Reality in .NET

Code Camp: Atlanta

Jeremy Brayton — Sat, 14 May 2005 04:10:00 GMT

http://www.atlantacodecamp.com

Tomorrow, bright and early. I get a chance to hang with my homie Bill, who also happens to be presenting on something I know nothing about: the Compact Framework. Maybe after his presentation I can understand his posts about SqlCE and start to develop an appreciation for those devices I loathe (PDAs and Cell Phones). I suppose it's not so much the device, as it is the OS that I've been in contact with (Palm, ugh!). Cell phones are a whole other subject, worthy of therapy sessions and separate ranting blog posts but I think I'll spare you the drama for now.

Others I know of, but don't know personally are Paul Wilson and Wallace McClure. They'll both be presenting on Database topics which is an area I'm highly interested in, given my CRM background. Even though the Compact Framework interests me about as much as my next bowel movement, I know Bill will make the topic enjoyable.

A quick run down of the sessions I plan on attending:

Paul Wilson - OR
Todd Fine - Avalon and XAML
Brian Walters - Multithreaded apps in C#
Bill Ryan - CF
Wallace McClure - ADO.NET and SQL 2005

I'll most likely post some notes or thoughts I took from each session since I'm sure it'll have me thinking about something.

I have a more recent picture in my gallery here. I have a better picture but I'm too lazy to put it up at the moment. I figured that's enough to tell me from a crowd of 200 or so people, so if I bump into you, “Hi” in advance. If you're not going, you probably have more important things to do or something so I'll let you get back to it.

Database -> RSS -> Database

Jeremy Brayton — Fri, 18 Jun 2004 15:54:00 GMT

I've had an idea for a while. I subscribe to a ton of blogs, 98% of which are programmers. Once in awhile I'll come across a post that I really need to save for later. RSS just doesn't cut these kinds of posts because even though comments are syndicated, I go to the website to view the full thing more than I use RSS Bandit to view the post + comments.

My thought was to develop a database backend that I could use to pull entire posts + comments into. It would sort of be like a “offline blog” that I can use to read certain posts from certain authors for certain reasons. Since there are umpteen Longhorn blogs I subscribe to, it'd be wonderful to have one place I can go that has all of the snippets I want to look at, rather than try to run through RSS Bandit or some other tool to “manually remember” which post I need to see. Sure I can search, but I'm difficult.

Pros

Automatic downloading - Keeps track of certain posts so if they're updated by the author or comments are added, it updates the database
Posts + Comments - Posts themselves are useful, but I've found some super important “nuggets“ of information hidden in comments that are extremely hard to find without a aggrigator that uses the CommentAPI like RSS Bandit
Fully rendered pages - screen shots, clips, everything will be included so you can see the post as if you were on the website
Offline storage - Do I really have to explain this?
Backup - You could backup your entire blog at home, or in the case of complete failure everywhere you can “request“ your users send you the information so that you can rebuild your blog. Say geekswithblogs.net had a database corruption, I would be screwed with no way to rebuild my blog other than the RSS feed I have in RSS Bandit for my own blog (yeah I'm narcissistic)

Cons

Copyright - You don't want everyone in the world having your information and using it as if it were their own. Like they can't do this with your RSS feed now?

Someone's pretty much already did this to a degree. It's not quite the vision I had but they're leading me in the right direction. The post I'm referring to is here. I'd like to say 2 things to both Greg and Scott:

1) Damn you
2) Thank you

Damn you for almost taking my idea and making it free. I spent numerous “toilet hours” ₁ thinking of how to do this in such a way that would make it unique yet useful. I know I'll gain use from this if no one else, which is the basis for practically everything I program.

Thank you for proving that this can be done. I'll take what you started and make my vision. It will be free for all, period. I don't believe in charging for anything blog related because I spent $0 on my blog here at geekswithblogs.net (Thanks Jeff, I will give if you ever needed it).

₁ Toilet hours - Time spent brainstorming some of the best ideas I've ever had. This occurs only when I'm taking a dump. I have time on my hands during this so I might as well put it to some good use even if the smell sometimes impairs my thinking.

Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

Jeremy Brayton — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:18:00 GMT

In case you've been under a rock lately (like me) there's an important new download for those free-file buffs out there.

Here's some highlights:

Microsoft C/C++ Optimizing Compiler and Linker. These are the same compiler and linker that ship with Visual Studio .NET 2003 Professional!
C Runtime Library and the C++ Standard Library, including the Standard Template Library. These are the same static-link libraries included with Visual Studio.
Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime. Visual C++ can optionally build applications that target the Common Language Runtime (CLR).
Sample code. The toolkit includes four samples designed to showcase the powerful new features of the 2003 version, including new optimization capabilities, features to improve code-security and robustness, enhanced ISO C++ standards support, and the ability to use the .NET Framework library and target the CLR.

I'm assuming it's just the compiler and no IDE at all. This is perfectly fine though because you don't really need the IDE anyways. Now you can compile C++ programs natively in Windows, free. Plus you get all the added bonus of optimizations and the .NET tie-in.

The link to download it is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/vctoolkit2003/

There's also some articles and samples included. The samples alone are probably worth the download.

Microsoft EU battle

Jeremy Brayton — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 17:21:00 GMT

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4591561/

The EU also gave Microsoft 120 days to release “complete and accurate” information to rivals in the office server market so their products can work more smoothly with desktop computers running Windows.

MS should give out the same documentation to everyone. The SDK isn't different if you download it from a .microsoft.com, sun.com, java.com, or any other domain. If you can download the SDK you know as much as the rest of the world. If you want to find out if your product will work on Windows what does the rest of the world do? Download the SDK and test the product on the version of windows.

Monti said he limited the order to Europe in deference to regulators in the United States and other countries, but that doing so “will not unduly undermine the effectiveness,” given the size of the European market. Microsoft, which had $32 billion in revenue last year, does about 20 percent of its business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

32 billion / 20 % = 1.6 billion
1.6 billion / x % = 613 million
Total: x = 38.3125%

That's a pretty round number. Microsoft is basically being ordered to pay over 38% of it's earnings for EU of last year. Almost half of the money made by Microsoft in the year 2003 in the EU market is being 'refunded' to those EU countries.

Capitalism teaches us that when we don't like a particular company or product that we can 'choose' another product. If I don't think Windows is performing to my needs I'll choose something else. The problem with this is SalesLogix depends on Microsoft heavily to function. I can't use it any place BUT a Windows Server platform so until they make some kind of Linux/Unix/Whatever hybrid I'll be married to Microsoft for quite some time, or at least the company I work for will be.

The problem with this picture is they say that apparently 90 percent of the world's computers run Windows. Software companies have made the monopoly, not Microsoft. If SalesLogix would run on Linux we might possibly be using KDE as our Windows Manager instead of Microsoft. I could be blaming MS for SalesLogix insistent demanding of using all things Microsoft or I could point the finger at who I really think is at fault for that arrangement: SalesLogix.

I think the answer is not to penalize MS for anything. Sure they've done some underhanded stuff in the name of their product but that's no different than some telephone, electric, or other “big business” I see around. I don't think they make a crappy product which is why I use Windows. Do I like that everything on it ties it together in a web of all things MS? Not really but I've learned to live with it.

We need more operating systems, not more flavors of Linux or Unix (they're roughly the same damn thing too). We need more developers willing to step out on a limb to do development on different operating systems. The number of people in this world are growing so we should have a lot more choices for them to make, not simply grow the only choices into huge untouchable corporations.

Sharp Develop .99b

Jeremy Brayton — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 04:30:00 GMT

Where'd the 'a' go? Oh well I guess this is a needed upgrade if you run .99. I hadn't done rigorous testing or anything but there's an update for those of you keeping up.

For those .NET developer's who don't know, the download link is here: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/download/

Join the announcement list while you're there, that's how I learned about the download. It's much easier checking email than going to their site every couple of days, especially on something as cool as this. It may not be Visual Studio but it's slowly getting there. I'm wondering how quickly some of the Whidbey features might get integrated, the sooner the better if they want to keep up.