BinaryJam

This was a chalk and talk session, I had no real idea what a C&T session was but it was interesting. Don gets up and asks a load of questions from the audience and writes them down, in xml!. He sorts them into topics and proceeds to answer them.

The basis for the piece was the messaging infrastructure of webservices and future indigo messaging. Some questions were

1 x vs y vs z
2. http vs DCOM MSMQ
In this one he talked a little of .Net remoting and mentioned about it not being secure (perhaps you could role your own etc) and that the team who wrote it were not very big and they essentially had to rewrite dcom in no time at all so the whole tcp-binaryformatter was not a protocol that has had many man years on it, in fact why not just use DCOM its had thousands if not millions of man years worked on it ( there was more detail but I cant do him justice)

He says he will post these details to his blog with the questions and answers.

So what I will comment on was the talk in general, this was alively talk by an extremely well practised speaker. It was thoroughly enjoyable and with all the SAO zelousness (is that a word) a breathe of fresh air, the talk he did on this he compared the topic of SOA vs OO to sexuality and needless to say the outcome was very funny. SOA is based on OO “and if your feeling curious about experimenting with SOA there are places you can go in almost every large city to do this”

A very clever man and a very funny man. So far and I have a feeling this will be the highlight of TechEd for me.

Well Yesterday was the day of the big KeyNote speech a lot of big screens and music etc. It was interesting as its the first of its kind that I’d attended. They used it to launch the “Express” version of VisualStudio (well little bits of it). This is essentially ASP2.0 and Vis2005 broken down into bits for the Hobbyist developer. Plus a free version of SQL2005 (essentially replacing MSDE, considering it writes to a MDB file why dont they just call it JET )

First Session of the day was the Building occasionally connected applications. This was presented by Rocky so a good speaker, although I later heard he wasnt booked for this and its someone elses session, well it was pretty seamless if it was. Building on the Smart Client App Block her went through th evarious scenarios that presented the disconnected problem and detailed how the App Block dealt with them. This is the hardest of the App Blocks I looked at it, because it builds on top of so many of the others. I downloaded FotoVision, wonder why they didnt us the AppBlock ?? Cos its too damn hard!!!

Next was what I thought was going to be about VS2005 and Yukon, WRONG, they used this session to introduce further the Express editions, now I did glean some useful info from this sessnio about whats coming, the XDS’s can now be designed with a built in adaptor which you can add methods to to essentially create DataObjects in the XSD designer, no more splitting out the XSD and the Provider code into seperate classes, wonder what happens if you XML serialize this object ??? But this session mainly annoyed me, not becuase of the content but becuase I feel that MS have wasted valuable time in getting these products to market instead of concentrating on VS2005 and Yukon, for the Hobbyist. Sorry but Hobbyists don’t pay the bills its the people here, if people want to learn this stuff do it the hard way the rest of us had to what makes you so special ?

C# best practices. This was split into a lot of “Whats wrong with this code” sections its was an enjoyable session despite the very few questions I got right, its hard to spot these things as so much of it you could put down to style, which is what I did I thought I would write that code like this, strangely enough the way I would write it was the correct way, but I didnt know why in some cases. Others I did I just nailed the IDispose section but then I harped on about it so much I should do.

Lastly Don Box but I gotta go and he deserves his own section.

Found this nugget in the .net247 with a link to the MS site, google didnt list it

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/html/cpconrowstates.asp

In a nutshell :

switch(m_objDataTable.Rows[i].RowState)
{
case DataRowState.Deleted:
this.SettingsManager.RemoveAdminSetting(m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserId",DataRowVersion.Original].ToString());
break;
case DataRowState.Added:
strKey=m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserId"].ToString();
strVal=m_objDataTable.Rows[i]["UserName"].ToString();
this.SettingsManager.SetAdminSetting(strKey, strVal);
break;
}

Just found this

http://www.wayoftherodent.com/gd101/bs_paperarcade.htm

Cool

IIS6 Has a fancy new feature called web gardens, this helps keep the uptime on a site.

For those of you who write websites and have generally only written for a single server (there are people who do this, intranets, small sites etc) then you have to bear in mind that this makes your application work like a Web Farm. If you store stuff in Cache or Session or Application, there are (N) copies (where N is web garden number) all seperate from one another.

Having seen the setting for web garden in the Application Pool and realising its impact, its a little too simple to change, now help text, no warning (“did you design this application for split deployment ?”).

Just a thought.

Raymond Chen posted a link on his blog to an article detailing, and I mean detail, about the etiquette for drinking in British Pubs, a guide to the non-brit

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/05/10/129069.aspx

* This was a nickname given to me in my early twenties working at an IT dept in Birmingham(UK) that was opposite a cemetary, The guys reckoned that I was so pale and needed sunshine (I am a sad old goth), and the HR department didn’t so much as go on a recruitment drive to get me but went out with shovels and dug me up from opposite the company.

Extract from

http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/03/13/89220.aspx

….

The easiest way to find out was using autoruns.exe and procexp.exe, two tools from those excellent folks at sysinternals.com. Autoruns lists all the executables called at startup, but gives no indication of where they’re from or what they do. Procexp lets you dig deeper for vendor name and program information. Note that autoruns can also delete startup items, but that’s a little extreme – if you delete something important, you’re going to have a fun time with regedit putting it back into SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. It’s safer to first try XP’s built-in System Configuration Utility, from Start->Help and Support->Tools (or c:\windows\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\msconfig.exe). Just use its startup tab to turn off startup processes without deleting their entries. Once you’ve confirmed that everything you want to work still works, you can then use autoruns to delete the entries for good.

….

Well I got the bike, lovely and shiny she is too. I
forgot what a pain running a bike in would be. My first bike GPZ500, I was
a new rider so I didnt know how to ride the bike so it was no problem. My
next bike the ZX6R, after a couple of days I realised I’d made a big mistake and
this wasnt the bike for me I was too short in the leg and long in the body to
ride a super sports, but I was commuting everyday and anything was better than a
car I eventually got used to it, but that getting used to period coincidined
with running-in.

This bike is a lot like the GPZ500 I loved so much in
riding style, but quicker and a four stroke, add to this I have had a license
for 8 years and have been riding for 5 of those there is no getting used to
period for me within a few miles it all came back to me and the temptation to
rev past 6000 rpm let alone 4000 is a bikers nightmare.

Still its fun I can feel the arthritis in my fingers
coming back already.
(Im 35 before you ask
computers, climbing and biking do that to you)

Cant wait, Cant wait Cant wait !.

I ordered my new spangly zzr600 two weeks ago, its friday, Im only working till 13.00, cash arrived in bank, bike is ready. Insurance company SCREWED up got the bloody reg number wrong. Not a major deal but now the bike will list two owners cos I cant wait another x days till insurance send the correct documents and get it registered properly.

See piccy here