No, I didn’t
give up blogging. I am working on a project. I am writing lots of specification
and a big prototype. Has to do with SOA, Queuing Networks, Agents, Agile
Machines and even a little bit with Indigo. I am pretty excited about this. If
all works well, the result is going to be public very early next year. I am
just too busy to blog at the moment. I am the critical path. Excuse the
continued silence. 
While most of the newtelligence events are currently held in German (such as www.TornadoCamp.net), there's actually one that you can attend that's held in English - and it happens in one of the most beautiful little countries in Europe: Slovenia.
(The area around the event location is so cute, you might think Disney had something to do with it - I've been assured that they didn't)
CodeWeek runs a full week (7 days!), from December 1 through December 7 in Bled and I've been told that they've got one or two seats left, so if you're interested (or know someone who is) and act quickly, you may still be able to grab one.
I am using shared networking in my Longhorn VPC and I could browse the web and connect to the network. So to make working on the network a bit easier (and to try some more features) I thought it may make sense to add the Longhorn Virtual PC on my box to our domain. Setting this up worked.
Now, if I boot up Longhorn and my box is connected to the network, I get to see "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to begin." and right after that, the VPC reboots. If I am quick enough to get to the logon screen, Longhorn reboots right after accepting the password. If I disconnect my machine from the network I can log into local LH accounts just fine.
“Package load failure”. Package ‘VSCorePackage’ has failed to load properly ( GUID={7494682B-37A0-11D2-A273-00C04F8EF4FF} ). Please contact package vendor for assistance.
Uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, rebooted, problem sticks. :-(
Update: Apparently this error isn't really a sign of complete failure of the development environment, but rather a result of project file corruption. Before the problem occured, the C# compiler in VS tanked and obviously trashed the project file. New projects still work as expected, but the project that causes this failure is broken.
Joe Long, the Product Unit Manager for XML Enterprise Services at Microsoft, talks about the Indigo migration story in this recorded presentation on MSDN. If you weren't at Joe's PDC talk and think you don't have 37 minutes time for this, you can still not afford to miss listening to the prescriptive guidance section starting at slide 60, if you ever have or will cross an application domain boundary with a Remoting, Enterprise Services or Web service call on the current stacks. And now leave here and go there.
Because most teams at Microsoft seem already a milestone or two ahead of what the Longhorn and Whidbey PDC builds reflect, how much is it worth to report bugs?
Hello? Redmond? Comments?
This article here hints at XBox Next running on PowerPC. Of course, the kids over at Slashdot call such a potential move bad names, but that's of course, because they weren't grown up enough when PowerPC was indeed a hot topic for Microsoft and Windows NT. In fact, I may still have a vintage Windows NT/PPC CD somewhere around here.
- Reminder #1: the NT kernel runs on Itanium, AMD64 and x86 and if Microsoft really, really wants, they can certainly make it go on PPC (again).
- Reminder #2: Windows NT was born and created on the Intel i860 and MIPS R3000 Risc processors and went to x86; not the other way around.
- Reminder #3: Xbox runs an NT kernel - stripped down to what's exactly necessary. There is processor dependent code in Windows, but I would assume that the stuff "down there" is a relatively clean place.
 Between PDC and now, I was in Redmond on Monday and Tuesday at a meeting with the Indigo team. One of the topics discussed were the new transaction management capabilities that are part of Indigo (which, for Longhorn, includes a lightweight transaction manager).
Ingo was there, too, and we had a little argument about how hard it is to write transaction resource managers. Ingo thought that it would be awfully hard to write them and that average programmers would never do so and wouldn’t see the need for them. I said “hey, it’s really trivial”, explained that I consider transactions a very general programming paradigm for much more than just databases and told him that I would write a little demo to prove it. I wrote the demo on the plane going home in about 3 hours. Here it is.
The “2 Phase Commit Puzzle” application is a little Windows Forms puzzle that doesn’t use Indigo or the Longhorn bits, but rather employs a little lightweight 2PC transaction manager that Steve Swartz and myself hacked up when we were on our Scalable Applications tour this spring.
The puzzle uses four resource managers (transaction participants). The TileWorker keeps track of the tiles as they are moved around, always votes “yes” on Prepare, does nothing on Commit and rolls all tiles back into their original (shuffled) state on Abort. The TimeoutWorker votes “yes” if the puzzle is completed (pressing the “Done” button) within the preset time-span and “no” otherwise. It does nothing on either Commit or Abort otherwise. The GridWorker votes “yes” on Prepare if the puzzle is completed (order is correct) and otherwise “no”. It also does nothing on Commit or Abort. The OutcomeContingentMessage is a participant that will always vote “yes” on Prepare and shows a “Congratulations” message on Commit and a “You failed!” message on Abort.
