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 Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Here's a reminder to get your disaster recovery plans up to date and not to keep all backups on site. Very sad. University of Twente NOC Destroyed [Slashdot

Wednesday, November 20, 2002 4:22:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

So, Microsoft bans modified XBoxes from XBox Live. I may be alone, but I honestly think that's a reasonable move in the favor of -- plain and simple -- gameplay. The whole online "play with random folks on the Internet" is only fun as long noone is cheating. Mod your box as you wish, but don't ruin my game-night with using an "invulnerability hack". I think that putting mod-chips into the XBox certainly isn't an evil act as such (if I wish I can just as much gut the box and turn it into a cat toilet), but the consequence of being able to mess around with the games and spoil other's fun by being unfair in the online-game certainly is.
Wednesday, November 20, 2002 4:17:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

The most interesting aspect of service-oriented architectures is that they have potentially unlimited nesting. A full-blown SOA solution is just a simple service to others.
Wednesday, November 20, 2002 3:42:33 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Fast ausverkauft. Nur noch ein Platz frei! It's going to be a fun week, next week. Maybe we'll do one in English soon ;)

Wednesday, November 20, 2002 10:43:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Is WSDL too hard?. In response to Greg Reinacker's comments I didn't say WSDL is hard, I said its cumbersome and unproductive. Come on, its just angle brackets how hard can it be ?? [Simon Fell]

Hard or not hard -- can we agree on "It's just not enough" ? :) My main problem with WSDL is that it tries to do 2 things (message contract and transport mapping), while it should do 3 things (message contract, service contract and transport mapping), however at the same time, one thing (WSDL) shouldn't do all these 3 things altogether but leave them to 3 separate things: A message contract definition language (defines soap:Body content), a service contract definition language (soap:Header) and a "web services binding language" that maps messages combined with services to transports.

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2002 8:24:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

 Tuesday, November 19, 2002
WS-Security and SAML got this year's PC Magazine technical excellence award in the Protocols category. Congratulations to the authors. Cool. (Did I say "draft standards" anywhere here ?)
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 9:30:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

It's not easy to read, it's certainly not written to entertain, but still one of the most important pieces of information on COM+ out there: U.S. Patent 6,422,620. PDF browser at espacenet , image and full-text version (you want to look at the text version first) at USPTO.

The patent explains how COM+ works internally -- how stuff gets activated, how policies provide extensibility points, how contexts are built and how context propagation works. The filing of this patent was a long while ago (Aug 17,1998), but the document was only published by the USPTO three months ago and although in XML times it may seem like anything 1998 must be outdated, this stuff describes quite well what's happening inside any copy of Win2K and up. Reminder: It's not a "how to" guide for hooking your own stuff into COM+, but allows you to understand what they've done -- reading this it is also a pretty complicated way to explain to oneself why WS-Coordination  is such a relevant WS spec.

Related: US6473791, US6301601, US6134594, US6014666, US5958004, US5890161,  US6425017   

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 8:07:42 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Excuse me? Life? For hacking? So what penalty does one get who physically breaks into a doctor's office and steals a server hard-drive (along with backups) containing vital medical information? Death?

    Ouch!...House approves bill to make hacking automatic life sentence [Scott Hanselman's Weblog]

 

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 6:15:36 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Sigh....Net Server: Three delays a charm? [Scott Hanselman's Weblog]

Translated into a bit of my world: The server-version of COM+ 1.5 now ships in April 2003. Sigh!

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 6:02:48 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

The event I've been waiting all weekend to announce: Everett is out!
Visual Studio .NET 2003 Final Beta is here:
For MSDN members only:

download: http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/resources/subdwnld.asp
site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/vstudio03/

[Sam Gentile's Weblog]

.... that event is also an event that's releasing me of yet another NDA. It's a "freedom of speech" event. Celebrate!

There's tons of cool new things in Everett, but don't look for the next wave of revolutions. Everett comes with very many little improvements here and there, some needed, some nice to have, but no huge new chunks of functionality -- MS simply made a good thing better and that's perfectly cool this time around :)

One of the little things that I really like is that in C#, typing "override<space>" inside a class-body will bring up IntelliSense with choices from the base class. Once you select a method to override, IntelliSense will give you a default implementation for the method that calls the base-class. Pretty.

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:58:04 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Architect's Forum, Oslo (Dec. 9-10) is the first stop on the tour. This is the 4th time I am going to be in Norway this year and I am always happy to go back -- Norway is a great country -- it'd be at a "fantastic country" if a beer (in words: one) wouldn't cost at least €7.50.  
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:39:43 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Benelux, mark your calendars for Feb 18-19: Developer Days 2003. I will be doing a rerun of my Web Services DevCon talk about how to extend ASP.NET Web Services with custom extensions and I am honored to have been invited to do one of the keynotes, which will, among other things, highlight and (maybe) prove that "Enterprise Services" (COM+ if you're of the old-fashined type) is now more than ever heart and soul of scalable, robust and secure .NET server applications.
Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:23:08 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

Pretty much 100% of what I am working on right now is covered by some NDA and still keeps me very busy at the same time. Funny, how one starts to feeling "guilty" about not blogging for a while. With the number of people having linked here and/or are visiting frequently, keeping the blog going really is like "customer service" -- in a good sense. 

