Here’s my quick, two sentence definition of Indigo in order to give you an idea about the scope of this thing:
Indigo is the successor technology and the consolidation of DCOM, COM+, Enterprise Services, Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), WSE, and the Microsoft Message Queue. It provides services for building distributed systems all the way from simplistic cross-appdomain message passing and ORPC to cross-platform, cross-organization, vastly distributed, service-oriented architectures providing reliable, secure, transactional, scalable and fast, online or offline, synchronous and asynchronous XML messaging.
The PDC keynote, featuring Bill Gates, Jim Allchin, Don Box, Chris Anderson and, on video, John Scully, Marc Andreesen, Bill Clinton, Warren Buffet, Sean Combs (P. Diddy) and lot of other folks ... was easiest the best, most substantial, longest and fun keynote I've ever seen. And I've seen very many.
Longhorn, the Aero shell, the Avalon programming model, WinFS and Indigo rock already and they are going to get better and better as time progresses.
Hey, Linux Penguins, here's the new thing to clone. Good luck.
I am somewhere above Canada right now, on board of the KLM 747-400 named „Seoul“ (Reg. PH-BFS),
which is flying in a passenger/freighter configuration from Amsterdam to Los
Angeles today. My seat is 74J, which is on the upper deck. It’s always
cool to fly on the upper deck of a 747, regardless of class. Some airlines,
like British Airways, use the upper deck for economy class, some, like KLM,
seat their business class there and others, like Lufthansa, their first class. Today,
wines are great, food is excellent, and the service staff is very friendly (and
eye candy) on Holland’s national airline.
Tomorrow, PDC03 starts. Cool. Can’t wait to see my friends, can’t
wait to see what’s new. This is Christmas Eve for Windows development
geeks.
Did I say “a bit rushed”? This patch fixes a problem with the
click-through functionality that occurs with complex hyperlinks. If a hyperlink
in content has a list of parameters separated by the ampersand (&)
character, all except the first parameter are lost. The files in this patch
correct this. Drop them into the /bin directory of your v1.4.3297.0 install.
Download: hotfix-clickthrough-1-4-3297-1.zip
If you thought that Slashdot marks the top in mindless "Microsoft sucks, I love Linux" advocacy, here's something better.
The German tech-news site heise.de has discussion forums for every single article they publish and these forums seem to be the #1 meeting place for the clueless, bored, bitter, unemployed, underpaid, oppressed, unskilled and "why didn't I get another job" people in the German IT industry.
Today's news is the Longhorn build that PDC attendees will get. This is what the forum twits have to say in German, here's Google's English translation. It's so bad, it's funny.
My good friend Steve Swartz is giving blogging a second try and this time for real. Given that the stuff he's been working on is/was in the stealthier areas of the Indigo effort (not the public WS-* specs), it was pretty difficult for him to blog about work, but now with PDC things are changing.
In an effort to get newtelligence's PDC T-Shirt, Doug Purdy switched from Radio to dasBlog as well.
These two blogs will be very interesting places to watch if you are interested in the Indigo programming model.
Doug Purdy is the Program Manager for the new serialization framework (which consolidates XmlSerializer, BinaryFormatter and SoapFormatter), Steve Swartz drives the Indigo programming model that all of us will use.
The source code archives (SourceSetup/SourceZip) are missing four files in the Assemblies subdir that the gentlemen who added the respective features didn't care to put into the source setup project. You can get the files either from one of the other distribution archives, from the GDN workspace (source control) or the fixed source code archives from the dasBlog download location. GotDotNet doesn't let me upload the corrected release version right now, so I deleted the source release copy over there for the moment.
newtelligence dasBlog v1.4: After you have read the release/upgrade
notes, get it from here.
I have done a bit less testing than I usually would, because I wanted to get
this version out in time for PDC – just because I want to have some of the
new features (especially cross-posting) for myself for PDC. I have bravely
deployed this new build on my own blog (here) and it didn’t break me, so
it should work for you as well. Make a backup of your site before you install,
ok?