The great thing about this little puzzle is that I could add arbitrary other success/failure conditions for the outcome of the puzzle (e.g. number of moves) without having to rewrite or even touch the code determining the other conditions or the code emitting the result message. I would just have to hook in the new resource and feed it with information from the grid.
Transactions aren’t just for databases. The discussion of the theory behind this is of course in our already well-known transaction deck.
Below are the download links to the game executable (in IE, you need to right-click and save it to the local disk; it will not work if started directly from IE) and the source code archive, including the simple WorkSet transaction manager. Check it out.
Download: newtelligence.TxPuzzle.exe
Download: newtelligence.TxPuzzle.zip
Avalon is very promising. No doubt about that. I can very well imagine how Visual Studio "Orcas" (the one to follow Whidbey) will add fantastic designers for creating stunning Avalon UIs. However, today, my first steps with XAML remind me very much of my first little baby steps exploring the Win16 API back in 1990 using Charles Petzold's Windows Programming book. Of course, it's all on a vastly elevated level and some of the controls are stunningly powerful, but putting together an Avalon app that actually looks good is pretty difficult right now. I am not complaining -- it's very early and I am happy that Microsoft lets me play with the stuff. I am just so horribly spoiled by visual design tools.
I figure that Avalon will create a lot of new jobs for designers. In fact, if you don't have a designer, your app will look really, really old, no matter how well you master the Avalon technology.
And I figure that I'll have to freshen up my math skills on trigonometry and linear algebra in a big way. Vector graphics is a very different ballgame.
Oh... and MSBuild does really rock the house.
My 4 continents in 4 months drinking buddy Stephen Forte thinks I am insane (that from him!) for keeping all blog stuff in XML files instead of SQL and I just had a quick chat with Jason Whittington about multi-user capabilities for dasBlog.
So... here's a couple of points on what I am thinking about "storage futures" for dasBlog.
XML files are goodness for small sites. There are a lot of folks I met who don't have SQL Server acess for their sites or don't want to deal with the additional complexity. I reckon that it's still a minor administrative burden to set up the permissions, but that's much less than administering your SQL store. Still, SQL is of course superior of sites that have more traffic, because it excels in dealing with concurrency, data consistency and all the database goodness. Come Yukon, there's a great way to mix the extensibility of XML and the power of SQL in a very rich way (to use a Microsoft marketing phrase). And of course, for folks like Stephen, SQL administration is something they do in their sleep. For SQL 2000, I am thinking about submitting Infoset to the data service, breaking out the elements needed for relations and indexes and store everything else as a BLOB. dasBlog only looks at the entry id, the date and the categories when looking for entries so that seems sufficient.
WinFS seems a great way to store the files and add search. I will have to look into that, but it's too far out to even do a prototype.
Multi-User capability is what I discussed with Jason. He suggested that the "author" is just another field. I disagree. The multi-user version of dasBlog (there will be one) will be organized in a very different way. I will actually keep the content absolutely separate on a per-user basis. Site config will be split into user preferences and site preferences. There will be master themes and user-supplied themes. However, there won't be a merged store. Reason: If I am blogging at a shared site and I want to move to a site that I host myself, I want to be able to take the content and make the move myself. Xcopy. If your weblog is on a site with a common store, you will have to extract and remove your content first and that may hard to do and may break stuff in the end, because there may be dependencies in the store that you don't know about. What I am going to do with the multiuser model is that there will be one runtime and app, but content, templates and content will be stored in subdirectories. If you want to move away from a shared site, you grab your stuff drop it into a single-user blog and it just works.
On the inside, the multi-user version will keep one data service instance (and cache) for each user and the portal page will by fed by a data service that aggregates all user data services and creates combined results. Logging will be separate for each user, but the logging information will be fanned out to the common site-wide logging service as well.
Steve just told me that it occurred to him this morning that the "theme slide" that's used in pretty much all talks here at PDC has sort of an easter egg. The three major blocks of WinFX shown are (in that order) Presentation, Data, Communication.
The MSR keynote was awesome. The stuff around "Tablet PC for students" was so awesome that I almost want to go to school again once that comes around. The "social computing" part was highly inspirational for weblog software
Links: Social Computing at MSR, Skyserver ... and I can't find a link to the Tablet PC stuff. And no PPTs on CommNet.
|