Gmail is in trouble:
Anti Gmail Legislation
California Senate Passes Watered Down Anti-Gmail Bill
So the California state government is passing legislation controlling an as-yet-unreleased technology service. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of such a thing before.
Rob Howard, one of brains behind the excellent provider model in ASP.NET 2.0 (sure, not just that...) leaves MS. I want to wish all the best of luck (and why not, a LOT of fun) to Rob for the new venture: Telligent Systems. As of today, the Web site contains just a GIF but I wonder which technology are they using to build the site. Maybe JSP? <g>
PS: I also wondered why Telligent Systems and not, a more natural for me, Intelligent Systems. Elementary, Dr. Watson! Intelligent Systems already exists; both with .com and .net. It doesn't exist as .it, but who cares :-)
Wow, another cool news aggregator was released over the weekend: Sauce Reader.
It also has integration with the Windows Messenger client (not yet the MSN one). I have that on my desk at work, so will try it there.
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I've been watching - and reading - the recent debate over the announcement to postpone the launch of Objectspaces to Longhorn by aligning it with WinFS.
Barry Gervin has a report from TechEd on this issue that ties together this decision with MBF also being moved to the Longhorn timeframe. I think it makes sense to make every effort possible to make sure that when we [MSFT] decide to put out a new data-access API, we can say that we have done everything possible to make sure that it is aligned across all layers that will build on it, and that it will provide a stable programming model for many years forward.
I don't think it is prudent to dismiss WinFS as "Just a Filesystem" that does not have anything to do with data-storage. It represents a paradigm shift in terms of connecting structured and unstructured storage, database and filesystem, and provides an object-relational model for data access - That, combined with the need to support the requirements for data access that ObjectSpaces and MBF bring to the marriage will help make WinFS suited to be the data-access platform for the future. For MBF this partnership will surely mean that we can now rely on a strong underlying persistance platform that will also be the data-storage platform of choice for Longhorn generation apps.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to present the overview of Avalon at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). The conference attendees are typically independent hardware vendors, designers, and folks writing software at the software/hardware interface level. As such, there's less interest in the higher level aspects of Avalon, but there was a lot of interest in the entire graphics and media stack. So my talk focused on that. General WinHEC session information and materials can be found here.
Other Avalon graphics and media sessions at WinHEC delivered by my colleagues can be found here:
Stay tuned for another post, hopefully soon, about 3D, for which WinHEC was our coming out party.
To handle this, there is a utility called rs.exe. This utility allows the a developer to create a script utilizing Visual Basic.NET.
A sample script will follow soon.
Raymond Chen wrote up a post on extending the IE context menu in response to a comment I left on Brendan’s blog post of useful IE features.
Reading Raymond’s post, it definitely is not hard to do, and I appreciate the fact that he didn’t nuke me. When I originally searched around with the “View in Firefox” idea in mind, I never found the article he links to. I think I had a problem with figuring out the right search terms, because it seems pretty obvious now. Be sure to check out the comments, there’s more cool tweaks there.
Anyway, thanks Raymond.
Yesterday I wanted to use a locally installed Virtual PC Windows 2003 Server
to test an MSI file that needed to be built for the Crystal Reports Merge
Module. We don't use the "shared folder" approach to deploying applications,
rather, we let the FrontPage Server Extensions do the heavy lifting. It just
works. My original problem was that the networking was terribly slow, though,
and the process would time out.
On reflection, that's easy to understand: both the OS (a Windows XP session)
and the Virtual PC program were in a race to utilize the network interface. My
fix?
While I didn't actually measure the impact of this change, it felt like my
Virtual PC session was making at least a 500% improvement in total network
utilization.
The path of a righteous man is beset on all sides, by the inequities of the selfish , and the tyranny of evil men. blessed are those who in the name of charity and goodwill , shepherd the weak through the walley of darkness , for he is truly his brothers keeper and finder of lost children. and i will strike down upon thee whit great vengeance and furies anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord , when i lay my vengeance upon thee. [Ezekiel 25:17]
A little too dramatic? Probably. Blog spam has to go. Turning off comments is not an answer. No solution will be perfect. But hopefully, with the right set of tools/features, something can be done.
I thought I’d promote some of the discussion from a recent blog entry to the main feed as others may find it interesting… As Mark Treadwell says, it is a complicated subject.
Comment (Markus Reiner):
Hello,
we have also problems with DateTime because of using local time. IMHO DateTime should internally use always UTC. Only Parse() and ToString() (the methods converting it for interacting with a user who lives always relativ to local time) should ask the OS and convert it if needed.
If someone persists a DateTime instance (to a file, to registry and so on) you will always get in trouble! Don't look only at serialization!
It would be very helpful if we could have a patch for .NET 1.1.
Response (Anthony Moore)
Markus, thanks very much for the feedback. I have been working on some FAQ entries to answer these questions, which for now I have posed on the BCL Blog:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bclteam/archive/2004/05/21/136918.aspx
In short, it is not practical to make a change as substantial as you are recommending to DateTime, either in servicing or in future releases. Believe me, the options have been thoroughly explored, but it is not possible to get acceptable compatibility in terms of both functionality or performance. The first FAQ entry goes into the detail on this issue.
However, it is possible to serialize DateTime without getting into trouble, so two of the FAQ entries are devoted to recommended ways to serialize DateTime in Binary and Text.
Thanks very much for your response and I hope this is helpful.
Anyone out there have a reference to what the best practices for programming SharePoint are? Specifically, how much normalization one should use in their database/lists? Here's my scenario:
I'd like to create a Time Off Request and Reporting application. It would have the following operation:
With a normal database application, I'd have 4 related tables: Employees, Departments, Administrators (but actually, this could be a boolean field for the employee table), and the PTOData table. However, I'm not sure if you can write all of these within the context of SharePoint lists. Anyone have any ideas? Should I just create separate tables, and only use SharePoint as a wrapper? Let me know what you think!
BTW - Dustin - I asked my manager if they'd send me to the dev training. If I can go, this is something I'd like to cover. For those of you who also would like to go, but are afraid of asking your boss for a few grand, I can send you my request document (the sucker was 2 1/2 pages long!) as a template.
Last night Robert McLaws released VisualBlogger 2004. It's getting good reviews from a bunch of blogs. Congrats Robert! I gotta try it out, I hear it works with Radio UserLand too.