However, there's light at the end of this tunnel. I am preparing for a speaking tour throughout Europe which will kick off in Norway next month and will continue through 10 more countries from January to April '03. I'll talk about "service-oriented architectures" and "aspect-oriented programming/metadata-driven architectures" on this tour - as usual there's going to be plenty of "demo-code fallout" from brand-new talks, which I'll post around here in the upcoming weeks.

And now for something completely different: http://www.somethingawful.com/photoshop/  ;)

Tuesday, November 19, 2002 5:16:26 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [6] - Trackback

 Friday, November 15, 2002

Little known COM feature: CoGetInterceptor. This function provides you with a universal interception mechanism that lets you dynamically inspect all aspects of a call and that feels a lot like .NET Remoting Context interception sinks (which unfortunately went from documented to "internal only" in .NET FW RTM)

I don't have the cycles right now to provide an isolated sample or an in-depth explanation, but it works something  like that:

IUnknown * pItfToBeIntercepted;
ICallInterceptor * pInterceptor;

// ... get pItfToBeIntercepted from somewhere

MyEventHandler * myEventHandler = new MyEventHandler( pItfToBeIntercepted ); // implements ICallFrameEvents
CoGetInterceptor(iidToBeIntercepted, NULL, IID_IContextInterceptor, (void**)&pInterceptor); // get interceptor
pInterceptor->RegisterSink( myEventHandler ); // register

with myEventHandler being an instance of a class that implements ICallFrameEvents. That interface has a method OnCall that gives you the ICallFrame info. You forward the call to the actual target object using ICallFrame::Invoke or you can just consume the call right there and not forward.

To get between the caller and the object, you call QueryInterface for iidToBeIntercepted on pInterceptor and hand this reference to the client instead of the actual interface.The actual "inner" interface is wrapped by the class that handles ICallFrameEvents and which forwads the call to it inside OnCall using ICallFrame::Invoke. (as shown in the pseudo-code constructor above).

If the target object is aggregatable, you can do all of this in an outer QueryInterface, proxying each interface being asked for and therefore construct a fully transparent interception layer.

Friday, November 15, 2002 8:56:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1] - Trackback

 Monday, November 11, 2002

To everyone visiting this blog infrequently: The calendar on the right broke a few weeks ago. Please use this link to get to older content. Also, check my stories section.

Monday, November 11, 2002 3:20:23 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

 Saturday, November 09, 2002

Busy times. No time to blog in the past two weeks. We're doing a major redesign of the newtelligence website, which will finally be fully dynamic, web service enabled and the new home for my blog. I've written a news aggregation service using all the good stuff in the .NET Framework and a bunch of ASP.NET controls for this.

We're hopefully done with all of that by end of next month -- takes a long time because we're really busy with our regular work in between. Just got back from a week-long .NET workshop and will be going to another one next week, followed two weeks later by our open-for-everyone .NET seminar "TornadoCamp.NET". (All in German, still a few seats left).

[Yes, TornadoCamp.NET might sound like a silly name, but it works as an expressive anglizism for the German market]

Saturday, November 09, 2002 8:31:00 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

 Tuesday, October 22, 2002
After toying around with various RSS/RDF feeds over the past few days (I am doing something in that area, but I am not yet ready to say what), my conclusion was that regular expressions are the only way to parse them. It really seems that RSS != XML. Sad.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002 3:56:30 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

 Saturday, October 19, 2002

Radio's rss.xml has unescaped ampersands in the <comments> tag! :-(

<comments>http://radiocomments.userland.com/comments?u=108971&p=12&link=http%3A%2F%2Fradio.weblogs.com%2F0108971%2F2002%2F10%2F17.html%23a12</comments>

Saturday, October 19, 2002 10:20:32 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

 Thursday, October 17, 2002
Thursday, October 17, 2002 6:46:24 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback



Ignore this posting ;) I am just trying to figure out whether this works with Radio. My JavaScript skills are a bit rusty and I am not up to date and what works with which browser...
Thursday, October 17, 2002 6:22:56 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

I really like Google News for what it does, but ...  News is very much about trust. I go to CNN.com and MSNBC.com knowing that they're both "breaking news" outlets and that what they are reporting often needs to be consumed with caution. Other news sites don't break the news as fast, but they are typically more solid in their assessment of what's happening for real and what's only a rumor. Aggregators like Yahoo! carry AP, Reuters and other news-agencies where you really know that these things come hot off the wire and are often even more speculative than what you get at CNN.

If you look, for instance, at the German media landscape, let me focus on TV, there's one TV news-show the "Tagesschau" that's among the highest rates programs (across the board) every night. It's dry news. No flashy intros, no sensational stories, no dog-breeder show reports. Very plain. They could air the show in black & white and read the news in Latin and people would still watch it. One thing you know is: They are very careful in figuring out rumors from facts and they cover the world. They've done so for 40+ years, false reports are extremely rare and trust only builds over time. The same is true for your trusted newspaper and just as much for the news website you visit most.

Now, Google News gives you an aggregated view of some 4000 different news sources and does so with almost to-the-minute accuracy. How do I sort fact from fiction? How do I tell trusted sources from speculative sources? It's difficult. News isn't news.

Thursday, October 17, 2002 4:16:13 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback

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The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.

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