Archives

Archives / 2003 / April
  • Someone Needs to be Shot

    So, I am working with some ServicedComponents so that I can use COM+ transactions. For some reason, every time my method returns, all my fields are null. It doesn't make sense to me, so I step through the program to see what is going on. The set methods are called sure enough and the properties are indeed being set properly. So, I do a google search and find in a newsgroup posting from MS developer support that this is the "Expected behavior" for any ServicedComponent which has a method marked as AutoComplete. As soon as the method returns, the object will be destroyed. So, if you have any fields, they will be reset. Now, I have two questions: who is the moron on the .NET team that thought that was a good idea? Has he been fired yet?

  • TreeView Controls

    There is a reason I hate using 3rd party controls. It is because they all suck (ok, one exception... the FreeTextBox.NET control is pretty slick). Today, I spent about 5 hours jacking with different treeviews only to end up using a modified version of the IE TreeView. It all started out because the new TreeView over on GotDotNet locks up IE for some unknown reason when you use the HTC file. So, I decided, I'll go out and download another treeview control. Simple enough, right? I mean, anyone making a TreeView control should have the basics covered. Apparently, making a decent server control is insanely difficult for the shmucks who make TreeViews (or any other type of control for that matter)...

  • Hillarious

    If you haven't seen this show, you need to. It's definately the most hillarious show I've seen in a while. I don't watch TV often (to many more fun things to do...like working till 3:00 AM), but I am tempted to go and get cable installed just so I can watch this one show.

  • Dot Net Rocks

    "Michael Stuart is a Senior Consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) and has been completely taken with .NET. He is working on the next generation of Microsoft Application Blocks, or BlueBricks, a collection of classes that you can use for free in your applications, that use best-practices in a variety of areas.

  • It's About Time

    "Three of the nation’s largest e-mail account providers, normally bitter rivals, today are to announce a joint assault on spam, vowing to collaboratively hunt down unsavory e-mailers and explore industry standards that would curtail the ability to create bulk electronic mailings."
    [MSNBC]

  • "Other" CEOs

    "Borland's president and CEO, Dale Fuller, describes his company as the Switzerland of software development. He is molding the company's products to interoperate with a broad variety of platforms and to bridge the gap between Java and .Net."
    [ZDNET Webcast]

  • Dot Net Rocks

    "Dino shares some valuable tips and insights into the innerworkings of ASP.NET security, IIS Impersonation, how __VIEWSTATE is encoded, the serialization engine, how to store encrypted values in the registry, inline code vs. CodeBehind, and Italian Rock bands. We also learn that Dino has an extreme distaste for barbeque.

  • .NET vs. J2EE

    ".NET 1.1 framework running on Windows 2003 with SQL Server 2000 database achieved the best throughput results for direct Web Service invocation test on an 8 CPU host, at 1488.53 transactions per second (1072.90 transactions per second on a 4 CPU host), followed by .NET 1.1 running on Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 with Oracle9i as the backend database. The fastest J2EE application server performance was achieved by JBoss running on Red Hat Linux 8.0 at 513.33 transactions per second (354.25 transactions per second on a 4 CPU host) and followed by Application Server Y at 411.87 transactions per second (312.70 transactions per second on a 4 CPU host) and Application Server X at 288.26 transactions per second (213.37 transactions per second on a 4 CPU host)."
    [Doculabs]

  • RIAs

    With all the talk about Flash based RIAs, check out this dealy that Scoble pointed out a few minutes ago:

  • Soap vs. Something else

    Don and Sam are both smart guys. I generally agree with both of them. But, tonight I have to make a choice... I am siding with Don on this one. When .NET first came out, I would have pushed remoting, but with the WS-Extensions becoming reality, lately I am realizing just how much potential SOAP has and how much cooler (even if more verbose) it is than remoting. As time goes on, I think we will see a lot of things you can do w/ SOAP that aren't readily available in the remoting infastructure (not that you couldn't build them, just that lots of cool people will build lots of cool SOAP stuff because it is the happening thing and remoting is so 1990s).

