Digg Spy

Now this is cool: Digg Spy

Ouch - IE Fubar'd....

Turns out the IE team already has the answer...

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/16/504864.aspx

snippy - code snippet editor

Very cool little util here

found via Geek Notes

Verizon SOA story...

Worth reading: Verizon SOA

WebService .NET reference table

Christian Weyer on a roll.

Kirk Allen Evans' Blog : Modify a Web Service's WSDL Using a SoapExtensionReflector

Kirk Allen Evans' Blog : Modify a Web Service's WSDL Using a SoapExtensionReflector

... Thanks Kirk, but ouch!

update: Christian Weyer has something similar:

Media Nirvana - note to a friend

Speaking to someone yesterday who had some great idea's about media enablement/control. But I think they've been covered already:

ex: Media Nirvana - XBOX360 and ORB

and

slingbox

lastly - not quite as freeing:
tivo online scheduling and Tivo to go

Hope this note gets you a little closer to media nirvana... ;)

VSTS Diagrams

Check out this link for 2 usefull VSTS diagrams: security mapping and single server install guide.

Kirk Allen Evans' Blog : Customizing ASP.NET Membership and Profile: What Goes Where?

Kirk Allen Evan's digs a little deeper into the new ASP.NET Membership and Profile:

http://blogs.msdn.com/kaevans/archive/2005/11/10/491514.aspx

CCNet 1.0 Final Release Notes - Confluence

CC.NET Release Notes for 1.0

Cruise control is now at 1.0. Time to upgrade the server at work....

Selenium - Functional Testing Framework For Web Applications

Apparently DonXML is suprised he missed the release of Selenium from thought works, but I only heard about it from him - So Don, you're not so far behind ;)

Looks like a very interesting piece in the Web Application testing puzzle. Here's the link to Don's post with more info:

http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2005/11/11/2271.aspx

when we get there

VisualStudioTeamSystem + enterprise = more than Microsoft too!

http://www.teamprise.com/index.html

Can't loose this link ...

VSTS meet CruiseControl

http://vstsplugins.sourceforge.net/index.php/archives/news/2005/8

O/R Mapper Essay

http://www.matshelander.com/Weblog/DisplayLogEntry.aspx?LogEntryID=80

long but good read

atlas blog

http://www.wilcob.com/wilco/Default.aspx - not to be missed...

javascript notes

http://moofx.mad4milk.net/#introduction
http://prototype.conio.net/
http://script.aculo.us/
http://openrico.org/rico/demos.page

Christian Weyer: Smells like service spirit : WS-* support on the .NET platform

Fantastic reference table:

http://blogs.thinktecture.com/cweyer/archive/2005/10/19/414273.aspx

Case you missed them

links:

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/

http://www.wilcob.com/AtlasClassBrowser/

http://www.pdaphonehome.com - Samsung i730 FAQ updated...

the ever present web problem

back button, forward button.... bookmark....

dynamic apps make it difficult for these items.

Possible solution:
http://codinginparadise.org/projects/dhtml_history/README.html

definitely impressive

Vision and execution. Colour me impressed.

http://osx.portraitofakite.com/logon.htm

atlas and 2005

After being much wow'd at NJ Code camp on Saturday by web parts and authentication models, and continuing to drool over start.com, I've resolved to sharpen my knowledge on these through revamping my site.

hence a bookmark to myself on atlas: http://www.nikhilk.net/Entry.aspx?id=94

Blog usability

Yep its official my blog breaks every usaiblity rule:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/weblogs.html

Oh well. I'll fix it...soon....maybe.... ok someday...

British Library

Amazing - the British Library has put some books on line (not incedible alone), including a notebook by Da Vinci (cool content).

The book viewer shows you the book itself (you actually "flip" the pages), and there is even a "maginfying glass" available. (enrich the user experience)

Lastly the page is enriched further with optional audio and text. (extend and enrich the content).

What a great site.