Cross-posting is certainly the coolest feature if you happen to have two or
more blogs (the number of folks who have that is growing daily). Before I add a
formal explanation to the docs (which isn’t going to happen tonight) here’s
a quick primer:
If you have cross-posting enabled on the configuration page, you will have
two more entries in the administrator bar. “Crosspost Referrers”
and “Crosspost Sites”. Crosspost sites is an editable list where
you can enter the other blogs you want to post to and where you want to keep
entries synchronized. The picture shows my setup for Lonnghornblogs.com.
Hostname and Port should be trivial to understand. The “Endpoint”
is the Blogger API or MetaWeblog API endpoint of your blog engine (leading
forward slash required). It’s tested that dasBlog interops with itself
;), with .Text and Blogger.com. There’s not much of a reason why it
shouldn’t interop with more engines. The API type is either “Blogger”
(for Blogger.com) or “MetaWeblog” (for mostly everything else,
including dasBlog and .Text). Click the “Test” button to verify the
setting before you save them.
Once you’ve set up one more more sites, you’ll get the following
little extra box at the bottom of the “Edit Entry” page:
Just check the sites you want to cross-post to. If the site supports the
MetaWeblog API, you can also enter categories there. Multiple categories are
separated by semicolons. Once you post, the cross-posts are queued up and will
be posted within a couple of seconds. One catch: You should no re-edit the
entry before the synchronization is done; typically within 15 seconds after your
post has been stored. If the entries haven’t been synchronized, yet, the
checkboxes will remain unchecked.
If you subsequently edit the entry, the changes will be replicated into the
foreign Weblogs (not vice versa). If you delete the entry, the foreign entries
will also be removed. In essence, you only have one blog to maintain, but
multiple publishing points.
The feature isn’t yet integrated with Mail-To-Weblog. What you need to
do there is to post your entry via mail, edit the entry later via the web
interface and change nothing except checking the appropriate boxes and setting
the categories. Support for cross-posting via Email will be in v1.5.
The “Crosspost Referrers” page shows the referrers that you are
getting on the foreign site. Note: Your main blog is going to get some
of the traffic of the foreign blogs because of the referrers feature. The
referrer stats are baked into the cross-post feature and can’t be switched
off singly at this time. For each unique hit the foreign site gets on one of
your entries, there’s a potentially a request for a 43 byte image plus a
bit of protocol overhead; let’s make that 100-150 bytes. Keep that in
mind before you enable cross-posting to a high traffic site, otherwise this
feature may end up “slashdotting” your own server. (Similar considerations
are true for “Aggregator bugging” – see the release
notes)
PS: Thanks to all the heroes in the GDN Workspace who helped a lot with this
release.
Brad More is asking whether and why he should use Enterprise Services.
Brad, if you go to the PDC, you can get the definitive, strategic answer on that question in this talk:
“Indigo”: Connected Application Technology Roadmap
Track: Web/Services Code: WSV203
Room: Room 409AB Time Slot: Wed, October 29 11:30 AM-12:45 PM
Speakers: Angela Mills, Joe Long
Joe Long is Product Unit Manager for Enterprise Services at Microsoft, a product unit that is part of the larger Indigo group. The Indigo team owns Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services, Enterprise Services, all of COM/COM+ and everything that has to do with Serialization.
And if you want to hear the same song sung by the technologyspeakmaster, go and hear Don:
“Indigo": Services and the Future of Distributed Applications
Track: Web/Services Code: WSV201
Room: Room 150/151/152/153 Time Slot: Mon, October 27 4:45 PM-6:00 PM
Speaker: Don Box
If you want to read the core message right now, just scroll down here. I've been working directly with the Indigo folks on the messaging for my talks at TechEd in Dallas earlier this year as part of the effort of setting the stage for Indigo's debut at the PDC.
I'd also suggest that you don't implement your own ES clone using custom channel sinks, context sinks, or formatters and ignore the entire context model of .NET Remoting if you want to play in Indigo-Land without having to rewrite a large deal of your apps. The lack of security support of Remoting is not a missing feature; Enterprise Services is layered on top of Remoting and provides security. The very limited scalability of Remoting on any transport but cross-appdomain is not a real limitation; if you want to scale use Enterprise Services. Check out this page from my old blog for a few intimate details on transport in Enterprise Services.
