February 2003 - Posts
In an article posted on eweek the CEO of BEA has the following comment about .NET
eWEEK: Let's talk about competition overall, not just IBM. How do you compete with .Net?
Chuang: Well, there's no competition now because the .Net server doesn't exist. I've been through this several times with Microsoft. Back in 1996 there was a technology called Microsoft Transaction Server. We were doing Tuxedo, just barely moving into our CORBA-based third-generation object-oriented transaction, and we sat around and said, "Oh my God. Microsoft is coming out with MTS. How are we going to survive?" And people asked me the same question. And then MTS disappeared. I'm not sure .Net will be the same, but the same symptoms are clearly happening.
Mr. Chuang has an interesting (and misinformed) take on .NET. I could spend an hour picking this paragraph apart, but I think the funniest part is the comment about there being no competition between BEA and .NET because .NET server has not shipped. Is he for real? Yo, Mr Chuang, .NET server is an Operating System, not a middle-tier application server. Many, many, many production web services and remoting components built using .NET are running on Win2k server boxes.
And just when did MTS disappear! I guess when it was rolled up and extended becoming COM+! Which, by the way, is still a viable, rock solid way of creating middle tier components without .NET (or even with it).
I'll be the first to admit J2EE bring some great architectural concepts to the table, and as a .NET architect I believe there are lessons to be learned from some of those concepts. But unfortunately inaccurate comments like this one propagate ignorance about .NET into the Java community, which does no one any good
[Currently Playing: Voodoo Glow Skulls - Who is this is]
NUnitAddIn
Here's a screenshot showing how easy it is to start spelunking about using Ad Hoc tests. In the example below I've defined a class that creates and disposes of an app domain. All the Ad Hoc test does is return the AppDomain object (which dumps all of its fields and properties). If an Ad Hoc test method is static - the constructor and dispose methods won't be called. Ad Hoc test methods can be private (you won't have to modify your code). At the moment methods with parameters aren't supported. A future version may pop up a dialog box for the parameters.
Running NUnit tests from within the VS.NET IDE. Now that's what I'm talking about.
[Currently Playing: Operation Ivy - Self-titled]
Mark forwarded me a link today of a site that pushes DHMTL to the max. I've gone on record before about my loathing for web development*, but I know a lot of you out there are web dev's so maybe you can pick up a trick or two from youngpup.net.
Wha'ts great is he has open sourced the entire site, and it has lots of cool goodies...
[Currently Playing: Schreeching Weasel - My Brain Hurts]
*Disclaimer
Nothing aginst web developers, actually the opposite. I have an enormous amount of respect for you guys. I spent a few years in asp hell, and I'm so done with cross browser incompatibilities, weak UI support and scripting languages. ugghhh... kudos to ya'll
Wow, this week has flown by. I can't believe it is Friday. How come I hit my stride at work just as the weekend comes. uggghhh... It seems like the week is just too short.
Anyway, with Mark's help, I'm looking into managed C++ right now. I've got to say this, managed C++ is incredible. I'm currently *attempting* to write a managed wrapper around some of the functionality found in easysoap++. But it ain't easy. I am not a C++ programmer. Let me say that again... I am not a C++ programmer. I have to utmost respect for people who know thier way around this language. I am in awe of its power, and one day (hopefully soon) I will understand enough of it to get around comfortably.
Anyway, I'll let everyone know how the conversion goes... Hopefully I'll have something to show for my work next week...
[Currently Playing: Hatebreed - Satisfaction is the death of desire]
This post came across the ADVANCED-DOTNET list several months ago and I had to post it. Many of us want to be able to step into the IL as we are debugging, but we can't. This suggestion was provided as a work around by Craig Andera and seconded by Mike Woodring. It's a great way to view the IL as your debugging; lets hope MS will make this easier in the 2nd drop of .NET. You can find the post in the archives here.
(1) decompile your assembly using ildasm to get an IL source file that includes the original high level language in interspersed comments.
(2) recompile the IL into an assembly using ilasm.exe
(3) debug the assembly; now able to see source+IL+asm
It turns out an organization called SmallScript is working on a SmallTalk port for .NET called S#. Now, I'll admit, I've never seen or written any SmallTalk but it does offer some goodies that C# doesn't including:
- The ability to inherit from sealed classes (such as System.String and *SoapClientMessage*)
- Multiple Inheritance
- Dynamic Typing (I'm not a fan of dynamically typed languages, but some people like it)
I'm going to look into this. I'm thinking at this point that I could create an assembly, written in S# that would allow me to use the SoapClientMessage class. Stay Tuned...
[Currently Playing: The Prodigy - The Fat of the Land]
Does anyone out there know where I can get a class or two that allows you to programmatically create a SOAP request, and consume a SOAP response message? I've been back and forth with the SoapMessage class in .NET, to no avail. For one, it only works for creating SOAP Request messages. Secondly, I can't seem to get it to serialize objects correctly when they are used as parameters to a method call.
This is frustrating to say the least, because I know the code I need is buried inside the .NET framework; I just can't get at it. Spicifically, the class I need is the SoapClientMessage class, which can be found in the System.Web.Protocols namespace. Unfortunatly for me, that class is sealed, and has a protected .ctor. (See previous rant in relation to this).
If you know anything, drop me a line... --Thanks
[Currently Playing: Disturbed - Believe]
Ok, I couldn't help it... I had to take the test also. It's funny, I've never actually seen or used amiga...
Which OS are You?
NAnt is a great tool... 'nuff said.
Actually, I can say a little more. I started using NAnt last june, when i attempted to convert a large application from a psudo-automated process using .bat files (which worked great, it just required Mark to babysit it alot) to an automated build. Its not that NAnt didn't work, it did; and its not that I couldn't write the build scripts, I did; the problem was that I was the only developer who new how to write NAnt scripts. And on a project of with 7 developers, working on a UI consisting of an exe and 19 dll's, it would have required an hour or more a day from me to keep the build scripts updated. That wasn't going to happen.
Well, now I'm on to another project, and one of the first things on my todo list is get the nightly build up and running. Which I did. NAnt is solid, and works great. If you go to the sourceforge site, it looks as if nothing is happening on it, but grab a nightly and you'll see it is full featured and ready to go. The documentation could use a refresher (it hasn't been updated in a while), but the basics are there so someone new to NAnt could get going pretty easy.
Speaking of documentation, I'm getting ready to add NDoc support to the build, but there isn't much documentation on the NDoc task. If anyone out there has any info or samples I'd love to see it...
BTW, if anyone thinks nightly builds are not important, they need to read this article @ Joel on Software. It will change your mind
[Currently Playing: 311 - Grassroots]
For those of you that are mainly Win32 orientied developers, you may not know much about colocation facilities. I know I don't. I know they have racks and racks of servers, and you can get mucho bandwidth there but thats about it. Well, if your like me, then read Joels new article about his experience finding a new colocation facility. Pretty interesting stuff...
[Currently Playing: mxpx - Pokinatcha]
More Posts
Next page »