Reinventing the wheel

Brad Abrams on virtual functions and OO design

My response to Dare's response to my response to Dare.

The one in which I disagree with people who are a lot smarter than I am.

Ted Neward has a fantastic article over at ClrGeeks on Strongly Typed Infosets in .NET.

The solution he presents is a good compromised between the loosely-typed extensible XML world and convenience of strongly typed objects.

As we move toward a Web Services world that allows to stay closer to the native XML messages, I think we're going to see data being shipped around in these sorts of objects. All we need now is a generative framework for building these classes from XSD schemas, and we're good to go.

My new favorite office app

More than you ever wanted to know about ChainStream()

EWeek: Microsoft's Eric Rudder says MS will ship "a version of Windows Server in the Longhorn timeframe, known as Longhorn Server." Guess this answers the internal debate I was having with people at work as to whether Longhorn was only going to be a client-centric OS. This announcement is just more fuel on the "Longhorn will change the world" fire. Yet another reason I'm glad I'm going to the PDC in October..

According to eWeek, Microsoft now has something like $63 billion in cash. That's about $1.15 million per employee (assuming that they've got about 55,000 people there).

Based on 2001 GDP statistics from the World Bank, it would take the entire country of Honduras 10 years to produce that much money.

According to my handy Cigna Retirement Planner, all I have to do is invest 103 million dollars a month at 8 percent for the next 30 years and I'll have that much money too.

On a whim, I stopped by the bookstore tonight to pick up Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I started reading it at about 9:30. Now, about 4 hours later, I've finished the book and I'm ready to move on with the rest of my life.

I really enjoyed it. Nothing like 4 hours of mindless escapism. It's certainly not high literature by any means, but those books sure are entertaining.

My ultimate wish list.

Clarification

Questioning Ingo Rammer. But not really.

A great deck about the internals of the .NET Garbage Collector, by one of the guys who wrote it.

[Via Brad Abrams]

Scoble calls out Microsoft's biggest enemy.

The singular greatest enemy of any technology company is not rival technologists, but the Luddites who refuse to see the possibilities that new technologies offer them because they are fundamentally afraid of change.

 

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to have four pints of Guinness tonight instead of dinner.

No, really. It's OK. I had a salad for lunch yesterday.

I ran across a copy of MSPress's .NET My Services Specification (based on the Beta 2 code!) in the break room at work today. I had to chuckle -- it was a relic from an era long past, when Hailstorm was going to change the world. Today, that's so far out of date is laughable. I remember when Hailstorm was the big hot topic -- it seems like that was ice ages ago. But it was only about about 18 months past -- that book was published October 17th, 2001.

Sometimes, the speed at which the technologies I work with are advancing staggers me.

Sean Van Ness describes how to include the same C# source file in multiple assemblies using Visual Studio.NET.

Adding this to the "Things I didn't know about Visual Studio" file.

Martin Spedding on India.

My first impressions of the new NUnit

Roy's offering his services to companies who aren't technically qualified enough to do a technical interview themselves.

If they're not qualified to interview the candidates themselves, how are they supposed to be qualified enough to decide who's qualified enough to interview those candidates for them?

 

Why I don't like the XML serializer

Things to read when you should be working

Indian dinners are great

Deep dive with Reflector!

This site is too cool

Yet another scheme

The epiphany I had at lunch today.

Steve Loughran has a really funny post-mortem document on the Alien films.

Microsoft has posted a tentative list of PDC session topics. Man, I can't wait until October!

Thoughts on where .NET web services are going

Thanks to Fumiaki for pointing out that the RSS link referenced in the footer went to the wrong URL. That's been fixed now.

The inevitable link to MSDN

I finished my WSE 2 Demo tonight. It's available at http://hyperthink.net/code/wse2demo.zip. In order to run it, you need to have .NET 1.1 and the WSE2 Technology Preview release installed.

The contents of the demo are twofold:

• A simple recreation of Keith Ballinger's Heckle app that he showed that DevCon last week. This demonstrates using the SoapClient and SoapService classes to send SOAP messages across the wire.
• A more advanced chat server application that uses Web Services to communicate. The first request for each chat is processed through a central server; subsequent chats are processed peer-to-peer.

If you want to open the solution file, you'll need to create a virtual directory called HeadlineClient in IIS that points to the physical Wse2Demo\HeadlineClient directory prior to opening the .sln file. Otherwise, Visual Studio will complain.

Note that none of the web services actually need IIS to communicate -- all their communication happens via SOAP over TCP.

Documentation for the chat service is included in the source code.

Give it a shot and let me know what you think

I found another side project

CNN.com has an article on implantable chips for human tracking

Clemens is doing cool stuff

The fact that I can't check in code from home kills me.

Talking about the pros and cons of India

I've been playing around with the WSE2 Technology Preview that was released yesterday. I've got a little chat client/server app built that uses the new SoapClient and SoapService to send SOAP via TCP.

I was really suprised when my code threw an exception with the following call stack:

system.dll!System.Net.IPAddress.Parse(string ipString) + 0x296 bytes	
microsoft.web.services.dll!Microsoft.Web.Services.Messaging.SoapTcpTransport.OnReceive(System.IAsyncResult result = [undefined value]) + 0x228 bytes	
microsoft.web.services.dll!Microsoft.Web.Services.AsyncResult.Complete(bool completedSynchronously = [has no runtime value], System.Exception exception = [undefined value]) + 0x50 bytes	
microsoft.web.services.dll!ReceiveAsyncResult.OnReceiveComplete(System.IAsyncResult result = {System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.AsyncResult}) + 0x6a bytes	
mscorlib.dll!System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.AsyncResult.SyncProcessMessage(System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.IMessage msg) + 0x141 bytes	
mscorlib.dll!System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.StackBuilderSink.AsyncProcessMessage(System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.IMessage msg, System.Runtime.Remoting.Messaging.IMessageSink replySink) + 0x272 bytes	
mscorlib.dll!System.Runtime.Remoting.Proxies.AgileAsyncWorkerItem.ThreadPoolCallBack(System.Object o) + 0x3f bytes	
    

That certainly looks like the remoting stack hanging out down there at the bottom of the call stack to me...

It looks like the SoapReceivers class is using the Remoting infrastructure to do the work of servicing incoming requests. Makes sense, I guess; the Remoting team probably already has some pretty solid code for doing passive listening on a given socket. I'm more interested in the potential performance penalty of running all my WSE requests through the StackBuilderSink.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the System.Uri type cannot be natively serialized by the XmlSerializer because it does not expose a public constructor?

That sucks.

My first message on my own server!

My final thoughts on a really stimulating two days

Non-normative.

The killer app for web services?

More new toys from MS!