Gartner AD Confrence Tracks

The Gartner Applicaiton Development confrence was devided into 4 primary tracks:

1. application life cycle for SOA
2. AD resource management
3. modernization and integration
4. AD governance and control

This is a pretty good deliniation of the industry if you accept the SOA pill. Specifically SOA presents new demands on application development both in how applications are developed and managed, how existing assets can be leveraged, new roles required, and environment challenges like SOX and ever increasing security threats.

First an ambient orb now a lava lamp

we may well need to implement this....

Gartner AD summit arrival - non technical

The confrence is in grapevine TX, right near Dallas.

As my wife is joining me on this trip we decided to fly into Austin and drive to Dallas. I lived in Austin for a whe, andwanted to sow her some of my old haunts.

We were unable to carve out much time for Austin, and rain dampened some of the experience, but I was able to show my wife enough she'll be eager to go back.

If you get to Austin:
Rudy's BBQ
Oasis on lake travis
6th street at night
4th street too
hills on north Austin (arboretum area).

I also will be looking for a chance to get back to San Antonio.

The drive from Austin to Dallas was smooth, although there was an accident requiring 2 medivac helicopters, which had I-35 shut dow both ways for a short strech.

The confrence is at a very nice, and huge resort and convention center; the Gaylord Texan.

Gartner application development summit

This week I'm attending the Gartner Application Development Summit, and Enterprise Architecture Summit.

In 2003 I attended the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services summit.

Over the next few days I'll be posting both current messages from my attendance, as well as changes from what I remember. I'll also give some personal experience and perspective.

Tit-For-Tat - Small Ad

Not as good as the big ad, but I appreciate the parody.

The Bus Stops here

Phil Wainewright has some excellent points here. The premise of an ESB is the real question isn't it?

If ESB is a package, and that package is designed to enable SOA and merely to be more standards compliant and less costly than traditional EAI then yes the emergence of WS-Relability and WS-ReliableMessaging will reduce the need for a packaged ESB.

However if you consider the ESB to be a SOA pattern, and ESB vendors offering an implementaiton of that pattern, then the ESB is just fullfilling its own promise. The promise behind a standards based pattern is that certain implementation aspects will be driven to be commodity, and vendors will need to innovate to differentiate their products as they recognise each layer of the ESB should be swapable for the best of breed providers solution.

Further, custom adapters will not go away anytime soon, there are a multitude of proprietary legacy systems that adapters are the only connectivity and EAI vendors are the niche players.

Additionally if you consider ESB as a pattern, then it is very acceptable to have a few implementations of that pattern and federate accross them (its part of the pattern). The standards provide the glue to integrate and federate an set of ESB's.

Continued standards development is key for driving the ever increasing value of SOA-enabled enterprise, and those enterprises at the bleeding edge are realizing the ROI to justify some level of errosion of competitive advantage in trade off for standards that enable further competitive advantage development.

So its not the end of the road for the service bus, the bus just got a new paint job.

Microsoft Position on ESB

Another point from the aforementioned paper is that ESB == EAI.

To some degree this is true, but ESB is actually the evolution of EAI concepts.

To say you are using EAI technologies does not imply SOA, nor does it imply standards based connectivity. It does imply advanced messaging capabilities, and brokered communications.

An ESB implies security, standards based connectivity, as well as service registry and service mapping. These are what differentiates an ESB from plain old EAI.

The current SOA and ESB movements don't claim to do anything new, but rather evolve best of breed architectures that have been used in the past, while reducing barriers to entry and common failure factors.

Microsoft postion on ESB

I reviewed the document posted by Scott Woodgate on Microsoft's position on the enterprise service bus.

To distill the document:

• The author believes ESB is a transitionary stage not a product.
• The author believes the functionality of an ESB is offered by Microsoft in superset of functionality.

