Quick note: All of our *.newtelligence.net and *.newtelligence.com servers will be unavailable from 6PM CET until about 6AM CET due to construction work in the office.  

Sorted out. We educated the construction guy how to turn the servers back on. He succeeded. Obviously. (Just checked coming back from seeing Charlie's Angels for the second time. This time the English original. Fun movie. Guy movie. Most definitely.)

Category-based UDDI RSS search. Done.

Matevz Gacnik got it and put himself on the list 

(Note: I set the output cache to expire every 180 seconds and therefore it mostly takes a little while to rebuild by getting the fresh data from UDDI) 

I wrote a little OPML renderer that grabs all RSS feeds that are registered in Microsoft's UDDI registry

A quick overview about my changes to BlogX and why it just isn't BlogX anymore. And, yes, you'll get it.

Philip Rieck makes a great point about the obsession with "revolutionary innovation" quite a few people have. Little steps count too, he says, and there's good stuff in old things and I absolutely agree. At TechEd in Barcelona I said in one of my talks that people should read less computer books published in 2003 and more of those published in 1973.

Stephen Forte is a big fan of Munich, except for their Linux strategy; and I do agree on the latter -- for some obvious and some not so obvious reasons.

BloggerAPI, MT API, MetaWeblog API, Comment API, Pingback API, Trackback  ...  are you nuts?

I must admit that until last week I didn't really pay much close attention to all the blogging related APIs and specs beyond "keeping myself informed". Today I copied my weekend's work over to this server and now I have all of them implemented as client and server versions. Sam's and Mark's validator is happy with my RSS 2.0 feed and the experimental Atom (Pie/Echo) feed.

I have to say ... the state of affairs in this space is absolutely scary. Most of the specs, especially for the APIs are lacking proper information detail, are often too informal with too much room for ambiguities and you need to be lucky to find a reasonably recent one. Sam laments that people don't read specs carefully and I agree, but I would argue that the specs need to be written carefully, too. It also seems that because the documentation on expected behavior is so thin, everybody implements their own flavor and extensions and not only do the APIs have huge overlap, but it seems like any random selection of offline blogging tools will use its own arbitrary selection of these APIs in any random order. Since my implementation didn't "grow" over time, but I implemented it all in one shot essentially only since last Thursday and had to look at this all at once and what I found was just saddening. All of this has to be consolidated and it will be.

I am all for the Atom project and creating a consolidated, SOAP-based API for all blogging functions that the aforementioned APIs offer. XML-RPC was a good thing to start with but its time is up.  I am also for replacing RSS x.x with a spec that's open and under the umbrella of a recognized standards body and not of a law school, that's XML as of ca. 2003 and not as of ca. 1998, and that's formally documented (with a proper schema). What's there right now smells all like "let's hack something up" and not very much like serious software engineering. Ok, it's proven that it all works, but how about dumping the prototypes now?

 

This morning I got up early (I going to be picked to play Paintball in an hour or so) and implemented image and attachment uploads for the blogging site. This is the test for the live site.

[Here's a copy of the SoapExtension Wizard for Visual Studio.NET: ASPNETSoapExtensionWizard.zip (53.82 KB)]

 

I will be speaking at TechEd Malaysia 2003

Productivity and ASP.NET

It took me less than an hour to implement, test and deploy pingback support for this blog here using ASP.NET and XML-RPC.NET (and that includes reading the spec). Yesterday and today, it took me less than 2hrs total (including addressing two comments/suggestions/corrections from Sam Ruby) to get (n)echo/pie/atom support working so that it can be validated.

A little IHttpModule implementation for ASP.NET that maps between URLs using regular expressions. In use here.

On-the-fly template-based blog rendering

If you want to get a feeling for what the rendering engine here can do (which may not be so impressive looking at other tools, but a lot better than than rev20 of BlogX which I started from), check out the "Pick a theme" bar down at the bottom of the page.

The default theme for this page is currently "newtelligence Blue". You can always go back to the default by clicking "Reset". When you select any of the other themes, you'll get a cookie set and the rendering engine will use the template whenever you come and look at the site.

[As of this moment there are two little bugs in the logic which will (1) have that cookie span the whole site and (2) will render the page inaccessible for you if the cookie goes bad. Both should be fixed today.]

This here is not Radio.

Quake II on .NET. Scott Stanfield and his team at Vertigo Software show yet another nice trick: Quake II in managed code.

I couldn't find one, so I made a WS-PolicyAttachment UDDI bootstrap file for import into Windows UDDI Services.

When I put that together, I ran into a bug in the spec. Point 5.1 shows the tModel for the remote policy reference. The tModelKey shown there is

<tModel tModelKey="uuid:0b1b5a47-bebf-3b7d-9802-f2dd80a91adebd3966a8-faa5-416e-9772-128554343571">

which is a bit long for a uuid, isn't it? Correct is the following (as the spec later explains):

<tModel tModelKey="uuid:0b1b5a47-bebf-3b7d-9802-f2dd80a91ade">

The bug even survived the revision from 1.0 to 1.1, which makes me wonder whether anyone ever reads these specs in any depth