Bryan Hinton's space: Technology

Entlib 4.0, Unity, Logging Application Block, and a CLR bug makes for a bad day

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:38:51 GMT

One of my first tasks at my new job has been to look at integrating the Exception Handling block and Logging block into our .NET Stack. We are also exploring using Unity as the Dependency Injection container.

Things were moving along as I started playing with Unity and the Exception Handling block, but as soon as I tried to simply add logging of the handled Exception - it all blew up in my face. Fortunately others had discovered the problem as well which was traced back to a bug in the CLR which had previously been reported and marked as fixed in .NET 4.0. Now I understand that bugs happen and especially when they are bugs in the underlying platform there is only so much to be done. The Entlib team did provide a code fix that could be applied to the source code and then with a custom compilation of Entlib you could be off and running again. Well sort of - having a custom version of Entlib introduces other problems when you are talking about using the VS config tool to manage Entlib config. When deploying this to 30 developers so they can manage Entlib config on their projects it gets to be problematic as the instructions for getting the built-in config tool involves changing solution properties and copying binaries around are not trivial.

If I were doing something out of the ordinary I would be more willing to pay the price - but I am trying to do the most basic Unity-EntLib integration here. I am disappointed that issues with such a common scenario weren't caught before release. The p&p teams have obviously invested time to make Unity and EntLib play nicely together (ala the Unity extensions that are available out of the box to enable Entlib to work with Unity) - I would have imagined that acceptance testing of any sort would have caught this. Perhaps the explanation is as simple as the issue repros differently (perhaps JITs differently) on different machines. Here is hoping that when the fix to the binaries that is hopefully in the works comes out that the team will explain how this happened. Based on the principles that p&p espouses I know they value quality highly which makes this even more unusual.

Note: I use this blog to post both Personal and Technical articles. For a technical only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/technology/feed.rss). For a family only feed use the following URL (http://bryanandnoel.spaces.live.com/category/family/feed.rss)

Technorati tags: EntLib 4.0, Unity

Changing job roles

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:57:21 GMT

In about a week I will be transitioning from my current team (Data Integration) and role as a Data Warehouse Engineer to what we call the .NET Stack team. It has been great expanding my Data Warehouse experience - I am more familiar with the Kimball method of designing data warehouses now (and even see a lot of similarities between the Kimball approach to Data Warehousing and the Object-Oriented world that much of the programming world uses). I won't be sad to leave the ETL tool behind that we use here (Business Objects Data Integrator or DI) though. For the last couple of months DI and I have been working together with a very loose truce - I promise not to curse it too much if it promises not too crash or do otherwise crazy things. My co-workers have been great to work with and I will miss sitting with them on a daily basis - a fun group to work with.

In my new position on the .NET Stack team I will be working on defining, developing, and integrating various technologies and concepts that the .NET development teams working with the different Church departments can use to be more productive, effective, and efficient. This will allow me to be back involved with Team System/Team Foundation Server like I was at Intel which I am very excited about. I will also be spending time with WCF, WPF, nHibernate, Entity Framework, LINQ, and a lot of the other .NET technologies out there. Should be a fun and challenging task - looking forward to it!

Gmail versus Hotmail

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 02:54:47 GMT

Scoble just announced that he is switching from Hotmail to Gmail. From time to time as I hear people making the switch I go back and revisit each site to assess capabilities and see what I am missing. So far I have not seen a compelling reason to change from my 10 year old Hotmail account. I have had a Gmail account for a year or two now. So below I snapped some screen shots of the interfaces to talk to the advantages of each as well as to what I don't like about them.

The first two screen shots are of the message listing screen. Windows Live looks better. It looks more polished. I like the message reading pane on the right (you can also put it on the bottom). I couldn't find an option to do the same in Gmail which is a major disappointment because being able to arrow through my emails and scan them in the reading pane is how I work through my email.

I like the conversation grouping that Google has. That is a great feature to help reduce the size of email in your inbox by collapsing those ongoing conversations.

I am not sure what I think of the archiving of Google Talk conversations automatically. I think it is cool that I can do that, but the fact that it does it automatically for all my conversations seems a little much. I would imagine I could turn it off (just checked and yep I can). Windows Live Messenger allows you to save conversations to a file or email them to yourself on a conversation by conversation basis which I like (although you can also configure it to automatically save conversations to a file). Windows Live Messenger so dominates Google Talk in features though that it isn't much of a comparison and I am not meaning to compare them right now anyway so I digress.

Hotmail does folders and Google does tags - but both allow searching across your whole inbox on search terms which is way more important. I have largely stopped filing my email anyway with the pervasiveness of search these days. It is so much easier to just search and find what I need. That perhaps gives Google the edge here in that I can annotate a message with a tag describing it more directly if I want and then archive it to just get it out of my inbox.

I like the ability to right click in the Hotmail interface and get a custom right click menu to interact with a message.

Both services have way more email storage than I need (both Hotmail and Gmail have in the 5 to 6 GB range although with my Hotmail Plus subscription I get 10).