I see the ESB as offering the following features:

• Standards based broker
• Publish and Subscribe Queues (including publish once)
• Gauranteed Delivery
• Data Transformation
• Access Control
• Service Mappings
• Service Registry
• Data Caching
• BPM hooks
• Intelligent Routing (Workflow)
• Audting/Error logging
• Monitoring

I have a slide on this but am not sure I'm permitted to publish it online. The Enterprise Service Bus is an architectural pattern, as well as a product class.

From a functionality perspective I agree that Microsoft has the technology to deliver this list, Windows Communication Framework takes this even further.

I have to disagree with the authors point of view that ESB's are a transitionary stage and shouldn't be a product.

The ESB, even when federated with other service buses, provides all the value of a standard integration broker with the added advantage of standards support, but it goes further to provide abstracted functionality thats not system dependent including workflow capabilities, while centralizing service definition and auditing and logging. This is incredibly powerfull in a enterprise environment as it provides distribution and loose coupling for speed and agility while still centralizing for code reuse, standardization, monitoring, and most importantly, governance.

Lastly the ESB provides an opportunity to define a standard colloquial business languange, which can act as an intermediary translator between system specific terminology. This purposes to save tremendous translation work as new and existing systems only ever must be integrated to one "language" rather than the language of each system it must be integrated too.

Because of this abstraction of functionaliy, and centralization of services and governance enterprises can get the optimal ROI for their SOA efforts.

Product stacks fitted into the ESB umbrella are key players in to realize value on this front, as they can provide comprehensive offerings and can extend them to add further value. If each component operates and connects based on standards the component becomes a commodity and the vendor will need to embrace this and look for ways to differentiate by providing further value. Predictive analysis, out-of-the box services, and service throughput analysis are some areas for such value add.

Product stacks also can simplify setup, installation, and maintance to assist in reducing TCO of SOA.

While Microsoft has the peices to create a strong ESB stack it disappoints meet to see this paper miss the mark, rather than suggest Microsoft ESB construction.

Feedburner

I'm intrested in rss monitoring, and as such I'm giving the free services of feedburner a try. Notice the little "0 readers" icon on the web-views right menu.

Feedburner replicates the xml feed, and tracks the hits to all that hit the replicated feed. So if your using the previous feed url (atom.xml) you won't have to change anything. Anyone bookmarking the feedburner url will show up in statists.

Samsung i730 setup

The new Samsung i730 is working fantastic.

I'm happy with the 2gb SD card with it as well.

I found reasonably cheap exchange server hosting at dslextreme.com ($5/month for 6 months - $10 thereafter). This in adition to a new domain name (fullyconverged.net) has me fully connected. This would be completley unnecessary if the company I work for was on Exchange or Notes, or even made the mail server accessable outside the firewall.

I set some filters up at work that automatically forwards key emails, and meeting invites to the fullyconverged.net account.

Additionally the phone polls my gmail account ever 5 minutes.

All in all its made managing the flood of email much easier, and contacts and calendar at my fingertips...

I think I'm a bad influence on a friend of mine - he's now eagerly awaiting the arrival of his new i730.

Long term update: Sager 9860

I thought I'd give a quick update on my progress with the Sager 9860 I got a while back.

This has by far been the best laptop I have ever owned, or worked with. Its big, its fast, and its reliable.

Last week I had an unfortunate run-in with Norton Antivirus. (Stupid f**** NAV... -- URGH!!!). So I finaly gave up trying to convince windows I (admin) was the owner of the registry, and took the plunge to reimage the machine.

Normally the first reimage on a new laptop comes the same day I receive it - the amount of pre-installed junk is unbeleivable. The Sager 9860 came with no junk - just a couple useful apps (Nero and Intervideo DVD come to mind).

The repaveing process went fairly smooth (I had grabbed the latest drivers before starting). I'm running smooth again with a couple things working that didn't before even :) (Virtual Server shared drives between host and child).

The screen is still the bigest factor for enjoyment, and the 2gb of ram is making running VPC images for different tasks a reality.

