Archives

Archives / 2003 / March
  • Clemens' AOP Demo

    "MS Finland put up a (long, 30min.) Windows Media 9 series stream of the demo that I did in my AOP talk over in Helsinki. And Matt Powell from MSDN is so nice to mention the things I demo there in his MSDN TV episode on SoapExtensionReflectors/Importers. My demo code is here."
    [Clemens]

  • Who are These People?

    "Lewis reported that commanders here say 1,200 Iraqis were killed trying to ram checkpoints or firing at U.S. soldiers.

  • Speak of the Devil

    I just mentioned that Macromedia was throwing the idea around that Flash could be used for desktop apps a few days ago. Seems that ZDNET has picked up on it as well:

  • WebService Results

    "So, in the previous example, you decide to submit a strongly-typed DataSet of rows back via the WebService when synchronizing. You then enumerate the rows of the DataSet table and create instances of the custom business objects. On each business object you call its Save() method. What does your WebMethod return? Does it return:

  • The Kind of Nation We Are

    "Far from being the Great Satan, I would say that we are the Great Protector. We have sent men and women from the armed forces of the United States to other parts of the world throughout the past century to put down oppression. We defeated Fascism. We defeated Communism. We saved Europe in World War I and World War II.

  • Iraqi Mural

    "NASIRIYA, Iraq (CNN) -- U.S. Marines searching Iraqi military headquarters in this southern city that was the site of intensive fighting came across a mural depicting a plane crashing into a building complex resembling New York's twin towers, a news agency photograph showed Wednesday."
    [CNN]

  • Windows Forms on Linux

    Mono can now run Windows Forms apps on top of Linux1. If you are interested in eventually using Mono, you can take a survey to help the Ximian people figure out what to do with it by emailing: monoresearch@ximian.com.

  • Security.NET from Microsoft

    "In this episode of the .NET Show, Erik Olson and Mike Kass show some of the code that was used in Microsoft's entry into the OpenHack competition, and use it to share some of the insights and practices that are important to understand in order to better secure your Web sites and applications."
    [The Dot Net Show]

  • W3C vs MS

    "In a sign of growing discord over Web services guidelines, Microsoft has pulled out of a key Web services standards working group.

  • Bills, Bills, Bills

    "Authorities in China are using a computer program that spams illegal advertisers' mobile phones until they turn themselves in.

  • Dot Net Rocks, VB Style

    "Carl and Mark talk with Ethan and Bob about the Good Ol' Days of the BASIC language, and some of their experiences early on in the first days of the industry, as well as PowerBASIC past, present, and future. Crazy tech-support calls, and other stories."
    [DotNetRocks]

  • Beware of Cookies

    "F5 Networks, a maker of networking gear for big Web sites, has patented a way to improve communications between Internet browsers and Web sites and sued three competitors for infringing that patent..."

  • Free Shirts

    "Ah, the good old days. I remember Microsoft C 5.0 and 6.0 and the Programmer's Workbench. C++ came in 7.0. Visual C++ 1.0 (which was sometime after 7.0) was actually a godsend in those days...I still have my old Microsoft C++ shirts. I wish they still gave out shirts like they used to. Thanks to Brad for the corrections on versions!"

  • The Apes at Ximian

    "The combination of his disdain for Windows forms (the API, or just that type of app?) and also web services leads me to believe that he feels that the power of .NET is creating neat-o web applications real easy.  Now, granted, you can do that.  But some of the real power is creating applications for Windows (or maybe OS X if Mono goes that way) that have the ease deployment, scalability, and extensibility of the web applications, with the added benefits of a rich client.  Right?"

  • Macromedia

    Jeremy Allaire notes that Macromedia is trying to turn flash into a tool for making desktop apps as well as web apps. Kevin Lynch notes some of the progress that they are making in this area. Still, I just have to ask, "Why?" We already have Java and .NET, do we really need a third product that has no enterprise level features (unless you consider JavaScript an enterprise ready language), a runtime and BCL that are so limited they can actually fit in a 300k download, and a suped up version of photoshop as the IDE?

