Archives
-
Patterns Webcast from PDC
Its about to begin...
-
MS Blogger Should Have Been Fired
I don't see what the big deal is here. The guy blatantly violated MS security policies. Yes, the picture was quite innocent, but here is the deal. You can't just go around snapping photos of stuff arriving on trucks to Microsoft. If the guy had in any way been a valuble employee, he probably would have gotten away with a slap on the wrist. However, he was just a temp anyway, which means he is disposable. My question is, when the hell did a tech get the idea that he could just go around snapping photos of stuff arriving on trucks and posting them to his weblog? What if the stuff in question had been delivered under some NDA or something?
-
Longhorn Video
“Lap around Longhorn: Chris Anderson and Don Box provide a code-centric, high level walk through of the main pillars of Longhorn.” [1]
-
SCO Doesn't Like GPL Either
"The Free Software Foundation is the only entity that can enforce the GPL so, in effect, IBM is barred from trying to enforce the GPL with SCO," wrote Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman, in an e-mail response to questions.
-
Method Based Transaction Support
Unlike EnterpriseServices, Indigo will finally support true method based transactions (yes, as you should know, EnterpriseServices doesn't really do this, even though you have those attributes which might make you think it does). So, all those people that thought I was crazy for saying the currently implementation was lame can just kiss my @#$*!. :-)
-
MS Dumps .NET Remoting
Yes, it is final, MS is dropping .NET Remoting support. Funny. COM+, DCOM, and MSMQ will be supported by Indigo, but .NET Remoting WILL NOT. More info in this video.
-
Refactoring Support in Whidbey
-
Longhorn PDC Build Preview
If your not there. Head over to Thurrott's at: http://www.winsupersite.com/ to get plenty of screenshots and info.
-
Creating *Valid* XHTML Documents
While working on our CMS, we ran into a common problem that no one seems to have solved completely yet, creating valid XHTML documents from IE's non-validated HTML editing component. The common suggestion with .NET is to use the SgmlReader to make a pass over your doc and then just output directly to an XmlWriter using WriteNode. While it may seem like a good suggestion, you don't really gain much with this approach, because what you are generating is definately not XHTML, it is HTML with closing tags. The following block of code shows how to extend this method to create truly valid XHTML. For the sake of simplicity, there are a couple missing pieces from this code (like handling element nesting appropriately and running a validation against the schema after conversion to make sure you were able to convert the doc), but this should get you started in the right direction.
-
Earnings Reports / Webcasts
Two approaches to solving the same webcast problem:
-
Search Every Word In Every Book Using Amazon
Wow.
-
Macromedia Annouces eHelp Acquisition, Stocks Fall
Looks like people aren't buying MX... Macromedia's stock fell something like 35% today. Everyone is selling off their stock... that's gotta hurt. I wonder what the guys at eHelp (who Macromedia just announced they are acquiring) think about all this, seeing that their acquisition deal is supposed to be $10m cash and $55m stock.
-
Anti Spam Bill Passed
If you haven't heard already, the senate passed an anti-spam bill today to create the “do not spam” registry.
-
Structs are Better?
“Going to the big class hierarchy is again, you write more code than you need to, and you get too much connection between different parts. I particularly dislike classes with a lot of get and set functions. That is often an indication that it shouldn't have been a class in the first place. It's just a data structure. And if it really is a data structure, make it a data structure.” [1]
-
Non Techical Solutions
Brian Sullivan offers some non technical ways MS can improve security. What should be noted though is that most of the time, these attacks that take over everyone's computer are based on known security flaws that have had patches available for months. What Microsoft really needs to do is some type of consumer awareness project. How about some radio / tv / web ads about what the hell Windows Update is and how Microsoft provides this service to help you secure your computer against the viral hordes. Then, users might realize 1) That windows update exists and 2) that they should use it. As it is now, must users think that when they have this kind of attack they should have been running anti-virus software, but the truth is that many times anti-virus software doesn't help all that much against these types of attacks. Patching those holes is really the best solution we have right now.