The're some wear showing on the keyboard where my wrists rest, but nothing that bothers me.

Over all this machine has been (and hopefully will continue to be) amazing.

Because you love harmless stupidity

Stuff on my cat... don't like cats much but I had to laugh.

http://www.43things.com/ on the other had is very intresting social experimentation....

In other news the local trenton "Classic Rock" station's morning DJ's Free Beer and Hotwings are now podcasting... How long till my mother asks about blogging?

Clipcode Knowledge Services

Clipcode Knowledge Services

Ok now we're getting to a utopia ;) Domain specific language built on the gang of 4 patterns. Model the application using patterns such as "Abstract Factory" and "Concrete Product" and have it realtime generate the code stubs for these patterbs.

Wow.

not suprising

"Supreme Computer Geek". Marriage is getting me though - I'm sure it brought my score down....

CARLTON DRAUGHT BIG AD

CARLTON DRAUGHT BIG AD

lol - its a big ad. thats for sure....

Abnoxious or no-brainer

Blogger, now allows bloggers to have google adsense right on their blog. Meaning they can get paid by google inserting relavent ads on their blog.

Is this obnoxious or does it only make sense? Turns out one blogger already made more the a million dollars by blogging with adsense.

I'm turning it on to see it, but feel free to let me know if its ridiculous or a good idea.

(Expectation for revenue from this blog: $0.42 USD/year.....)

Sweet new cell phone/pda

Just got a Samsung i730 from Verizon.

A little pricey but amazing.

So far its a great form factor, and the EVDO connection rocks. Need to get access to an exchange server for email to get pushed down to it in near real time. Pop/imap access works but is delayed.

More on the i730 soon.

Get Reading Blogs says MS and Google.

Google's perspective:
www.google.com/ig

*notes: must sign in, then you can drag and drop everything, clicking add content - last option you can add your own feeds.

Microsofts thoughts:
http://www.start.com/3/

*no log in, so if you clear your cookies its gonna forget who you are, but clicking the down area beside the start logo in top right gives you the ability to add your own feeds and alot more

Very cool stuff.

Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, 2005

Magic Quadrant for Web Services Platforms, 2005

Like the gartner quadrants. Trust them....maybe not.

I'm looking forward to Longhorn

Oh yes, its true.

It appears that many people are not looking forward to longhorn, at least according to what I've been reading.

The general consensus seems to be that longhorn will offer end users little reason to upgrade. I have to agree with this, at least initially.

Unlike xp which offered multiuser and greatly improved securtiy and stability - obvious improvements for end users. Longhorn makes a few points here, but the value is in the plumming.

The difference being that microsoft is recognizing the trends in the it industry and the fact that its not going to own those trends. In response they seem to be working with those trends and standardizing witht them, while targeting longhorn to be a platform to deliver on. That's right - its the developers that should be excited about longhorn.

My prediction is that about a year after launch people will begin to understand the value proposition longhorn makes, and by then, developers will be deliering applications never before possible.

SOA Anti-patterns

Excellent article on SOA

From: www.geekswithblogs.net

In this post we will introduce the concept of SOA anti-patterns. Like any architecture there is a right and a wrong way to do it. SOA is no exception.

Link to article...

Longhorn (heart) RSS

Longhorn (heart) RSS

Its excellent to see something I've been beleiving in for along time come to start to come to fruition. Its my belief that subscription based content consumption is the next generation of computing.

Subscription based consumption renders current consepts of composite applications obsolete in many scenarios.

Microsofts plan here is everything you could ask for in an approach - open and standards conforming. Yet at the same time, maximizing the value proposition of the Microsoft OS and Office platform. (whether they'll get it right or not has yet to be seen).

By making data subscription incredibly simple for applications developers and users, application models will need to change again to the fourth era of application interface.

The first era was main frame - accessing data that was shared with others.