  • Chris Sells

    Chris has been asymilated... I guess the reason that big sucking sound seemed so loud is that it was right behind him :-).

  • Sean Fights Back

    Sean (the Architecture "guru" from MM) doesn't agree with me about MX, but he doesn't seem to understand what I was saying, so I will try to explain a little better this time :-).

  • FreeTextBox.NET 1.5

    The 1.5 version of FreeTextBox is out. Very cool stuff. Office 11 styles are now included.

  • ENT Support for .NET Weblogs Archive

    The weblogs archive now has ENT support. Very cool stuff in the works. Incoming feeds will automatically be enriched with ENT data. Still working on the categorization, so open to suggestions. Currently, the idea behind the architecture is that ENT info regarding the general feed will be inserted into the node. If you want to add additional ENT info to your individual posts, please do so, because there isn't a good way to do this automatically. In my mind, the ENT clouds should be arranged something like this:

  • Off Topic?

    Ok, I know this was hashed around a week or so ago in a different context, but maybe some people have some new or interesting ideas they could share.

  • Xml Interfaces Reloaded

    "Jesse Ezell has a post where he criticizes my recent entry on Tight Coupling vs. Loose Coupling. He seems to have drawn the same conclusions I did about Interfaces vs. Abstract classes when it comes to versioning APIs then asks why using an API based on abstract classes that represent an RSS item isn't better than passing around IXPathNavigable objects. He correctly points out that an API based on objects is easier to code against than one based on passing around XML. However, the goal of passing around XML instead of objects is flexibility and not necessarily an easier programming model."
    [Dare's Diary]
    While I agree that flexibility is important and that the easiest way to give this flexibility is to just pass the raw data around. However, if you ask me that is not a solution but a cop out. Instead of solving any problems yourself, you force every developer who interfaces with your code to do so. Proving an extensible object model allows you to solve many issues while allowing developers to add extensions as they are needed.

    Case and point, anyone who works with the SoapReflectors, SoapExtensions, etc. that are part of the framework will quickly realize why a rich object model is a vastly superior solution. The fact remains that WS-* space is a heck of a lot more complex and evolving a heck of a lot faster than the RSS space, yet the object model provided by MS remains easy to use and extensions to the base functionality are not as beholden to the application (the .NET Framework in this case) as Dare would have you believe. How many posts have you seen from developers saying, "man this ws-extensions toolkit is really cool, but I wish Microsoft just gave us a XPath navigator instance instead"?

  • OlyMars

    Lots of negative talk regarding OlyMars lately. I will admit that I don't have the time to figure out how to use it (gave it a try a few times, but just wasn't my style). However, it is still a very cool tool, it just has a crappy interface on top of it, but it isn't meant to be production code anyway now is it? My understanding is that it is just a research project...and when is the last time you saw a research project with warm fuzzy documentation and a sexy UI?

  • Dare on XML vs. Interfaces

    "However there is a significant difference which is a consequence of the fact that data typically evolves faster than code. In the past few months significant changes to the RSS landscape have occured with the rise of RSS 2.0, replacement of content:encoded with xhtml:body by some notable RSS feeds and the invention of the CommentAPI. There would be significant API churn and information overload if a new interface was cooked up anytime something new happened in the RSS world and a news aggregator wanted to support this feature."
    [Dare's Diary]

  • IUniversalDoTheWork

    "Seeing the struggle between Simon Fell, Don Box and Sam Gentile about XML vs interface is a bit funny. Whaoo, going this way, we will have soon the universal interface for all implementations : public interface IUniversalDoTheWork { IXPathNavigator DoTheWork(IXPathNavigator nav); } Going to past now, if IPathNavigable is so much better, why was it so bad to use VARIANT in COM interfaces ? XML is nice. Really. But let XML exist for what it is good for: data exchange."
    [Pierre Chalamet]

  • Flash Remoting

    Following the link John Dowell left in his great comments about PPT -> SWF conversion, I eventually stumbled upon this article about using remoting in Flash MX (for those who are not aware, you can actually use remoted J2EE and .NET components from the Flash player starting with MX). Turns out that the Macromedia community's interest in design patterns is increasing as well. The difference is that it is a really new thing in the Flash community, and you generally are dealing with simpler patterns, not enterprise level patterns (still pretty cool nonetheless).

  • Object Mappers

    "NONE of them are easy to use. All I want to do is specify a database and hit "Generate". Kickstarter.net is on the right track, but they've got a ways to go."
    [Robert McLaws]

  • PPT->Flash

    According to the reviewer's guide the Powerpoint equivalent from Corel's Office 11 can export to SWF (Macromedia Flash file format). Why Microsoft has not yet done this is a mystery to me, there is a huge demand for this today:

  • Red Pills

    Scoble says there is another blogger of note that hasn't annouced he's taken the red pill yet...

  • Salaries

    "How is this even possible?  It doesn't make any sense whatsoever.  First off, the two languages are officially a little over two years old.  At least with VB.NET, a lot of VB skills carry over... so you can claim more years of experience.  Also, VB.NET and C# are virtually identical in features and capabilities... targetting the same platform.  So how can anyone justify the difference in salary?  Am I the only one that doesn't understand this?"
    [Cory Smith]

  • Scobelizer

    "Sorry for taking the weekend off. I know I owe you all some big news. That's coming soon. I was asked to hold off for another day, so I'll probably announce that on Wednesday morning."
    [Scoble]

  • ENT 1.0 Spec

    This might be useful while putting topic support in the RSS feeds or extending your favorite RSS agregator.

  • My Services Pricing

    I really love the My Services concept, but what is up with the pricing? I mean, I would really like to add .NET Alerts support over on the Dot Net Weblogs Archive, but yah right, MS is really blowing it here. Like I am going to dish out $10,000 to license passport and then $1,500 for the site and then another couple grand or so to use .NET alerts. Almost $15,000 just to send some friggin messages... I could write an app that sits in system tray and accomplishes the same thing without Passport in about 10 minutes, what is so special about the MS implementation that it requires $15,000 in licensing fees to do the same thing?

  • Dot Net Rocks

    "Paul D. Sheriff is a recognized leader in the Visual Basic industry and the Microsoft Regional Director for Southern California. Paul is a frequent speaker at Microsoft Developer Days, Microsoft Tech Ed, Microsoft "MSDN Presents", Access/VBA Advisor Developer Conferences, and user groups across the country. Paul is a contributing editor to Access/VBA Advisor magazine. You can also see Paul teaching .NET on Microsoft WebCasts and with Blast Through Learning videos. Check out Paul's new book "ASP.NET Developer's Jumpstart" with co-author Ken Getz.

  • VS 2003: First Complaint

    VS 2003 is great. I love the new C# autocomplete stuff, but one thing I can't stand is how they implemented the override autocomplete. Unlike every single other autocomplete function in VS.NET, where you type like you normally would and then hit tab or alt-space to complete, you have to type override to get it to come up, and then it automatically does. So, if you are used to typing something like:

  • First Mono Book Is Out!

    "Dieses Buch bietet eine ausführliche und praxisorientierte Einführung in die Programmierung von .NET-kompatiblen Anwendungen mit Mono unter C#. Nach einer klassisch strukturierten Spracheinführung in C# und in das Arbeiten mit dem Mono-eigenen C#-Compiler vertiefen die Autoren anhand von Themen wie Threads, Netzwerkprogrammierung, Sicherheit, Interaktion mit Datenbanken, XML u.v.a.m. Ein ausführlicher Praxisteil zeigt, wie mit Mono Webanwendungen erstellt, via gtk GUIs programmiert und unter MS.NET geschriebene Anwendungen im Rahmen von Mono (wie auch unter Mono geschriebene Anwendungen unter MS.NET) betrieben werden können."
    [Amazon]

  • MSDN Universal

    If you want to get ahold of VS.NET 2003 and don't have an MSDN subscription yet, you should check ebay's prices. I know someone that picked up a complete MSDN Universal Subscription for about $500 this week. Definately worth every penny.

  • MSDE Settings Tool

    This month's Visual Studio Magazine includes an MSDE admin tool with source (VB.NET). Could be useful if you don't have SQL (and hence Enterprise Manager). I assume that for most people that read this feed, that isn't an issue, but I do know there are a lot of people out there who haven't dished out the cash for VS.NET / SQL yet and are running Web Matrix and MSDE (speaking of Web Matrix...some very cool stuff coming down the pipe for v.2 that I wish we had in VS.NET 2003).

  • Universally Unloved

    "..Although it's true that Microsoft's products are universally unloved by their users, they're quite loved by the people who buy them: IT managers, VARs, and OEMs. Microsoft knows this and works tirelessly to address the biggest issues, which don't include pleasing users, who have little say in the selection of business software. The buyers don't see an upside in providing lovable software, but they do see a downside in selecting the wrong software..."
    [VSM March 2003]

  • Multi-Lingual Support

    "...Still, they are making headway — the Coast Guard has established radio facilities, and cleaned up enough rooms to make their stay slightly more comfortable. And the computers are working — about the only things on the terminal that didn’t require a massive overhaul when they arrived.
           “We came here and found all the computer systems up,” Shea said. “All we had to do was change the language from Arabic to English. It’s Microsoft!”
    [MSNBC]

  • Framework

    "The Framework is really cool part of .NET.  The languages are just there to help you do your job with the Framework in the best way possible for you."
    [Erik Porter]

  • Information

    "The forces of American colonialism began to drop containers that produce a sound explosion, a very huge sound. I remind you that they said that their strategy is based on shock and awe. Those failed ones manufactured a type of container that has an explosive substance, which they drop. They cause a very huge explosion in terms of sound, as if the universe was shaken. After a while, you go out and you don't find anything. You find some nails, screws, pieces of metal, but the important thing here is the sound. Those failed ones think that through the huge sound explosion, people would be shocked and consequently would collapse and be defeated. What happened? The contrary. The fighters..., the masses..., and the heroic sons of the Iraqi tribes discovered this game. They will turn it against the American louts so as to shock them. Wait for surprises, God willing, to see how the US game will fail."
    [WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com via Martin Spedding]

  • VB.NET

    "Picking VB.NET over C# is a little like picking which Playboy bunny will join you in the hot tub—you can’t go wrong either way."
    [Greg Robinson]

  • Politics

       On Thursday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a Senate panel that the United Nations “can’t be in charge.” He suggested that Russia, France and Germany could contribute to postwar reconstruction by writing off Iraq’s debts.
           Iraq owes Russia and France about $8 billion each, mostly for sales and contracts concluded in the 1980s, when Iraq was at war with neighboring Iran and had friendly relations with most other countries. Russia, then as the Soviet Union, was the major supplier of arms to the Iraqi military.
           But Wolfowitz, one of the main advocates of the campaign to overthrow Saddam, also said that France would have to “pay some consequences” for its opposition to the U.S. invasion, especially for opposing NATO assistance to Turkey.
    [MSNBC]

  • GPLangelo

    "I get tired of seeing people claim the GPL says you can't make money off covered software, or not sell covered software. The GPL says nothing of the sort. The GPL says you can't *prevent others* from sharing the software, its source code, or modifications to it, and that all modifications to it must also be under the GPL."

    "RedHat makes money selling GPL'd software. Cygnus was making money selling GPL'd software before they were bought by RedHat. ArsDigita was making money selling GPL'd software before they brought in those outside VCs."
    [Chris Hanson]

  • ECMA / ISO

    On top of an ISO seal of approval, companies can also look at the published specifications of C# and the CLI to better understand the underlying products once they purchase them, Goodhew said.

  • IsNullOrEmpty

    Yea, we have heard that request before... here is a method we are looking at adding a the Whidbey release of the .NET Framework on the System.String class. 

  • Do not use IClonable

    "I was doing a little work on the Design Guidelines document tonight and I noticed this section that we added recently.   I thought I'd post it here for your comments.    Where are you using ICloneable today?  Do you agree with this suggestion? 

  • .NET Tools List Update

    "We now have more than 130 items in the list! That makes a lot of tools for us to use. What is still missing from our toolbox? With all these tools (not counting the components and libraries), we have no excuse for bad software ;-)"
    [Fabrice]

  • Forrester Likes Central

    "Forrester believes that [Macromedia] Central will have a major impact on three application environments:

  • Cut and Paste

    "BTW, I have been working on a much better blog editor. Anyone know if it is possible to tell "paste" to just keep the carriage returns and drop all of the other style formatting?"
    [ScottW]

  • How long is it going to be before .NET has components for Analysis Services?

    This is just a rant on .NET with OLAP.  I am currently working on a project with OLAP and .NET for my work.  The pain in the butt side is getting the two to talk.  I am currently combining OLEDB.Net and so of my own XML parsing to create a usable document for displaying results.  I chose this route so I didnt have to Interop with ADO.old because I believe in moving into the future without looking back :).  So the overall gist of this is, when are we going to see SqlAnalysisServiceAdapter?
    [Jeff Julian]

  • Rss Error

    "Don't know if anyone noticed, but there's an error in the RSS feed.

  • Viewstate (2)

    "OK Jesse, but what's happen after a postback ? If I need to keep the value? And why can I read the value of the Control viewstate in debug mode, and not from my code?

    So far, the best solution has to be an hidden input box, and it works very well.

    Until I can read somewhere a clear article on how to use Viewstate properly between controls"

  • NLucene

    "I also implemented a search feature on the root site. You can find it here. This is just temporary, I have a couple other items up my sleeve, so I hope to make this much better in future. I still have to write something to repopulate the index, so until I can do that, it will be updated once or twice a day manually. (btw, if you are interested, the search is done using the NLucene project)"
    [ScottW]

  • .net Weblog Archive: Filter

    "I really like Jesse Ezell's .net Weblog Archives (even though he didn't spell my name right at first! :) Here's my feature request: Filtering. I already subscribe to many of the currently archived feeds. I'd love to be able to filter those out of the RSS feed. Since RSS retrieval is a simple GET, the list of filtered feeds would need to be stored on the server side. Or you POST up the list of filtered feeds and get back the filtered aggregate RSS. Aggregating and archiving RSS seems to be hot right now, so a standard mechanism for filtering would be appreciated. My vote: lets expose a web service to retrieve aggregate RSS information."
    [DevHawk]

  • Etiquette

    "I've read several bloggers who have their own opinion of what constitutes blog etiquette, but is there an accepted definition?"

  • ViewState

    "Manipulating Viewstate on a page is quite easy, using a property to save a state with a pair of get and set, fine..."

  • .NET Weblogs Feed

    "Great idea, although i don't see a 'search' link up there? is that the general idea? Plus - I stupidly added a link to this blog on there - and not to the RSS link either - to the actual web site of the blog . I know, stupid me. So i went ahhead a posted this blog with its RSS link. Only then do i discover that Feeds on DotNetWeblogs are automatically archived." erm. oops! sorry. So now i have two links up there ;) *shy smile*.Guess I should have RTFM..... sorry about that."

  • .net Weblogs Archive

    I missed a post for the last time... Ever saw a post about a day ago on the dotnetweblogs.com home page and then it dissapears and you have no idea who posted it? Wish that other bloggers showed on that page too (like Don or Clemens)? Well, I did and I do and rather than dreaming of what could be, I decided to do something about it. Here is the result of a few hours of early morning work:

  • Ellison Opens His Mouth

    "(04/03/03)—At a gathering of current and potential Oracle Corp. ISV (independent software vendor) partners in New York this week, Oracle Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison extolled the virtues of Linux and predicted that the open-source operating system will soon decimate Microsoft Corp. in the battle for the data center market.

  • MS Appeal

    Are most lower level judges really as ignorant as they seem? Why does Microsoft always have to appeal their cases only to have the appelate court agree that the first judge was an ignorant fool? What a waste of tax payer money. I really hope I never have to go to court for anything big and waste so much money on some useless trial only to have to appeal the decision because the judge cheated on his bar exam.

  • Portal Server 2003

    I was playing with Portal Server 2003 tonight and it is very cool. The UI makes a great use of DHTML. One thing that jumped out at me was that it uses SmartTags inside of IE! Anyone know how they accomplished this feat?

  • Never Say Never

    "They'll never be able to replicate Google's functionality...never. Google's got way too much of a headstart and their sole focus is on search technology. They are the experts."
    [David Stone]

  • Macromedia's SOA Vision

    "Web services are a native element in most of the software we're building at Macromedia today, and Adam's vision of asynchronous, message-driven, scripted, dynamic runtime-modifiable systems is a pretty technical way of describing the architecture for applications that we're working to enable in Central, with our focus primarily on the client side user experience and building on all the ongoing innovation in the services infrastructure. Still a lot of progress to be made in the underpinnings, such as wide adoption of XML Query, XML message brokering, and XML repositories rather than just relational databases, but there's certainly a lot we can build on already with our applications just with the web service architecture as it exists today."
    [Kevin Lynch]

  • More SxS

    Early Adopter still isn't convienced that the SxS behavior is good. But, we do agree on the whole framework deployment being a pain issue:

  • Cool Method You Never Knew Existed

    Ever needed to get the method description for the currently executing method? You can do this pretty easily by calling: "ConstructorInfo.GetCurrentMethod()."

  • .NET Rocks

    "Andrew Brust is President of Progressive Systems Consulting, Inc., a Manhattan-based company specializing in the development of, and developer training in, custom applications using .NET, SQL Server, and other Microsoft technologies.

  • Early Adopter on SxS Deployment

    "If the push was for SxS, then you would be free to make a lot more breaking changes to the Framework, as it wouldn't actually break apps.

    "20meg is a small price to pay for apps that 'just work'."
    [Early Adopter]

  • WM 2003

    "Our team has been spend some cycles the last few months on a new refresh of Web Matrix.  We've unfortunately been heads-down on ASP.NET V1.1 and ASP.NET V2 for the last several months -- which is why the refresh has taken longer than we origionally hoped for..."

  • AOP Extensions

    A few refinements to the AOP IL generator since this morning (addition of boxing for value types and some minor tweaks) and everything is working wonderfully:

  • AOP Extensions

    Well, after further examination, it looks like Clemens' demo code only includes support for field and property constraints (same names and usage as the AOP ServicedComponent attributes, but different scope)...guess I am going to have to write some code after all to get my AOP constraints up and running.

  • Better Things to do...like AOP

    As Scott points out, there are much better things to do than talk about VB and C# all day... So, here is something a little more fun. Clemens isn't the only one that can use AOP with ServicedComponents anymore :-). I took a completely different approach and I am liking it a lot, since I seem to have bypassed a ton of the problems he was having. I'm not using MC++, so no sad Macs are going to pop up in your face, but I am debating just using all of Clemens cool, already written attribute code from his demo to test my implementation (I think I can match everything up to his interfaces with a few small tweaks). Still very early in the process right now though since I just started around 11:00 PM (it is 4:00 AM now and I can't seem to get to sleep now that it is up and running).

  • Why men kill over language choice

    "'This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great secret of this world. Choosing "bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity -- to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!" And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. "

    --from Dostoevsky's classic The Brothers Karmazov. Book 4. Chapter 5, "The Grand Inquisitor"

  • More VB fun

    "They are not mutually exclusive.  We can co-exist.  There is plenty of room in the world for more than one language :-)  Also, as time moves forward, the two languages will diverge more... allowing for additional flexibility and capabilities.  You should know both; if nothing more than to take advantage of everyones knowledge... some being published in C# while others in VB.NET."
    [Cory Smith]