-
The Int64 Problem
Brad Notes:
-
Joel Fights Back
Joel responds to Ned's criticism with his own words:
-
Boycott GPL
Jd points out this article about the Free Software Foundation threatening Cisco over the use of GPL code inside their routers. I know Microsoft has softened their position on open source software lately, but I really can't stress enough how lame the GPL license is (even “viral“ as someone once said). The thing was designed by a bunch of communist hackers that think that you should never own the rights to the source code you create. As such, merely including GPL code in any product means that you must make your entire product's source code available to the world. There are plenty of decent open source licenses and GPL definately isn't one of them. The truth is that using GPL'd code isn't free at all, you will pay if you use it. Think of it this way, you lose out on product sales in the same way you would lose out due to piracy of your app, only because you used GPL, it is perfectly legal. If Valve had used GPL'd code in HalfLife 2, they wouldn't have had to worry about someone breaking in and stealing their source code, because they would have had to give it away for free anyway.
-
Joel on Exceptions
“People have asked why I don't like programming with exceptions. In both Java and C++, my policy is:
-
Monkey Controls Robot Arm with Thoughts
"Monkeys that can move a robot arm with thoughts alone have brought the merger of mind and machine one step closer.
In experiments at Duke University, implants in the monkeys' brains picked up brain signals and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts.“ -
Cross Platform?
“Recently I have taken up porting various pieces of Open Source software written in C# to the Mono platform. Though a tedious process, it actually has many benefits for Mono.
-
Joel on Unicode / PHP
“When I discovered that the popular web development tool PHP has almost complete ignorance of character encoding issues, blithely using 8 bits for characters, making it darn near impossible to develop good international web applications, I thought, enough is enough.
-
Schwarzenegger enlists Fiorina
-
Matrix Revolutions
-
Overdesigning
Julia is having trouble putting together the classes for her app. Here is some advice:
-
Ellison
eWeek has an interesting article up about Ellison and Oracle.
-
Advice to Vendors of Enhancements for the Products I Use
I've been talking a lot lately with different various product teams and vendors of various products. I always end up saying a lot of the same things to these guys. So, to save some time in the future:
-
CFC vs. ASP.NET
In another erroneous DevNet article, Ben Forta tries to say that ColdFusion is a good alternative to ASP.NET. [1]
-
The Gatekeeper
Clements talks about implementing two way gate keepers:
"What I see less often is a gatekeeper on outbound channels that verifies whether the currently executing local service adheres to the agreed communication contract. Validation on outbound messages is a proactive action taken in order to create trust with partners about the local service's ability to adhere to a contract. Furthermore, validation on outbound messages is quite often the last chance action before a well-known point of no return: the transaction boundary. If a service is faulty, for whatever reason, it needs to consistently fail and abort transactions instead of emitting incorrect messages that are in violation of the contract. If the service is faulty, it must consequently be assumed that compensating recovery strategies will not function properly and with the desired result." [1] This is quite an interesting idea... though I'm not sure how much it really solves. For one, validating against a schema only ensures that your data is semantically correct... whether it is logically consistant or correct is a whole different story. So, even if you do implement a gatekeeper, you still have to implement long running transactions (you can't assume that just because you send a "valid" message to an external WS that it is actually going to get there and the call is going to complete w/o errors). By implementing a gatekeeper, you might be able to stop a transaction before the local commit, but that doesn't really gain you much (besides a little performance if you are sending out lots of invalid messages for some strange reason). Additionally, the only way you can really validate that message is by getting the WSDL of the service or some type of XSD contract, and if for some reason the format of acceptable messages is going to change between the time you write your app (during which you hopefully design it to output valid messages), what is to stop it from changing between the time you request the WSDL and the time you make the call? Nothing. So, you still have to handle that case anyway. So again, all you get is the performance benefit of not having to go any further... worth the extra effort? Probably not (unless, you or your service provider is horrendously inconsistant in message creation).[1] SOA: Checking postconditions is more important than checking preconditions. Clemens Vasters.
http://staff.newtelligence.net/clemensv/PermaLink.aspx?guid=278c5ee8-2dcb-4010-ac8c-9e54dcd05b61 -
Carl and Mark Back on Track
There is a great .NET Rocks episode up now (and a bunch of great ones on the way). Nice to see the show back on track. Scott Gu / ASP.NET 2.0.
-
Monologue
Mono .NET Bloggers
-
Update your sites
Microsoft released the IE changes that are going to take place following the patent ruling:
-
Salamander Legal?
Carl mentioned Salamander in his comments on Roy's flame. Looks like a very cool tool (allows you to run .NET apps on machines without .NET installed). However, I just have to ask, can someone from MS tell us if it is actually legal to use this tool?
