. All opinions are my own.
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(I know that's not an entirely accurate description of what he said).
Robert Scoble talks about the latest Microsoft MVP summit, and some of the backlash over VB 6.0 not having a recompile path to .NET and Vista. He tried to make the argument that sometimes things have to break for revolutionary change, and he's right. Then again, I'm not sure that Vista is a revolutionary change. Anyways, one aspect that Robert completely ignores is that he makes the assumption that if people are forced to do a rewrite, they'll do it on a Microsoft platform.
There are only so many times Microsoft can make you rewrite some code, before you decide to go elsewhere.
Tags for this post: dotnet vb rewrite vista
Related posts: Leon, get with the program; Windows Vista, now with nagging; SQL Server is incompatible with Windows Vista?; Microsoft taints bloggers with free laptops... or, whiney bitches win again!; Leon, my point remains
posted at: 15:15 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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The QA section at work just found the Klingon translation for the Web Service project I've been working on, and is making unjustified fun of me. To defend myself, here's how it happened...
Global product, with a few languages currently supported. I need to support different languages in my Web Service, but there aren't any other translations available for the messages yet. In fact, we're not inclined to spend the money until the messages stabilise a bit more. But I need that translation. Simon happens to own an English to Klingon dictionary, which is better than anything else we can find.
Klingon translation it is then.
Oh, it's never been shipped, and it never will be. It did test the message infrastructure though, and provided some cube fun. If only I hadn't got busted by QA.
Tags for this post: dotnet international internationalisation message translation klingon test
Related posts: Time to document my PDF testing database; Historical revisionism; CD ROM; Interesting technique for finding leaks in code; It's always the way, isn't it?; The dangers of bad automated translation; Random fact for the day; Random idea; Wanted: PDF documents; Updated pdfdb; Australian's say the darndest things
posted at: 17:58 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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Clarke Scott (who once applied for a job as a Microsoft evangelist, although we should note that I don't hold the Microsoft job application moral high ground) blogs about repeats verbatim without verification a post from a Microsoft evangelist based in New Zealand about Linux Australia's support for Linus' trademarking of the Linux trademark in Australia. He ignores of course that Linux Australia has been running one of the most successful Linux community events in the world for the last four or five years, or that Linus is genuinely behind the trademarking effort. He doesn't look into how the Linux Mark Institute (the international body behind the trademark) is structured. Or what their goals are.
He just comments that the community is less free as a result.
Windows is a trade mark too. How does having Linux trademarked any more restrictive that Microsoft owning the Windows mark?
Update: Clarke commented on this post to mention that I had missed that this was a quote from another site, which I am happy to concede. He also suggests the post was tongue in cheek, despite the fact that I can see no indication of that having re-read the post.
Update: Fixed broken link
Tags for this post: dotnet linux trademark
Related posts: Trademarking colours
posted at: 22:57 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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You know someone's going to make a comment like this when a story about a nine year old girl gains Microsoft certification comes out. There have been a few over history.
I'm sorry, but if a nine year old can get certified, regardless of country, gender, or overall geekiness, then the certification is to easy. Well, perhaps Doogie Howser should be allowed to get certified, but the reality is that certification should also be about real world experience and the ability to apply knowledge to the problem in hand, not just rote learning from a book. A nine year old can't have had a long consulting career yet -- can she?
Tags for this post: dotnet certification children experience
Related posts: Chicken run; A mini-slashdotting; US Hi 5; Hetherington, 82, created Mr Squiggle in 1959 - a decade before men without strings landed on the moon; Engineers Australia -- ignoring their members since 1919; Its either a third child, or Cat is pregnant with a unicorn; Australian public service announcement; So proud
posted at: 15:20 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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Mitch talks about an article about moving from an IBM Websphere based weather.com to a Linux and open source based environment. He makes a passing comment about cachability, and that caching would improve the performance of the site.
I think that the IT industry has lost something over the last couple of years, and I think it's time for it to come back. That thing is static content. I see no reason that a largely static site such as weather.com (people read the weather, don't change it, and the content updates regularly, but nowhere near as frequently as once per click).
So, why not write an engine to generate the entire content of the site from templates, and then dump the output into a bunch of files on disc to serve? In fact, when you update the data, just change the file on disc and let the new file get served out when it's good and ready. This keeps processor load as low as possible while serving, and in fact probably makes the whole thing easier to debug. It's how my site is done too, and it makes the box that's hosting it much more responsive than it used to be under a dynamic workload.