This view is where I look at it and can't believe all the love Gmail gets. The ads down the side are just an annoyance. I am assuming that most people must ignore them and learn not to see them. Additionally they are reading the content of the email and providing ads based on the content. While I imagine there are instances where this might be useful and interesting this feels very intrusive. To test out the length that this goes to I sent an email to my wife with the message, "Hey sweetie - can't wait for the romantic evening tonight!" Google's ads when I viewed the message in Gmail were nice enough to me provide links on how to get my ex-girlfriend back as well as where I can buy thongs and g-strings. Nice. Perhaps people don't pay enough attention to the ads to care or perhaps as some have suggested people don't care about their privacy as much such that having an email service read your email matters. But for me reading my email to provide context sensitive ads crosses the line.

I had to add a picture in of the Windows Live Mail desktop application for Windows that is also available. It is a lightweight desktop mail client which is more than enough for most consumers (your average home user doesn't need Outlook in my opinion). Of course with Gmail's IMAP and other support I am sure you can plug into any number of mail apps out there (and of course you get Outlook support with both).

Conclusion

In addition to the good things above I noted about Google - Google Calendar is better today than the Windows Live equivalent. Windows Live needs to get rid of having two different calendars - hopefully the next release of Windows Live Calendar will kill MSN Calendar and bring Windows Live Calendar up a notch. I like the way I see Windows Live Calendar going if it simply added true iCal subscription support not just the ability to import it would likely have all that I need.

Each service has it's strengths and weaknesses, but Gmail certainly doesn't yield a compelling reason for me to switch. Plus when I look at the overall platform (Windows Live versus Google) I believe Microsoft has made great progress in establishing what Windows Live truly is and has begun to build out the platform effectively with things like Windows Live Events, Office Live Workspace, and Skydrive. I am anxious to see what MIX brings in terms of Windows Live announcements. Things have been a little quiet on that front lately and I am anxious for some new news.

Google feels like they are stuck in the mud right now in this space. I haven't seen any meaningful changes for what seems like a year. I am sure that I am forgetting something they have done - if I have please note it in the comments as I would like to know. Google's greatest strengths in my opinion lay in Google Calendar, Google Reader, and their main search page. The main search page does little to tie me to a platform honestly - I can be Windows Live based - have a Google search bar in my browser to do web searches and I have the benefits of the web search I prefer with the productivity platform (Windows Live) I prefer. I can see why people prefer Google Calendar, but once Live Calendar gets true iCal subscription support (they already publish in iCal effectively) than I think the advantage goes away there.

Google Reader becomes for me the most compelling piece of Google's platform. I will not switch from it until something can come close to what it does. The starring and sharing (especially sharing) is a key part of my feed reading workflow (although for the casual reader of friends and family blogs they likely would matter very little). I can't believe we haven't seen any integration between Gmail and Google Reader yet. For my family members who aren't super techy, but want to read blogs enabling them to subscribe to RSS feeds and have them show up like emails in their email (which they religiously check) is huge. That would be a huge boost to the adoption of RSS and Atom. Today most of them use Windows Live Mail (that is the desktop client for Hotmail) to read their mail and it allows subscriptions to RSS feeds so I enable in there the subscriptions to blogs of friends and family and they are off and running. Simple and seamless. My grandma and grandpa read their grandkids blogs through RSS that way which is more RSS than most of my coworkers take advantage of!

Technorati tags: Google, Microsoft, Windows Live, Gmail

Technorati tags: Hotmail

Cozi - Calendaring for the family

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:57:46 GMT

cozicentral.cozi.com is yet another site doing lists, calendar, blog/journal, etc... The interesting concept behind it is the ease of calendaring. You can type in your appointment in natural english and it will determine when and who it needs to schedule the appointment for.

And when you hit return you see that Date Night has been scheduled for both Bryan and Noel (the colors represent different people). If you click on Date Night you'll see the details down to the Movie Theater as the location for the event.

The natural language scheduling technology is really cool. The site has the ability to sync with Outlook and send event details and list details to your phone. All nice technology, but nothing beyond the natural language technology that really differentiates the site. It is also hard to imagine me wanting to have my calendar info separate from my mail and contacts. That is what gives the Google, Yahoo, and Windows Live platforms so much power is the integration between mail, contacts, calendar, and other features. It will be interesting to see if any of the big companies look to match or purchase the natural language capabilities that Cozi shows.

Technorati tags: Cozi, Calendaring

The role of Architect in Software Development

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 05:26:00 GMT

Two good articles below that explore what an architect really means in the world of software development. In particular the last one is excellent in analyzing the origins of the term architect and applying that to the world of software development. My feelings on the role of architect mirror much of what is said in the second article. I think an architect role is garnered by experience and that an architect is to be a leader. A true leader needs to be able to get in the trenches and deliver working code as well as be in the room with the customer mapping customer requirements into actionable development tasks.

http://www.agilearchitect.org/agile/role.htm

http://codebetter.com/blogs/ian_cooper/archive/2008/01/02/architects-back-to-the-future.aspx

Technorati tags: Software Development, Architect

Study on how to become an expert

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 04:53:48 GMT

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study - page 4

Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families. Page 5

The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? - Page 6

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945&page=1

Technorati tags: Study, Expert, Chess

NotchUp.com - Death by slowness

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 07:39:01 GMT

I received a couple of invites to try out NotchUp.com today so I decided to go over and try it out. It is a YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site). Apparently the model it is using is to pair up interviewers with interviewees with the niche being that you can set a price that interviewers have to pay you to interview you. Sounds good - It'll be interesting to see how it works or if it works.