-
Central Beta
If you head over to Kevin Lynch's blog [1], you can get a beta copy of Central installed.
-
Royale
Had a chance to meet with the team and get a preview of an early Royal build and give some feedback. Of coruse, NDA covers everything interesting, so I can't give out the details, but I will say this much: Royal is very cool. Watch out Laszlo, I think its safe to say they've got you beat.
-
Performance
“The big wins we realized at the CLR level are just noise compared to other performance problems in the applications. With just a few days of work our pref team was able to improve the performance of one of these in house applications more significantly than all the CLR level improvements combined. Their findings are published here. This is NOT because the app developers are a bunch of clowns. Rather it is because, as hard as we tried in V1, there were still some places where the design of the platform leads them down the wrong path...More generalized, it is the key point of good API design. We should build APIs that steer and point developers in the right direction. Types should be defined with a clear contact that communicates effectively how they are to be used (and how not to). I am not just talking about the docs and samples (although those are good) but in the design of the APIs. For example, give the “pretty” name to the types most developers should use (ie. “Foo” and “FooBase”).
-
Windows Installer.NET
“Future versions of the .NET framework will provide a manifest-based application installer and servicing framework with native Internet support, which provides full application lifecycle management, spanning initial discovery, download, caching, verification, servicing and application hosting in a secure environment. This technology leverages the .NET framework to provide next-generation “Smart Client” application lifecycle management.”[1]
-
Dialog Classes Revisited
So, how 'bout them pop-up blockers? Recently, one of the projects I am working on ran into an interesting problem. Pop-up blockers were blocking our dialog boxes. These were perfectly valid, user initiated dialogs. The problem, however, is that the google toolbar (and others) seems to think that if you post back before popping up a dialog, then the dialog that you pop must be an advertisement. Of course, users tend to be too ignorant to know what is going on, so they keep clicking and clicking and nothing ever happens. So, we had to come up with a solution for this. The two requirements were:
1: It has to be a clean solution (no complex, ugly hacks in our code when we can avoid them)
2: It had to support postbacksYes, we technically could have eliminated postbacks in most places, but it would have violated #1 to start off with, since we would be doing a lot of extra client side script generation and would be breaking the ASP.NET model (not to mention that it would be too time consuming now that most of the code has already been written, tested and debugged, and the deadlines are yesterday.
So, here is a simplified example of the solution that I came up with that works great so far. Write something like this and insert into your page with a RegisterClientScriptBlock or RegisterStartupScript call:
//---------------------------- function __openDialog() { return window.open(...); // open dialog window, return handle } function __openDialogOrDisplayWarning() { var hWindow = __openDialog(); if(hWindow == null) { // window was not opened document.body.innerHTML += "<div style='position: absolute;...'>You have a !@$@!$^ popup blocker installed that has prevented this document from launching automatically. To prevent seeing this message in the future, disable your popup blocker, or hold down ctrl while launching the document. <input type='submit' value='Launch' onClick="__openDialog"></div>"; } } window.attachEvent("onload", __openDialogOrDisplayWarning); //----------------------------Now, there are a few important points here:
1) only user initiated popups (via js onclick) will be allowed through popup blockers
2) if you do not use a handler and attach to onLoad, then there is a chance that the code will execute before the page is loaded, causing a nasty IE error that redirects to a blank page.
3) it looks nicer if you spend some time on the div and make it look like a IE dialog box or somethingYah, in a perfect world we wouldn't need to do something lame like this, but the world just ain't perfect, is it?
-
Bad Ideas
I've seen this thing[1] going around for a while now, and would like to note that it is an insanely dumb idea (IMO). Basically, the idea is that you override the render method of your web form to output the whole page, and then keep sending javascript blocks to the client to update a progress bar (never returning from render). Not only do you end up generating horrendously invalid html, you also tie up your server's resources while this long running request is executing. Assuming it is intensive because
a) it takes a lot of processing power
or
b) there are a lot of people doing something that requires relatively little processing
This can only lead to problems. In any case, I wrote more about this in the comments on one of the first posts that suggested this solution [2]. Bottom line, do it right, don't do it this way.
[1] http://www.myblogroll.com/Articles/progressbar
[2] http://www.ddconsult.com/blogs/illuminati/archives/000089.html