ASMX is the default, ES ist the fall-back strategy if you need the features or the performance and Remoting the the cheap, local ORPC model.
If you rely on ASMX and ES today, you'll have a pretty smooth upgrade path. Take that expectation with you and go to Joe's session.
[PS: What I am saying there about ES marshaling not using COM/Interop is true except for two cases that I found later: Queued Components and calls with isomorphic call signatures where the binary representation of COM and the CLR is identical - like with a function that passes and returns only ints. The reason why COM/Interop is used in those cases is very simple: it's a lot faster.]
Doug, you are absolutely going to get newtelligence's PDC T-Shirt, but in all reality you should give me a T-Shirt for allowing you a super smooth transition and perfect upgrade path from your outdated blogging tool to this here. Tell Don that he's going to get one, too, if he makes the switch.
"newtelligence PDC T-Shirt!" you ask? There will be two types. The one Doug is asking for is very on-topic for PDC and it's subtly outrageous. You will have to wait until PDC and catch me (or someone who's got one) to see it.
Of the other one I'll have just three made for myself and it's not really subtle in it's message, but rather conveys it quite clearly:
Thanks everyone. I got about 20 MMS and SMS messages to figure out how to support these types of emails for dasBlog. I actually found a few minor bugs in the Mail-To-Weblog support and while the messages of course don't come out as pretty as from a regular email client, it does at least work now.
What's key -- and that's something that I can't figure out a consistent workaround for -- is that the SMS/MMS gateway must be capable of setting a subject line for emails so that dasBlog can do it's passphrase check. For Germany, this page has a bunch of info on how that works in the major networks (in German).
Yesterday and today I have added another new feature to dasBlog called "Crossposting". This feature, which will be available in the v1.4 build that I still plan to publish before the Microsoft PDC next week, is simplifying having multiple blogs on several sites by allowing a entries to be posted to a master weblog running dasBlog and having the engine crosspost across multiple weblogs using the Blogger API or the (more powerful) MetaWeblog API. If the entry is updates locally, the crossposts are updated and if the entry is deleted, the crossposts get wiped, too.
My concrete problem was that I wanted to contribute to longhornblogs.com, but didn't want to maintain a separate blog. Now I can post a local post here, check a checkbox and it'll appear in both places. To still get the referrals, I am "bugging" the crossposted articles with a transparent GIF that phones home into the referrer stats of the main blog.
I'll post a "how to" along with the release, which I hope will happen by Friday. Until then, you can check that it works by looking at the three synchronized weblogs.
One thing that’s still on my list of things to add to the Mail-To-Weblog support of dasBlog is support for SMS and MMS blogging. Because SMS and MMS e-mails routed through the mobile phone carrier’s E-Mail gateways often seem have varying whacky formatting added to them either by the phone itself or by the carrier (like weird subject lines), I need to have a set of samples to figure out how to support this best.
If you have E-Mail via SMS/MMS enabled for your phone and are willing to make a small donation to the dasBlog project by sending one E-Mail to me, you could help me getting this feature right. The E-Mail should have the subject “DasBlog:SMS” or “DasBlog:MMS” (if your phone permits that) and the text body should contain the mobile carrier name, phone manufacturer name and model number. Of course, MMS is where the real fun is and what I want to support fully.
Once we’ve got support for inbound SMS/MMS blogging, I intend to support WAP and cHTML support as well as a special set of templates and entry points for small form factor browsers like PocketPC in the following version.
E-Mails should go to clemensv@newtelligence.com
I wasn’t sure how good these two new features would work, but the
stats are so great that I already don’t want to miss them. Gives you a
really good impression what people are (still) interested in and what files
they grab from you site. Now I finally know what stuff (code, PPTs) I need to
keep current and what I topics should come back to and revisit.
For the curious I’ve included two screenshots of what today’s
stats of these two features look like as of 10 minutes ago.
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