  • Get Your ObjectSpaces Today!

    Why wait for MS to release the next version of the framework to start using objectspaces? EntityBroker from Thona Consulting is a very cool .NET object persistence framework that mirrors what the MS object spaces group is doing (yes, that means porting your code to objectspaces should theoretically be very easy...though they say they have things in the works that the objectspaces team hasn't even dreamed of yet). Write ZERO lines of DB code. Focus on your app, not your data.

  • C# 3.0?

    "In Polyphonic C#, methods can be defined as either synchronous or asynchronous. When a synchronous method is called, the caller is blocked until the method returns, as is normal in C#. However, when an asynchronous method is called, there is no result and the caller proceeds immediately without being blocked. Thus from the caller's point of view, an asynchronous method is like a void one, but with the useful extra guarantee of returning immediately. We often refer to asynchronous methods as messages, as they are a one-way communication from caller to receiver (think of posting a letter rather as opposed to asking a question during a face-to-face conversation)."

  • Blogging In Baghdad

    "A couple of weeks ago journalists were exasperated by that fact that Iraqis just went on with their lives and did not panic, well today there is a very different picture. It is actually a bit scary and very disturbing. To start wit the Dinar hit another low 3100 dinars per dollar. There was no exchange place open. If you went and asked they just look at you as if you were crazy. Wherever you go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked closed but sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed, windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being welded shut. There were trucks loaded with all sort of stuff being taken from the shops to wherever their owner had a secure place. Houses which are still being built are having huge walls erected in front of them with no doors, to make sure they don’t get used as barracks I guess. Driving thru Mansur, Harthiya or Arrasat is pretty depressing. Still me, Raed and G. went out to have our last lunch together..."
    [Where is Raed?]

  • Free Goodies

    The complete code for controls in Developing Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls and Components can be downloaded from MSDN. Too bad I already wrote the DatePicker about an hour ago... this ListView control might be useful though. Lots of interesting goodies here that you might find a place for (HtmlEditor, ScrollablePanel, etc.). Admittedly, it might not take more than a few minutes to create some of these yourself, but I'm sure you have better things to do than write custom controls all day long :-).

  • Per Session Static Variables

    "The ThreadStatic attribute is what makes this work. The only gotcha so far is that this doesn't work in an ASP.NET application (Web/Webservice) as threads are reused for different requests, hence having the wrong ObjectRegistry serving the wrong user/session. The only solution I can think of for the time being, is having the ObjectRegistry detect if there's a HttpContext, and if so, subscribe to the EndRequest event of the associated HttpApplication and clear itself when the event fires."
    [Yves]

  • Don Responds to the InfoPath Infidels

    "Now that more people have InfoPath in their hands, it seems everyone has some sort of reaction to it.
     
    My favorite negative reaction is from Richard Tallent. While I love James Snell's reaction, here's my response:
     
    1. "Rich" client required. Never forget that InfoPath is from the Office group. Their raison d'etre is to sell "rich" client software. By most definitions of the term, they have been successful in this endeavor. To the degree that they remain successful, InfoPath becomes part of the desktop computing ether. Of course, this sword has two edges...
    2. No security. Given that InfoPath produces editors on top of "raw" XML files in the file system, I'm not sure what they could do that couldn't be circumvented by notepad.  That stated, for apps that don't put the XML into the file system, one could either (a) produce different forms for different security profiles or (b) write some JScript. Neither one is especially elegant for the average IT user.
    3. Where's the .NET? Yeah, where is the .NET? Yes, the web service support is nice, but there's no managed code support. While I would be surprised if COM interop wouldn't work to let me write the C# code, I have no intention of writing MSXML code in C# (assuming it would even work).
    4. No controls. Without #3, this one is moot in my opinion.
    5. No offline access. Hmmm.. I've been extremely happy using the file system as my offline store. No magic required. Again, InfoPath is primarily an editor construction kit, so it seems weird for my editor to do this stuff for me.
    6. No user base. See #1.
     