The second era was the birth of client/server, where users were enabled to manipulate that shared data, not just consumer or enter it.

The third era was the move to internet (and intranet) based applications, specifically web apps, that enabled users to keep an application ~their application~ accessable.

The fourth era, as I see it, will be the era personalized publishing and subscription for consumption. Include in this area evolutions in existing application models and you will see, once again, revolution in how we view, and use computing.

Many at microsoft seem to think that the fourth era will be the rebirth of client/server (smart clients), but I think this is just an evolution of known tools and techniques - not transforming or evolutionary. Smart clients have a lot in common with the subscription model though!

A critical point in this revolution will however be in realization that we need to continue to offer all the strengths of the previous era's as we move forward.

To this I suggest to the Microsoft RSS platform team, that a user centric list of feeds (including what has been read) not only needs to be cross application (as they have proposed to date), but have the ability to span out of a single computing instance and be consumable and updatable from a multitude of devices and locations.

The statement "these are the users feeds" is the axisis of this. But we must recognize and accomidate that the user is a real living (and moving) being, that won't stay still. The concept of a OS based user must fade and the recognization of a single, cross network, identitiy must be realized.

I'll expand further on this at some point in the near future.

VSTS overview

shortoverview

TechEd Podcast From The Microsoft Podcast Team

Woo Hoo, I get to go tech ed after all... well not quite but almost as good.

TechEd Podcast From The Microsoft Podcast Team

First meeting with MS evangelist

Today we had our first face to face with Microsoft at work. Both sales and evangelists for our companies vertical were present.

Previously we had very lightly tapped one of them for assistance on some tablet pc applications we were working on.

We had brought a mixed crowd to the table today, but every one had a strategic and productive mindset. However this did result in a fair bit of time level setting around the tenants of what is .Net.

Strategically the session was focused on interoperability.

I know we would have liked a lot more detail around team system, and the sap/ms partnership, but we can cut some slack around products that aren't on the market yet.

Will definitely be back in touch with them as we move forward with various initiatives.

iPod Shuffle

Yes, its true, I added a 1GB shuffle to the lineup of iPods my wife and I have.

Todate our iPod collection now includes the shuffle, a 4Gb mini, and a 40Gb 3rd gen. Each hit a pretty specific niche in our lives, but there's some redundancy.

The mini is primarily my wifes, but she hasn't been using it much - distractions and the fact that she actually wants the shuffle. She uses the iPod for audio books, a little at the gym and at the barn. She finds the mini slightly to big for her.

I will give her the shuffle, but I admit I really like it.

I don't think I'd like the shuffle very much for music, stemming from not organizing my music collection very much, I haven't done much with playlists. Because of the amount of music I have the 40Gb is better for me for music (on the plane, or in the car). But audiobooks are perfect on the shuffle.

Microsoft Finger Print reader

A short time back I promised a quick review of some new toys I purchased. Ok so it might have been a long time back on some of them. I confess. I'm going to try to correct this delay, starting right here, todya!

I purchased the Microsoft Finger print reader based on a few reviews, including comments from Michael Swanson.

In short its a fantastic gadget! I readily recommend to anyone to get it. I bought one for my Dad even!

The device is well built, reliable, and very easy to use. Its even pretty reasonably priced in my opinion.

I can't wait for it to be built into laptops or mice.

Onfolio

I've been using Onfolio to manage my blog readings for a few months now. I really like it.
I've tried a bunch of tools in this space previously and I really landed on Onfolio, I've tried everything from RSS Popper, Sage, NewsGator, andBloglines.

The interface is slick, quick to pick up. Great way to keep track of what you've read, what you haven't, and mark things for follow up or to read later. On top of it, I can add things to a collection for future searching, or automated posting to this blog.

But horror of horrors yesterday my beta edition expired! And they now want $$ for me to keep using it.

The choice was clear: cough up the $30 the personal edition of this great product. When I went to confirm my purchase however, their web application threw a small hissy fit which left me with a nice error. Unsure of wether my order went through or not, I headed to their "contact-us" page and sent them a service request.

