Rants
I've always wanted to drive my server around the block. Here's my chance. This guy tooke a dual Xeon case and put it on a Go-Cart chassis with a radio controller. Voila, you can now drive your server around at blazing speeds...at 2.8 GHz! Pay special attention to the specially designed "Tachometer" that shows the CPU usage. They added 'bounce' when the CPU usage was 0% to look like a running engine. Very cool...
ms that the recent Patent court loss by Microsoft has some garnered some interesting support from the likes of Sun and Macromedia (Flash), among others. It is well worth a read...
The PDC talk is heating up and it is clear to me that there is a huge number of 'wow' features that will be unveiled in LA. It seems like most of the other bloggers are talking about what I think is protected behind the multitude of NDA's I've signed. So to be safe I am keeping my mouth shut...tightly. What I can say is that what you'll see at the show about Whidbey, Yukon and Longhorn are phenomenal. Some of it is evolutionary, but much of it is revolutionary. I think you’ll be pleased... I am.
Since Don (Box) can’t seem to not talk about it, Indigo has gotten me really intrigued. I haven’t seen any of it, but I really want to know everything I can about it. That’s where I will spend my time at the PDC.
On a more mundane note, it looks INETA is going to be fielding its own band at the PDC. So far I know its Richard Hale Shaw, Carl Frankin and I. But I expect it to be a blast a number of people to come out of the woodwork to play.
In the last four years, I have been so heads down in my writing, developing and spelunking that I have neglected my own music ramblings (see http://mp3.com/shawntwain). The PDC has given me a reason to spend some time tuning up the old fingers.
This is a small announcement of a presentation at Purdue of the electrical engineer that invented Ctrl-Alt-Delete. I never gave it any thought. It should have occurred to me that some has all sorts of odd inventions on their resumes. I remember an article a year or so ago attributing the ':)' to someone on a BBS in the '70s. Go figure...
I finally finished downloading Office (System) 2003 from MSDN and found out that it did *not* include OneNote. It is like breaking a toy on Christmas morning. I admit I am one of the converted. I just love using it for a multi-tasking note taker. I don't just use it in meetings (which I have very few of any more), but all day. As I get an idea about something I am not working on immediately...it goes in OneNote. I just noticed that the MSDN website says the rest of the Office System will be available October 1st. Arg!
I finished my talks today at VSLive. I am very impressed with the conference. I have never been before. The conference facilities and hotel are exceptional. Much kudos goes to Fawcette for putting together such a great conference.
I love getting to speak to people using ADO.NET and see how they are using the tools. It seems that there is some difference of opinion between what other ADO.NET writers/speakers are teaching about DataSets. I would love to do a panel discussion sometime with some of the other writers to investigate the different opinions.
My presentation and example code will be up here when it's ready.
I was a big Active Directory fan a ways back. Not for the usual reasons, but for application specific data. After dealing with the fiasco that was the LDAP store in Site Server, it was nice to see a large-scale robust LDAP store. The problem was that the data store was tied to the domain model too tightly.
With that in mind, I was very happy to see that Microsoft noticed and has released Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM). I really like where it is going. While the tools for managing the ADAM stores are pretty deplorable, the data store is pretty solid.
For the LDAP uninitiated, LDAP stores (like ADAM) are made to store non-volatile hierachical data and are tuned for reading, not writing. LDAP is not a replacement for databases, but a different data tool in your toolbox. It has this very specific purpose. What is nice, is that LDAP is a very mature standard. LDAP v3 is a protocol that has been with us for a quite a long time and implemented across the industry (IBM, Sun, Oracle, Novell, etc.)
Everytime I add a app.config file to a new C# App, it never does what I want. I want the app.config file to be deployed to the build directory so I can make changes to the app.config file and have it propogated. With the release of VS.NET 2003, us C# developers now have pre and post build steps. So I now have to remember to add the following to the post-build event:
xcopy /s $(ProjectDir)app.config $(TargetPath).config
I know I could write an "Add New Item" to make it happen, but I just haven't had the time. I just wish MS had done it for me.
UPDATE
Chris Sells has alerted me to the fact that if your project has a app.config file, VS.NET 200X will copy it and rename it for you. My bad. I could have sworn that I tried this before and it didn't work : (
When I was growing up we always had a couple of Holiday Inn towels hanging about. I never felt guilty until now. Follow the link...trust me!
I have been spending a lot of time writing about technology lately. After a phone conversation with Tim Ewald, it got me thinking. During the first half of writing the book, I was working full-time writing ATL/C++ apps mostly and trying to get up to speed with ADO.NET at night. While my girlfriend minds, I don't really.
While in this phase of the project, I learned a lot about the technology and the class signatures, but it was very hard to grasp the big picture of the real problems that people will/are facing.
Soon after I got a full-time position developing a large scale .NET application. This really helped me appreciate the nature of the techology. I started to get really excited about how ADO.NET would help people solve these problems. Later on I started doing a tour of .NET User Groups to talk about ADO.NET and this was enlightening as well. People were asking me real-world questions that I did not always have great answers for. In the end, both of these experiences definitely helped me write a better book IMHO.
So the quandry, do I go out and try to find a position helping build large scalep projects to stay sharp with the trench warfare that is coding or simply move to being a full-time writer/editor? I don't want to lose my edge of understanding the code, but trying to do both is exhausting.
In the end, I hope to find somewhere in-between. Work on designing large scale projects while being able to write/edit about feels like the good middle ground.