    It's important to note (as James Snell does) that InfoPath was developed by the Office team for the Office customer.
     
    Is it the perfect development tool for all XML applications? No.
     
    Is it an interesting step along the way? I think so."

  • S#

    "Beyond that, you can perform operations impossible in VB.NET or C#. For example, you can inherit sealed classes, such as System.String, and extend them to meet your needs. You can call external DLLs—not just ActiveX DLLs, or Win32 APIs, but any external DLL. You can dynamically add methods, properties, and fields to existing classes exposed by an assembly. "
    [DevX]

  • Show Me the Money

    "SINGAPORE, March 19 (Reuters) - The chief executive of network-computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc, Scott McNealy, criticised Wall Street analysts on Wednesday, saying their recommendations on the company's stock were inconsistent."

    "Sun's stock surged to a historic high of around US$64 in September 2000 during the dot-com boom but closed at $3.552 on Nasdaq on Tuesday. The company has lost about two-thirds of its value over the last 12 months.

  • Yah... right...

    "The world is down to two developer camps: One is .Net, the other is Sun ONE Java. Java is the No. 1 development platform. Viruses are a feature in .Net, but Java has security built in. I find it funny how the default setting in Win XP lets in Office macros but blocks Java," he told an amused audience.

  • Dot Net Rocks

    "Stephen talks about the International .NET Association (INETA - www.ineta.org), relates his .NET success stories, and talks about design patterns, COM Interop, Performance Anxiety, ASP.NET Forms Authentication, ViewState, Caching, and the DataGrid control. The DataGrid Girl (www.datagridgirl.com) calls and yaks with Carl, Mark, and Stephen about the ASP.NET DataGrid. "
    [Dot Net Rocks]

  • Calendar Picker

    Anyone know who makes the calendar picker control used on the "Show Previous Posts" menu?

  • Can I Get My View State To Go?

    "I have seen many people ask how can you leave a Page and restore its ViewState upon later returning. In the past I provided some helpful hints, but never taken the time to build a full working example, but an online challenge promising a free 6-pack made me finally put together this article and demo. This particular example redirects the user to a separate Page to better allow a date field selection, and then redirects the user back to the original Page, while restoring all the previous posted values. You could use similar techniques to save the state of a Page in a database to be restored much later. "

  • VB Enhancements

    "Looking over the new features planned for C#  and then for VB.NET  it seems (at least at first glance) that C# programmers are getting lots of new goodies which the VB guys aren't.  So far MSFT has gone to great lengths to keep both languages equivalent, but it seems that either the VB team is one release behind the C# team in 2003, or that the language specifications are beginning to diverge...Opinions anyone?"

  • Wrox

    Everyone's talking about all these great SQL and VB books from Wrox. Those were nothing compared to the books that made Wrox famous. Old school guys should remember the only Wrox book that I own: "The Revolutionary Guide to Assembly Language." Approx. 1,500 pages of good old ASM code. It was definately the best ASM reference I've come across, affectionately known by me and my cohorts as "the big red book".

  • Smart Tags

    I finally found the first ever useful smart tags today. FedEx tracking number smart tags...now, if only IE hadn't disable them... Anyone know where the UPS ones went? Can't seem to track them down.

  • Freedom Fries

    "But besides this, all of this flaming France is really just a juvenile way to try to divert people from the fact that we really do not have a good enough argument to convince the French and others to come to our government's point of view.  Ad hominem attacks are an age-old fallacy and a significant indicator of insecurity in one's own position."

  • Kapor Quits Groove

    "Mitch Kapor has left Groove Networks, and according to friends cited in the New York Times, it's because of his concern about the company's role in the fast-developing surveillance infrastructure.