About 4 hours later I got a phone call from a nice guy named Matt at Onfolio. He put through my order manually, and upgraded my purchase to the professional edition because I had the issue, and had been a beta user.

Overall great product, and so far the service was very good.

Scott Hanselman's Weblog : Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List

Link to article...

The Daily Grind 621

From: Larkware News

Life is slowly returning to normal. I should be caught up on e-mail in about ten years or so.

Software

Visual Studio 2005 Control Visualizer  and Visual Studio 2005 Cache Visualizer - A couple of handy debugging tools from Brett Johnson.
FeedTagger - Web-based news aggregator with tagging, now in beta.
The Normalized IIS Log File Project - GotDotNet project to move IIS log files to SQL Server and then to develop reports based on those files.
tajun'ka - Free blog client written in C#
Guidance Automation Toolkit - Technology Preview of a new offering from the Patterns & Practices folks to help architects automate code reuse within their organizations. Requires VS2005 beta 2 and the Guidance Automation Extensions.

Information

Dive Into Greasemonkey - A guide to programming with the Firefox Greasemonkey extension

Sponsor

.netCHARTINGThis edition of The Daily Grind is sponsored by .netCHARTING,
who offers a fully functional free developer version of their
high end .NET charting control for testing and development.

Click here to download (WinForms and WebForms, no timeout)

Link to article...

Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com

Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com

great discussion. I'm Pro-Why. No need to explain my stance based on the discussion.

This explains alot

DNA, XP, SOA, ESB, ETC Are Dead; FAD is the Future

This makes sense of the many resumes I've examined in recent years. I was always shocked that so many candidates were unaware of application design. They didn't know design patterns, modeling, or really anything else for that matter. Turns out I was wrong - they wer using FAD.

Wedding Pictures - pared down set

Have to clean this up some more, but I pushed up the picaso generated web page of a good selection of wedding photo's. http://www.jessandrob.com/wedding/wedding/

If you want any in higher quality, please let me know.

I suppose I should start using Flickr as well...

things that give me nighmares.....

Standards Schmandards

Invaded by Gnomes 

Invaded by Gnomes.... 

Five minute increments

I've realized much of my time as of late has become dreaded 5 minute increments.

Time between meetings is scarse and chock full of interuptions. Each interuption seems to be spaced about 10 minutes appart and consumes roughly 5 minutes of time.

The net result of this leaves me gun shy to start anything of any significance at work. Documents written in 5 minute increments are disjointed and missing details, and don't get me started on code quality. I have an ever growing list of things to read, all are over a page in length - all are likely to take more than 5 minutes.

This must be why email is so rampant - most emails can be written, or read in 5 minutes or less.

I'v taken to opening things, mentaly estimating time to read and respond. If its greater than 5 I close it again.

Thanks for reading this far, if you we me, you'd have already moved it to the read later pile.

I think its time to go take a break. Back in five.

New toys!

Woohoo today new toys arrived.

I received my new 1gb iPod shuffle and microsoft fingerprint reader.

Will update with brief reviews soon.

System.web.sendmail

Jessandrob.com is sporadically throwing exceptions when sending email. The majority of emails are fine, but some are throwing:
553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts

Google hasn't been much help.

I'm going to try puting the smtp address to localhost.

My hosting provider uses pop-before-smtp to ensure a valid user is sending mail. I haven't implemented anything to work around this - its working most of the time.

The next step after trying localhost will to implement a pop request prior to send.

After that I'm outta idea's maybe I'll have to call the hosting provider.

Five minute increments

I've realized much of my time as of late has become dreaded 5 minute increments.

Time between meetings is scarse and chock full of interuptions. Each interuption seems to be spaced about 10 minutes appart and consumes roughly 5 minutes of time.

The net result of this leaves me gun shy to start anything of any significance at work. Documents written in 5 minute increments are disjointed and missing details, and don't get me started on code quality. I have an ever growing list of things to read, all are over a page in length - all are likely to take more than 5 minutes.

This must be why email is so rampant - most emails can be written, or read in 5 minutes or less.

I'v taken to opening things, mentaly estimating time to read and respond. If its greater than 5 I close it again.

Thanks for reading this far, if you were me, you'd have already moved it to the read later pile.

I think its time to go take a break. Back in five.

Jessandrob.com source

I've decided I will opensource jessandrob.com as a wedding site starting point for people like me that want a custom solution.

The database design is ok, and doing this will force me to refactor the user opjects. I'll email Paul Wilson to see if I can include the demo version of his ormapper.

It won't scale super high, but that's not really the purpose of a wedding site.

I'll start refactoring a few things and improving the comments.

The site has been a pretty good success so far. There is the current email issue, and some confusion around the login process.

Non-technical

Wedding plans are rapidly coming to a close - 18 days to the big day. We are eagerly checking email and snail mail for rsvp's. We have a minimum number of guest we have commited to pay for so we're hoping to ave atleast that many guests.

Received the first pass of the ceremony from the officiant - it looks good but we need to review it again and make some minor changes.

House plans are going well as well. Basement was waterproofed a couple weeks ago, and the rest of te painting and things are well underway. We are scheduled to have the hardwood installed the 8th and 9th. Will be ordering the fridge, and washer/dryer in the next couple days. Dereks back and working hard. Nick also is working away. We next need to finalize paint colors for a few rooms, and book someone to some floorboards.

New on MSDN: Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System

From: Rob Caron's Blog

Installing the December CTP Release of Visual Studio Team System

Welcome to Visual Studio 2005 Team System Home: Getting Started

Welcome to Visual Studio 2005 Team System Home:

Link to article...

The Problems

From: Weblogs @ ASP.NET

Link to article... Microsoft Interview Questions

Great new MSPress title

Great new MSPress title

I need to review this in more detail...

Welcome to PubSub

This looks pretty cool

Link to article...

Improved CodeSmith Templates for ORMapper

These code smith templates for ORMapper are awesome - I was doing the same type of functions as a stand alone helper object to segment data access from UI - this makes your data object a true object as it controls its own implementations. Seems to have problems generating against oracle though... have to play with it some more.

From: Paul Wilson's .NET Blog

The following is news from Paul Welter, who's been gracious enough to create and update CodeSmith templates for my ORMapper:

I've updated the tempates on the CodeSmith site above. This update contains many new features. The biggest new feature is merge support. Now you can author new code in the generated entity class file and not loose your changes when the templates are re-run. The merge works by updating marked regions in the file. All your modifications will be saved as long as you don't edit regions marked as 'do not modify'. Another improvement is that it now generates a DataManager class that contains a singleton instance of the ObjectSpace class. Having this common singleton allows for generation of some default methods for each entity like Retrieve, RetrieveAll, Save and Delete. The goal of these updated templates was to abstract the ORMapper from the UI layer by creating methods off the entity objects. This leads to more of a true object oriented design. No longer does a consumer of the entity objects have to know any ORMapper syntax. Working with the entity now looks like ...

Customer cust = new Customer();
cust.FirstName = "Paul";
cust.LastName = "Wilson";
cust.Save();

All the ORMapper tracking and persisting is handled internal to the customer class. This is a much more intuitive syntax to work with.

There is also a new set of templates to generate NUnit test classes for each entity class. The test classes are very basic and designed as only a starting point. Another advantage of the improved way of working with the entity classes is that it is much easier to author tests for.

The templates should be used in the following order ...

1)MappingFile.cst - This generates the mapping file for the WilsonORMapper.
2)ClassGenerator.cst - This generates or updates the entity classes defined in the mapping file. This template also generates a DataManager class if it doesn’t already exist.
3)TestGenerator.cst - This generates NUnit test classes for each enity class. This is an optional template to use.

