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October 2003 - Posts

Database naming conventions
Julien's questions about database naming conventions started an interesting discussion. Read the comments.
Posted: Oct 30 2003, 06:08 PM by Fabrice Marguerie | with no comments
Filed under:
string, const, ref and Intern
For Delphi developers who switched to C# and are used to resort to the const keyword when they pass string parameters and wonder how to do something similar: there is no need for this. Yes, the const and ref keywords exist, but they are used for something else. The const keyword can be used in Delphi for string parameters to gain performance by avoiding that a new copy of the string be created.
In .NET, string references are kept in a pool whenever possible. Creations of new string instances are avoided as much as possible. When you pass a string as a parameter, its value is the same inside the method as outside the method, so only one reference is used.

You can get more information by paying a visit to the String.Intern method documentation.

Posted: Oct 29 2003, 03:25 PM by Fabrice Marguerie | with 1 comment(s)
Filed under:
All you want to know about "Whidbey"

All you want to know about Visual Studio "Whidbey" 2004 and ASP.NET "Whidbey" 2.0 is at http://asp.net/whidbey/! [Rob Howard]

There you'll find screenshots, PDC slides and demos, whitepapers, book chapters, forums...!

This is Christmas or what?!

Big bad update

Big batch of additions and updates ocurred during the last days to the content of the SharpToolbox.

Among other things, this brings in a new Internet and communications category, additions and updates to the great RemoteSoft products, new logging tools, and unusual dev tools such as SoftWIRE (picture) and Visual Welder (wich includes a 3D Spatial Editor!).

Well, this is not all (the counter is now up to 320!), and you'd better just browse the directory, or look at the list of recent additions and updates. Don't forget you can use the RSS feeds to stay informed.

PS: If you've submitted a request for addition of your tool, be patient, it's coming :-)

PDC overflow
The PDC overflow has begun all over the .NET blogspace. I guess I'll spend the week reading all those posts I flagged for later reading...
Presentation about the Application Blocks

I'll be giving a presentation with Microsoft about the new Application Blocks in December. Of course this will be in french...

Je participerai le 2 décembre au Forum Architecte organisé par Microsoft sur le thème Patterns & Practices.
Voici le résumé de cette présentation :

Au cours de cette journée, nous découvrirons plus en détail quelqu’un des "application blocks" proposés comme :

  • Gestion de l’interface utilisateur (User Interface Process)
  • Gestion du cache (caching)
  • Invocation de service (services aggregation & asynchronous invocation)
  • Déploiement et configuration (application updater & configuration management)

Je participerai avec Stéphane Goudeau de Microsoft à la présentation sur l'invocation des services dont voici la description :

Les composants liés à l’« Asynchronous Invocation Application Block» facilitent la gestion d’une communication asynchrone entre un client Web et un ou plusieurs fournisseurs de services. Ce framework enregistre les demandes d’accès à plusieurs sources, délivre les requêtes à des agents chargés de les satisfaire et lorsque les données sont disponibles les communique en retour au client pour affichage.  De cette façon des résultats intermédiaires peuvent être affichés sans que tous les résultats soient complètement disponibles. L’utilisateur a l’impression d’une application plus performante et les ressources du serveur sont libérées plus rapidement.
Les composants de l’« Aggregation framework Application Block » délivrent les requêtes à des agents, mais présentent les résultats sous forme d’un seul document XML.
Les deux approches peuvent être ainsi combinées pour offrir des mécanismes d’invocation sophistiqués.

Si vous souhaitez plus d'information ou vous inscrire, n'hésitez pas à vous rendre sur le site de Microsoft France.

Posted: Oct 23 2003, 05:29 PM by Fabrice Marguerie | with 1 comment(s)
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Logging Application Block

Microsoft released a new application block entitled the Logging Application Block that builds on the Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF).

The logging block provides extensions to the EIF architecture that help to address the common usage scenarios for logging. These include:

  • Formatting of event information
  • Configurable log levels
  • Enhanced information in the published events
  • Asynchronous logging
  • Reliable logging
  • Centralized logging
  • Request tracing for Web services
  • Metering for Web services
  • EIF publisher for Exception Management Block

Sounds quite interesting, doesn't it? The question is: where do I get EIF?

Update: EIF is now available as a free public download.
Update: changed the link to point to the block home page, rather than the dowload page.

One more taste of ASP.NET 2
Interesting demo outline by Scott Guthrie, the program manager for ASP.NET.
Posted: Oct 15 2003, 11:18 PM by Fabrice Marguerie | with no comments
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What to use for RSS feeds?
I noticed in Eric Sink's post about Vault's RSS feeds that they use an ASPX file for RSS feeds.
Is there an advantage in using ASP files? Maybe the not-so-well-known ASHX files are better adapted as they require less resources and we don't need to render HTML?
What I use myself (eg. for the SharpToolbox feeds) is something else : an ASMX with webmethods available for GET requests. The advantage of this method is that the expected parameters are defined just like with any other method, and you get an error if the parameters are not provided as expected. Of course, this is less flexible than a simple URL query where you can have optional parameters.
 
What do you use and why?
Suggestions for MyBlogroll

Julien Cheyssial wants to know our opinions and suggestions for MyBlogroll.

When I first thought about a server aggregator, my idea was having a web service on one side, and a smart client on the other side. I’ll try to reply to Julien’s questions from that perspective and thinking as if developing MyBlogroll myself...

Read more...

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