Everything should be static, unless you can't possibly do it without some runtime code.
Tags for this post: dotnet web dynamic static content
Related posts: What do you do when the users who generate your content revolt?; Customisation of visible posts; Cataloguing meta data against multi media formats; Gartner recommends blogging over electronic content management; Looking for web form state management; Apple's Safari javascript implementation; They all use MySQL...; Gloat; Exceptions in Web Services; Web Servers, Web Applications, Web Services, Web Parts and maintaining your job security through naming conventions incomprehensible to the innocent public; PHP sample source code; Creepy; Email subscription to comments; Prior art needed: Microsoft patents XML Serialisation
posted at: 23:46 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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On my talking to Mitch kick, I should comment on his post on how to report exceptions from Web Services. Mitch is right. The classes of error we return from the TRIM Web Service are of the form:
- Input error
- Transient error
- System error (call your admin)
You get rollbacks from us for free, so that's ok. The only one I've added to this list is the system error. It's possible that the server is experiencing system administrator errors, such as being out of disc, not having a dataset configured, or so forth. These really should be reported separately from the input errors and transient errors. They're not caller input, and they're only transient if the admin realises he should fix them.
We also return a unique error code for each error, which means I know exactly where in my code the problem happened, which is a feature I'm really liking from a support perspective. The Soap Fault supports an error code, so that maps nicely there.
I should point out that we don't use the Soap Fault though, we use a different Soap'ed object. Perhaps we should consider using the fault, but we didn't want to have to abandon execution of other jobs for an error in some cases.
Tags for this post: dotnet soap fault exception web service
Related posts: Web Servers, Web Applications, Web Services, Web Parts and maintaining your job security through naming conventions incomprehensible to the innocent public; Prior art needed: Microsoft patents XML Serialisation; Buy Toshiba!; Apple update; More on Apple service; On caching of websites; Apparently terrible warranty service is par for the course with Apple; The excitement of Apple service; Mono return codes; Looking for web form state management; Apple's Safari javascript implementation; They all use MySQL...; Gloat; Please don't; Let the Apple service ranting continue; Apparently I should pay more attention to pingomatic; Creepy; Did I mention that Apple service sucks?; On customer service
posted at: 00:31 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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Mitch comments on hiring the right people and the process that Readify uses. He mentions that it's important to have a balance between the points on Tate's hit list, which is of course right. Based on my two Microsoft interviews now, I must say that they focus a little too much on the theoretical problem solving skills, instead of looking for raw talent, or an ability to talk to customers, or read existing code. They've really focused on one of the things on that list.
It's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, in that people seem to assume that the process that hired them is by definition the best process to use to hire a new person (presumably who will be like them).
Oh, is there a way in FinalBuilder to send an email when a build step fails but has "ignore failures" checked?
Tags for this post: dotnet hiring finalbuilder microsoft
Related posts: Collect the whole set; Calling Tate Needham, or, Hiring in Canberra; Troubles hiring people
posted at: 00:24 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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In a blast from that restaurant in Office Space, Microsoft has been providing "flair" for peoples blogs when they attend their events for some time. For example, here's the proposed flair for the TechEd 2005 conference:
Apart from the fact that flair seems like a good idea and perhaps should happen more often, I thought it might be time to do some re-mixes of the TechEd flair. Here's the one for my Windows based workplace:
And here's the one so that my nerdy friends don't make fun of me:
Tags for this post: dotnet microsoft teched conference flair
Related posts: Microsoft TechEd flair; Funny; I didn't get my shirt!; That's one way of doing it...
posted at: 17:58 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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"Of course I still find this incredibly ironic. Microsoft insists on re-using it's own source code, and even given the ease with which they can step into Managed C++, they still preserve their existing code rather than go through the time and expense of shifting to .NET. Yet for their customers, millions of VB developers, they abandon them and leave them no choice. Funny how there's one rule for Microsoft's source code and yet another for their customers."
Quoting Bill.
I see the same push from Microsoft to port for us C programmers as well. As best as I can determine Microsoft has no intention of porting their own code away from unmanaged C / C++, but they are certainly applying a lot of pressure onto ISVs to do just this. The other thing that an ISV has to bear in mind is that a port makes you inherently less competitive -- you end up spending a bunch of engineering effort to recreate your current product, instead of adding those new features that the customers have been asking for.
Tags for this post: dotnet microsoft unmanaged managed .net port
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posted at: 01:22 | path: /dotnet | permanent link to this entry
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