Thanks
Paul Welter

Link to article...

RoBlog: all my wonderful toys

all my wonderful toys: "

Well, as those that work with me can attest, I used to blabber about how great mozilla's rss reader was, and how much more efficiently I could get nothing accomplished.

This Evening, I stumbled across this beauty: Onfolio (found on scobleizer here). And holy hell, it's amazing. Not only does it give you the awesome syndication features of Thunderbird, but the Onfolio Newspaper View is amazing. It has a firefox extension that is very well done (and an IE one, but if you're using an RSS aggregator, you probably aren't browsing in IE6). I'd say that I'll post more when i figure out how to work more of it's features, but i'd just be lying, as i'm pretty lazy.

This definitely ranks up there with Firefox bookmark keywords and Adblock Filters.

Wow, I'm a nerd

"


A freind of mine (and member of my staff) has started a blog, and alread made a posting I found useful. I really like the knowledge capture aspect.

Just this week I started looking at more advanced rss readers than Sage. I installed rssPopper for outlook and was deciding if it was working for me or not when Rob posted this OnFolio product. Another product that might fit the bill for me is NewsGator. The online/offline combination offering is pretty cool as well.

So trying OnFolio now. I like it so far.


Another of my staff (http://portal.goofyft.com/ - notice its an empty portal) suggested I should open source the code to my wedding website - www.jessandrob.com. My concern is that the code quality isn't the best, and I'm utilizing ORMapper.com so people would need to port the db calls to ado.net or throw Paul Wilson $50 for the mapper. Maybe I should as Paul Wilson if there's a way I can include it?

Anyone out there interested?

Yahoo! News - Microsoft Plans New IE Browser, Better Security

Yahoo! News - Microsoft Plans New IE Browser, Better Security

Finally! IE 7 is on its way. XP SP 2 certainly improved the security in IE, but its been along time since we have seen a new version from MS on the browser front. So long in fact, that I've been speculating for the last few months that they have been re-writing the browser from scratch.

In regards to Microsoft Anti-virus and Anti-spyware, the only way I can see these going overwell with consumers is as a service model (something MS has been trying to create for a long time). I don't beleive consumers will be willing to pay Microsoft for additional software that doesn't extend their computing experience (the argument will go that they shouldn't need anti-virus or anti-spyware - its MS's fault).

In a subscription model Microsoft can pitch the service as ongoing dedication to the health and maintenance of the installation, anolgizing to ongoing maintenance costs in cars or houses, capitalizing on the preventitive maintenance expereinces most consumers are familar with.

freetextbox.com

freetextbox 3.0 now is embedding all javascript and image files as embeded resources! Excellent! Scratch one thing off my todo list at work!

Paul Wilson just added it to his ORMapper too. Excellent

jessandrob.com

Lots of things are working on the site now.

Login, Registry, managed page content, login report, automated registration emails!

Working on online RSVP currently - the code is working just need to make sure everyone is in the database and related.

jessandrob.com

Lots of things are working on the site now.

Login, Registry, managed page content, login report, automated registration emails!

Working on online RSVP currently - the code is working just need to make sure everyone is in the database and related.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Excellent deep thoughts....

jessandrob.com

JessAndRob.com is up.



More features coming in the next week or so.

/dev/null - laptop buying

/dev/null laptop buying analysis



I saw this article today and thought I should update on my new laptop, aka TheBeast. In short it is AWESOME!.



It is truely a desktop replacement, and it makes no excuses of being anything else. About an hour of battery life, and its fairly heavy.

But its FAST! And the screen is INCREDIBLE.



If you are thinking about buying a desktop replacement, I totally recommend the Sager 9860 via PCTorque. Its amazing.

Download details: Windows AntiSpyware (Beta)

Download details: Windows AntiSpyware (Beta)

Very cool? Or should of occured 3 years ago?