Contents tagged with .NET
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Leaky Abstractions, System.Diagnostics.Process, and 1 bottle of Mountain Dew
This is a story about leaky abstractions. It’s not a happy story, and I don’t talk about cool things like WPF, AJAX, JSON, POX, or how much I detest the RIAA.
Instead, this is the story of a developer and the Process.Start() method. It’s not exciting, and I don’t mention Silverlight anywhere other than this sentence.
Still, you should listen.
Leaky Abstractions are the technological equivalent of a spring poking through your couch. Until the day that you sat on that rusty, pointy springy-spring, you knew that your couch was comfy. To tell the truth, you really didn’t know, care, or care to know why. Joel Spolsky has his own diatribe on this subject, and it’s worth reading. Of course, he talks about software, and not couch springs, but I’m sure you will still get the point.
Some time ago, my team noticed that a core part of our application would fail to respond, and when we restarted it, it would fail to reclaim its remoting TCP/IP port. Specifically, it listened on port 30123, and whenever we restarted the application, we would receive a System.Net.Sockets.SocketException claiming that the port was already in use. From the command line, a netstat –a verified this information. The netstat output also revealed that the “dead” process had the port still locked. We were mystified, as netstat was reporting a Process ID (PID) that was no longer in the task list. -
Continuous Integration Presentation
My Continuous Integration presentation in Dallas, Texas went pretty well. Although I'm not a practiced speaker, it seems that the audience was engaged and interested. I've even been invited to present on the same topic again to another group.
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Occasional is a matter of perspective
A few loyal readers have complained that the "Occasional Clue" has been a little less occasional than anticipated.
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Save C#?
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PDC 2005, Day 3 @ 1:44 pm (Windows Compute Cluster Solution)
One of the keynote presentations today was on Windows Compute Cluster Solution. Now, I've been working with Windows Clusters in a High Availability environment for some time now, so I've been very interested in what Microsoft's message was going to be in this product space. Microsoft has been getting their lunch handed to them in this area by Linux clusters for a long, long time. While it is currently possible to build High Performance Clusters on Windows without the Compute Cluster Solution, it is certainly not straightforward.
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PDC 2005, Day 1 @ 1:21 pm
Well, everyone else has been posting about the PDC - I thought that I would have written by now, but I haven't really seen anything that is really exciting. So far, most everything seems to be a refinement of things introduced in PDC 2003.
Oh, Office 12 was mentioned. Since use Office as a glorified Wordpad.exe, that's really not that exciting.
I am currently sitting in the session, "High Performance Computing with Windows Server Compute Cluster Solution." It's a slide-show fest, with very little demo or bits to see. This session is a basic review of of Clustering, and is mostly review if you are familiar with these concepts.
There's actually very little about what microsoft is doing in this space, and more about what high performance clustering actually is. I'm still not impressed. Show me, don't slide-show me. -
Local Variables No Longer Exclusively on the Stack
Sometimes things that everyone just knows aren't always true.
For example, when I look at c# code, I know that local variables are stored on the stack. Or, I thought I knew that. -
MSDN Documentation
So, over the last couple of years, I've been what I consider a 'defender' of MSDN documentation. After all, the docs are miles ahead of what they used to be.
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Are 'They' really smarter?
An interesting meme I've encountered a number of times amongst c#/Java programmers:
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New Tech: JAXASS
My new favorite line of code: