Archives
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The "Five Eights" of J2EE Availability
Woah! I thought that the J2EE guys knew how to build enterprise applications, but apparently that's just a myth. Check out the “Five Eights” expose by Rick Ross, founder of JavaLobby.
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"We Have Met The Enemy...
...And He Is Us“ (Walt Kelly, 1970 Earth Day poster)
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Real Programmers...
In one of the coments to my post about the future of VB, Leon Bambrick wrote
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Future of VB (Argh!)
FTP Online just posted a full version of a recent interview with Chris Dias titled “VB.NET Branches Out”.
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INETA Speakers band at PDC
Kirk Allen took this picture of the INETA Speakers band playing at the Expo hall during “Ask The Experts” at PDC last week.
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Longhorn needs a "Go Live License"
The “Go Live License“ for ASP.NET was a great thing. Here's a post from an old blog by Scott Guthrie as well as a mention in an interview with Eric Rudder.
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SQL Server Profiling
I went to a SQL Server user group meeting last night. http://www.pnwsql.org/, which is actually an MSN groups page with a broken graphic link, but - hey - they're data guys, not web developers.<g>
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My brother thought I might be institutionalized...
He's living near the Vatican (don't ask...it's a long story) and I hadn't returned his email, so he googled me, found my blog, and saw that I hadn't written anything in more than a month. Then my friend Fernando, a SQL guru, asks if I have another blog somewhere else. <sigh>
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Party Tommorow (Saturday, Sept 6)
I hadn't even thought about blogging this until Robert asked me if it was OK for him to mention it...
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PDC "Gatherings"
It took a few weeks to put together, but INETA now has their first feedback system in place, this time for gathering topic ideas for “Birds of a Feather” (or BOF) get-togethers at the PDC.
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How many icons in VS.NET?
Here's a fun one: I was riding in an elevator the other day and a guy got on with a large notebook that said “Visual Studio .NET Icons” on the cover. Now there is a specialized job! Guess how many different icons are in VS.NET? (answer in the first comment)
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Playing hard
Is it just me, or has everyone caught a summer fever?
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The "Engineer's Fatal Flaw"
Michael Kanellos - in a well-reasoned piece titled What happens if SCO wins? - talks about coining the phrase "Engineer's Fatal Flaw" with his college roommate, illustrating it with "the belief that you passed physics, so you think you know everything." His roommate "had an answer for everything, and often it involved the death penalty, a flat tax or some other clean, simple solution that would have been absolutely insane to try in real life." He then goes on to say that "there is arrogance inside the scientific mind, and it rarely knows when to stop."
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The wrong room
Jon Box commented in my previous post about name confusion that he was almost checked into Don Box's room. Which reminded me of this story (hotel part comes at the end)...
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Email on planes?
There's a story in today's Wall Street Journal about United Airlines installing in-flight e-mail by the end of the year. $15.98 per flight, plus $.10 per KB over 2KB. You're going to plug into the phones already on the plane and configure Verizon as a dial-up ISP. Gee, they did such a good job getting power to the seats (industry joke there) that I can hardly wait.
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VB and C#: Some perspective
I just got done writing the editor's note for VSLive! Orlando (I'm the conference chair for VBITS and VSLive!), which helped clarify in my own mind something that I observed last week while doing a couple of INETA user group presentations.
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Ideal n-tier hardware config for *devs*
Ever notice that the n-tier samples for developers are not truly intended for tiered distribution? Of course, that's because us devs don't have multi-machine environments to mirror what's actually used by our businesses (or customers). So, while the sample apps don't mirror real world, they do make handy demos. Can you imagine telling your boss / customer / spouse <g> that you need to have a dedicated development and test setup with, say, 4 machines and associated networking equipment? Would you really want to set up, configure, and manage this infrastructure?
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People Confusion (fluff alert)
Jesse commented to my previous post that the name of new INETA speaker 'Jon Box' was "way too close" to 'Don Box'. (he then went on to mention a BillG confusion). Of course, there are at least a couple of other 'Don's in our small industry - though perhaps none that are commonly referred to as "the Don" - but it does highlight the potential for confusion (not only that, but Jon Box is a coworker of similar-sounding Dan Fox). Maybe, like the Screen Actors Guild, we need more clearly unique names? Maybe Jon should change his name to Johanne. <g>
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INETA Speakers Bureau - New Additions
What with all the pressures leading up to TechEd next week, the INETA Speaker Committee still found time to evaluate all of the candidates proposed for addition to the Speakers Bureau. After careful consideration by, actually, quite a few people, we are pleased to announce that we are now adding a "baker's dozen" new speakers:
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".NET Designers"
I'm working on a series of small pieces for an area of MSDN online called ".NET Designers". The first one is about looking at the Microsoft sample applications through the lens of the Patterns and Practices security model. We have a few ideas about where to go from there, but I'm particularly interested in what design issues .NET developers are currently struggling with.
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VB gets a little respect. Very little. Tiny, even.
Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent piece about software prototypes entitled "The Iceberg Secret, Revealed" back in February, and I just ran across it. As I mentioned last month, I did some contracting for Joel circa 1992.
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"The Dullest Blog in the World"
My girlfriend - who reads my blog regularly, even though she's not at all technical - just sent me a link to a story in today's Seattle PI about the "Dullest Blog in the World". I'm not sure if she's trying to tell me something - like maybe mine is duller? - but, what it all comes down to is context and perspective.
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My dinner with Scoble
I had dinner with Robert last night. Our central topic was, where's the smart client going?
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This is progress?
Everybody's raving about it: Don, MSDN Mag, even Steve Gilmore said that "What Bosworth soon will know, and Ozzie already does, is that RSS is nothing less than a new platform for development and deployment." The war of the aggregators is heating up! Threaded navigation! Content push! Right to your desktop! .NET Source code available! The dawn of a new era! Yeah, right...
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Connectix
ScottGu was on my plane down to the Connections show in NOLA last week. Of course, being who he is, he was banging away on a laptop up until the last second to board the plane. When he went to put his laptop away, I noticed another one in his bag and said "Two machines"? He said, no, he's actually carrying three laptops. Ugh. Sounds like a job for Connectix Virtual PC for Windows, a competitor to VMWare that Microsoft liked so much, they bought the company.
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"Ask The Experts"
I'm managing the "Ask The Experts" booth at Connections this week in NOLA, after an all-day INETA board meeting on Monday. This area at the show floor entrance is put together by Microsoft's Eric Ewing (the guy behind the CodeWise Community) and when we did it at VSLive in February, there were usually a half-dozen speakers hanging out there at any given time. Tons of fun!
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Lurker in Las Vegas
Bill Beeem commented on my second blast post and tossed in Las Vegas. Wow, that's another memory jolt. What he's referring to was Comdex, cira 1994 or so, when I put together a room block for 20+ VB developers at the Golden Nugget. Why the Nugget and not a hotel on the Strip? Well, it turns out that Kenny Wynn (brother of Steve Wynn, who was clearly the model for the hotel owner in "Ocean's Eleven") was (still is?) a VB programmer! So we got a great deal and Kenny even showed up and picked up our breakfast one morning. Anyway, I rented a large passenger van to ferry people to the show.
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A Ritz-y launch event
Scott mentioned doing launch events in the PNW. I was fortunate enough last week to have the opportunity to do the Architecture track for the Puerto Rico launch event. Which was held at the Ritz-Carlton. On the beach. Very arduous duty. <g>
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A couple more blasts...
Don mentioned that Sara Williams now has a blog. Another blast from the distant - and more recent - past. I interviewed Sara (and Greg Leake) for an article on OLE 2.0 that I wrote for Byte magazine that was published in 1996. I found that article (OLE's Missing Links) in the Byte Archives. Their archives only go back to 1994, but I also found an article in January of 1994 about subclassing in OLE 2.0 by Gen Kiyooka.
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Copyright problems?
Mike Sax posted that "The Creative Commons License may ruin your life"and linked to my previous post about wanting a different copyright notice on my blog. Frankly, I didn't see what the big deal was. Then I read his link to Dan Bricklin's post about these "warrant" issues, and Yikes!
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Need a new copyright notice
Keith Ballinger pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago that the "Copyright Keith Pleas" at the bottom of this blog basically doesn't allow anybody to do anything with my blog. Perhaps even quote it. I asked Scott - who runs dotnetweblogs - about adding a customization option for copyrights, but it apparently didn't make it into the new site he rolled out this weekend.
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User Group = Customer Support Group?
Julia talks about why she runs a .NET user group. I just couldn't resist making the connection to this past Sunday's Dilbert cartoon about corporate "Customer Support Groups". <vbg>
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Taped the MSDN ".NET Show" on Friday
Chris Kinsman and I taped an episode of the .NET Show on applications architecture with .NET. We did the show with Ed Jerzierski (of PAG) and Mike Burner (of the Platform Strategy Group), and it should be out in May. Lots of stuff to talk about: the architecture community portal I announced last week, new patterns and stuff coming from PAG, and what we learned from our first on-campus architecture event in March and how we're updating things for our next event (now called the "Guided Design .Summit: Architecture and Design for .NET").
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NEW: Community Portal for .NET Architecture and Design
The new Microsoft portal for .NET architecture and design just went live on GotDotNet. This is the community side of the MSDN Architecture site and contains patterns, VS.NET enterprise templates, technical articles, discussion groups, and third party content.
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More stats for my blog...
As I mentioned in my previous post (emphasized in the comments by Mike), RSS "views" are the vast majority of accesses. And, yes, they tend to inflate numbers dramatically. The aggregator I'm using - SharpReader by Luke Hutteman - by default refreshes every hour.
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Audience for weblogs?
Robert is waging a personal war against "traditional" industry pundits (particularly John Dvorak), postulating that they're afraid of the readership that blogs as garnering. So, just how popular are these blogs?
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Pill people posit?
OK, thanks to some noted bloggers (Tim, Don, and Robert in particular) everybody knows that Chris Sells "took the red pill" and joined Microsoft. No doubt, this has caused some people to wonder about their chances of getting hired by Microsoft.
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How could I be so dumb?
I showed a security example at VSLive this week that simply didn't work. It was pretty straightforward: I put a LinkDemand in a component assembly that looked for a key signature in the caller. It's always worked before, so I didn't think to test it ahead of time. Dumb.
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Friend or Foe?
This week was VSLive Chicago. Pretty good turnout with lots of late registrations, which is encouraging for the industry.
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"Developer Dawgs"
The "Developer Dawgs" movie:
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Certification: False Postives versus False Negatives
OK, lots of people are aware of the false positives of certification. Like Scott Hanselman, who says "I know lots of people who are certified that I woudn't hire."
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The "Golden Hammer" anti-pattern strikes again, with echoes...
Don XML - in his From The What Were They Thinking Department post - wrote about what a poor idea Fawcette's Enterprise Architect Summit was. Robert Scoble and bunch of other "MS'ers" (apparently, .NET developers) climbed on saying yeah, how can it possibly compete with the PDC, they're idiots, won't they ever learn, blah, blah, blah.
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Please save us from "professional" developers
Sometimes I feel like us "Morts" live in some kind of parallel universe.<sigh>
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Aw, it's not so bad being a Mort...
Mike Harsh mentioned the "Mort" personna that MS uses for VB.NET developers, saying that "In summary, the Load event is about convenience". Julia expressed some tongue-in-cheek alarm over being a Mort.
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Memories of developing with Office...
Chris reminisces about writing MS certification exams in his Blast from the Past post. Well, going even further back, our first contracting job at Microsoft was writing the Excel SDK. This was in 1991 and came out of our bitching about Excel-based development at the Developer Tools Forum (the pre-cursor to TechEd) held in Seattle in August of that year. In yet another demonstration of serendipity, we actually worked for Joel Spolsky. Chris has used his FogBUGZ on a couple of projects, but I haven't been in contact with Joel in years.
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Condescending? Who, me?
About my previous post on Certification Exams, Andrew Duthie commented in his blog that:
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MS Certification Exams
Scott Hanselman ranted yesterday about the people putting all their MS certification initials after their names. A comment from Mike Gunderloy threw me into the "way-back" machine...back to perhaps 5 years ago when Chris Kinsman and I were hired to do the technical review of the Windows Architecture exams that Mike and Ken Getz wrote the questions for. Boy, we sure fought a lot over those questions. Not sure why exactly: Those exams were pretty pointless anyway.
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Whither UAL?
On a recent United Airlines (UAL) flight I ended up next to one of their pilots. I've been a Premier Exec on them for a few years, have a quarter million miles and a bunch of upgrades "in the bank", and am naturally playing close attention to their bankruptcy. The ticket agents say "don't worry, we'll always be here". 20 minutes later I read that they're being delisted from the NYSE. I've got to buy tickets for Chicago, DC, NY, Milan, Michigan, Boston, NOLA, Dallas, and Barcelona. And that's just in the next 3 months. <sigh>
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St Louis .NET UG
I did a talk on remoting for the St Louis .NET User Group on Monday. It was very different than the one I did in January for the Austin .NET User Group. The Austin meeting was quite an eye-opener: A large number of the people there were from the Java .com meltdown and most of the questions were about bridging between .NET Remoting and J2EE RMI. For those who care, check out Ja.NET from Intrinsyc and JNBridge Pro from JNBridge. The wierdest thing about the Austin talk was the ride back to the airport: The cab driver was a laid-off IBM Java developer with a master's in computer science. Very scary.
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Why am I doing this?
Well, Scoble's been after me for a while to set up a blog but, frankly, I figured it was just another nutball technology that was never going to amount to anything. I mean, he's always pushing something, right?
OK, so sometimes I can be a bit thick. But three things happened to me this week that - combined - pushed me over the edge. 1) On a flight to St Louis to do an INETA presentation on remoting to the St Louis .NET User Group, I sat next to a United Airlines pilot and learned some amazing stuff (which I'll put in a subsequent post) related to their current financial problems. 2) People all around me mentioned that Don Box was driven to the airport by Jeff Richter after a King Crimson concert. 3) Daniel A. Seara (the MSDN RD for Argentina who I met at the INETA LATAM kickoff a couple of weeks ago) forwarded a truly interesting link to Scott Hansleman's Tips for a Successful MSFT Presentation. So...in reverse order to above...there's some great stuff up there, people I know are doing it, and I've got a few things I'd like to tell the world about. Besides, I mentioned to Yasser that I was thinking about it and about a half-dozen people e-mailed me about that.