    Groove was an early beneficiary of
    Panopticon Pork. The peer-to-peer company, founded by Lotus Notes inventor Ray Ozzie, has been working with DARPA's Total Information Awareness Office, which develops research projects principally designed to mine information on US citizens."

  • Convert HTML -> PDF

    "In my case I just want to transform some XML with XSLT and save the HTML output as PDF. That's just about three methods.

    Are there any smart people out there with such an app laying around?"

  • Code Quality

    "I hate the fact that I have to produce a report of lines of code. I totally agree that I should be judged on the quality of code that is produced and not how many lines it took. In fact I've gone as far as intentionally written more lines to solve a problem when I knew it would take less. My boss tells me that it was the best code I've ever written??!? Because it was 200 lines as opposed to 20. WTF?!"
    [Jason Tucker]

  • DBC

    "Is anyone employing XC# and/or formal DBC methods in their work?"
    [Chad Osgood]

  • Outlook 2003

    Outlook 2003 is great! For one, it automatically connects over http to our Exchange server w/o any problems (bye, bye VPN). Didn't even have to set up anything, it automatically determined everything from the server name when I was adding the account. Additionally, the UI is a ton more responsive and there are a ton of really slick new features (like notifications that let you preview the text of incoming messages and preform actions on them w/o opening Outlook...very nice to be able to delete spam right away). Definately worth the upgrade.

  • What the hell?

    "Please re-enter your Password. It must be between 8 and 10 characters and contain at least 2 numbers. Please do not use characters such as @#$%&()!,."

  • I Should Be Sleeping

    "Architect Webcast: XML in Word 11

    Previously Live Event:
    This event was previously held live on March 6, 2003 . The recording of this event is 94 mins/secs long and 16272 KB in size.

  • Office 2003 Beta

    Downloaded / Installed my Office 2003 Beta tonight... very slick stuff. If you are planning on doing the same, the current Office Pro ISO seems to be missing an MSI (PROPLUS.MSI), but if you just click cancel instead of hunting around for it when it asks where it is, the setup will finish out with no problems.

  • Design Patterns

    "If you restrict "design patterns" to GoF design patterns, some languages do provide support, you just have to look at the right lanugages. There was a discussion on this going around about a month ago, John Wiseman aggregated the links. When you think about it, C# actually implements a lot of design patterns for you, they're just generally too low level to conciously acknowlege. Aren't concepts like "scope" and "polymorphism" design patterns?"

  • Language Level Pattern Support

    One thing I've been wondering lately is why there isn't more support for design patterns at the language or framework level in any language. It would really speed things up. I guess the addition of C# templates could solve some of these issues, but it sure would be nice to have some functionality built into the compiler for things such as factories.

    Example:

  • Office 11 on MSDN

    "MSDN® subscribers will have access to download the Office System Beta 2 starting March 11, 2003. Visit the MSDN Web site to learn more about MSDN subscriptions."

  • Office 11 Betas

    "As previously reported, concurrent with the rebranding, Microsoft officially launched Office 2003 Beta 2, which will be available to about a half million beta testers and businesses. Microsoft mailed the software late last week to the 12,000 people that tested Beta 1, which was released in October. Microsoft plans to ship Office System during the summer."

  • More VS 2003 Goodness

    Another cool VS 2003 goody: When in the C# editor, editing a derived class. Typing something such as "protected override " will bring up autocomplete on protected overridable members from the base class.

  • Interested

    "Still, if anyone is interested - I'll see if I can whip up something similar in a server control."

  • ASP.NET WYSIWYG Xml Editor

    This FreeTextBox.NET thing got me thinking about the whole XML based editor idea again and how frustrating it was to get Xopus running on top of .NET. So, I got to thinking, how would you go about making your own .NET based XML editor? Well, it needs XML, XSD, XSL support and the Framework covers that. The question is, how do you insert editable areas into the page?  Take this simple example:

  • Hello World

    public class JoiningTheExodus
    {
      public static void Main()
      {
        Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
      }
    }