among the crazy things that Sami experimented, you can find an article where Sami shows that he ported a Java Servlet engine to .NET for the only purpose of testing J# - initially, Sami wanted to port Tomcat to .NET with J# - or this other article that explains how to use Apache as a web server place in front of Cassini, and running in reverse proxy mode, for those who are affraid of having IIS 5 directly on the web, after the Gartner has advised that companies "should" look for a replacement to IIS, because of the Nimda and Code Red attacks.
DotNetGuru also conducted some interviews, to name a few persons : Miguel de Icaza, Euan Garden from the Yukon team, Jean Louis Bénard from Brainsonic, Gianpaolo Carraro, Sébastien Ros and Don Syme. DotNetGuru also organized an Architect event called the "DotNetGuru Symposium" who received 400 persons for a full day of architecture talks.
Now, I'm sure that you know more about Sami. I invite you to welcome him. Bienvenue Sami !
The French based ISV ILOG (Nasdaq ILOG) has released his two first .NET products : ILOG Gantt for .NET and CPLEX version 9.0. This information was relayed through the French MSDN newsletter. This is no doubt one more sign - if needed- of the maturity of the .NET technology and it's associated ecosystem.
These last three weeks, there was many different events going on I was involved in. First, there was a one week technical workshop about SQL Server "Yukon", part of the Yukon Ascend Program that was mentionned on eWeek. This event was organised by the Yukon team, represented by different people including a program manager from Microsoft Corp. The event was hosted at the HP ".NET Center", in Sophia Antipolis, near Nice. HP provided each participant ISV a 32 bit proliant server and also a rx2600 Integrity, which is running an Itanium2 processor.
We've been invited to visit the center, and we had a chance to have a look at their Blade technology which looks interresting. I want one at home as replacement of my 2U Proliant DL-360 ;-)
Then, I joined the French Codewise community the week-end after for a breakout where we talked about guess what... Communities. Every one's working on implementing the Codewise project. You'll hear more about this when Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" goes public beta.
Last week, on December 10, we went for a session of our ASP.NET roadshow in Paris. Yesterday, we were in Marseille, a town famous for it's soccer team (OM, aka "Olympique de Marseille") and for Pascal Belaud, and his "SQL Centric" .NET code generator, codenamed "OlyMars" (guess what it means). We had another session of the ASP.NET roadshow there, with about 120 attendees. You can see the room full, with people who brought their laptops in the end of the room, installing VS .NET while listening to the presentations.
Monday and today, I participated to a 64 bits porting workshop with HP, in Chantilly. We had two 64 bit expert speakers, Regis and Mike, who did a great job in presenting various aspects of Windows 64 bits, porting strategies and 64 bits tools, and also helped ISVs porting their code on Itanium2. Participating ISVs went back home with a brand new Itanium2 server in their bag. That's a nice goodie, ain't it?
At the same time, it looks like Laurent attented the ASP.NET Tour in Strasbourg and met Pierre, Pascal and Lucas there...
Xamlon v. 0.6 Beta 2 is out. I received a mail that announces that this version is a great step forward towards the release version, since most of the elements are implemented. This new release also contains a dialog window which will be very useful for debug. I've not had time to install this version and play with it, but it's in the Top 10 of my To Do list ;-)
At the same time, Paul Colton, Xamlon's creator, was kind enough to accept to answer some of our questions, so we published this short interview on the community site I work for on my extra time. There's the original English version, as well as a version translated in French. This is another view on XAML and Avalon, as debates on this subject are hot on the .NET blogs at the moment.
Pretty straightforward. You just have to add a keyword in the code of one stored procedure. Just add the "WITH" keyword in the code of the "Community_SectionsGetAllEnabledSections" stored procedure, as follows:
ALTER
PROCEDURE [dbo].[Community_SectionsGetAllEnabledSections]
@communityID [int]
AS
SELECT S.*, pageType_pageContent,
SectionTotalPages =(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Community_ContentPages C2 WITH (nolock) WHERE C2.contentPage_sectionID = S.section_ID)
FROM Community_Sections S, Community_PageTypes
WHERE section_pageType = pagetype_id
AND section_communityID = @communityID
AND section_isEnabled = 1
ORDER BY section_sortOrder
Yesterday night, I installed XAMLON and began playing with it, since I had some free time in my hotel room. First of all, a usefull advice: when you will install XAMLON on your machine, make sure you have an internet connexion available, otherwise, you'll have to retype the registration key each time you recompile the samples.
First quick feedback: I've been quite deceived that there are so few samples with the beta (the sample viewer application - which is itself a SAML app - and two samples), and absolutely no documentation. So, one cannot guess what is or isn't implemented in this current Beta. As a result, both simple "Hello World!" samples from the PDC refused to work, since the TextPanel does't seem to be implemented :-( Too bad. Let's wait for a future more complete beta.
On the other hand, I wondered which was the goal of this company providing a XAML implementation on .NET, which sooner or later will compete with Longhorn's Avalon. I saw two opportunities:
- Avalon means Longhorn only. XAML on .NET may be an option for ISVs to write XAML applications and allow them to run on any machine supporting the .NET Framework 1.1, typically Windows 2000 and XP.
- What if the XAMLON guys manage to have their tool running on Mono? Put in simple words: Wouldn't XAML be a simpler GUI abstraction layer, allowing more easy UI application porting between Windows and Unix/X-Window?
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