Out of the gate though things were bad - performance is HORRIBLE! So bad that the site is almost unusable. I have no idea what employer would be willing to pay money to sit there and wait for the site to come back. Major negative points there. In fact the only reason I stuck around is I imported my information and wanted to correct it so that in the off chance someone was able to get the site to work long enough to find me that they would see the right information (it crashed on me many times).

If you are listening NotchUp - you should have never launched with those kinds of issues - just awful user experience - I will never go back to the site by choice that is for sure!

Technorati tags: NotchUp.com, Social Networking

Team Dynamics

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:07:20 GMT

I hate to just post links here - I want to put more original thoughts - but when someone says something that I don't feel like I could say better or don't need to add to why talk (or write) just because - Peter Provost has some great thoughts in regards to Teams that I shared off my link blog, but since many don't see that I thought I would repost it here.

Technorati Tags: Management,Software Development

Interesting Oracle trick for range queries

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:19:21 GMT

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/01/06/rangekeyed_1.html

Why aren't there any data modeling forums?

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:08:11 GMT

In my new job I am spending a fair amount of time data modeling specifically around Data Warehousing Data modeling. The team I work on are pretty committed Kimballists meaning we generally follow the dimensional modeling principles outlined by Ralph Kimball. As with any programming methodology (and likely any methodology period) there is a fair amount of gray area. That is where both experience and "gut feeling" come into play in making decisions on how to model certain things that don't fit the philosophy very well or perhaps fit multiple parts of the philosophy.

What has surprised is why there aren't more forums out there to discuss this! I can go Google C# of Java or Oracle or perhaps better examples would be Agile Programming or Test Driven Development and find a host of forums to look at, but data modeling or dimensional modeling forums specifically seem to be very few and far between. It surprises me after all these years of Kimball espousing the philosophy etc... that he hasn't made available forums for discussion to happen etc... It would be fascinating to pose problems and see the community's opinions and to respond to other's questions as well. Sounds like a project in the making! Anyone interested or know if a good place already exists (not sense reinventing the wheel!)

Technorati tags: Dimensional Modeling, Ralph Kimball, Data Warehousing

Why does every iTunes point release require a 70 MB reinstall

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:00:48 GMT

Since the iPhone release which generated I think iTunes 7.3 over the last couple of months we have had 7.3.1 and 7.3.2 and 7.4 and now 7.5. Each required reinstalls (including a reinstall of Quicktime???) and the size continues to grow - last night when prompted to install 7.5 it downloaded and installed 69 MB or something like that - I remember 7 being in the range of high 40s. Anybody ever heard of a patch? I am a software developer so I understand a little about the distribution of software. I just don't get why point releases aren't handled as patches - going from 6 to 7 or 7 to 8 I completely understand a reinstall, but not for point releases.

Technorati Tags: iTunes,Apple

Happiness at Work - Some thoughts to live by

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:13:17 GMT

A friend of mine passed along a link to the Happy Hour is 9 to 5 book. It has nothing to do with drinking alcohol at work althoughly sadly that might be the only way some people could find happiness at work! Chapter 1 was alright and Chapter 2 started just okay, but finished much stronger. It is a good read and has some good ideas on things to try and make life around you more pleasant. The ideas are really applicable to life in general and not just work. In fact if you practice these things at work hopefully you are doing them first at home with those you care about

The author of the book also has a blog entitled Chief Happiness Officer. Today in fact he posted an interesting article where he called out to Americans - asking us a question about what makes us happy at work. There is an interesting discussion building there about differences between America and Europe for example and how that impacts what makes us happy at work. The discussion around the lack of a social safety net in America and the impact it has is particularly interesting.

In regards to that article I guess my comment there would be that I want to be happy at work, but work to me will always be first and foremost a means to an end. That end is providing for my family. That is priority number 1. So my first answer to what makes me happy at work - it is that it lets me go home at a decent hour with a decent wage so that I can spend my time and money with the people I care about most. Now while I am at work I think being happy and in general adhering to the principles that I have seen in the Happy Hour is 9 to 5 book is a great idea.

Technorati Tags: Work,Management,Chief Happiness Officer

Map to all the RSS in Windows Live Spaces

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:43:55 GMT

In writing a post to describe the content on my site I wanted to be able to clue people into the RSS feeds that would be available from my Live Spaces site, but I couldn't find enough RSS icons to satisfy me and so I did some Google searching to find out the details on RSS within Live Spaces. What I found was great since there is tons and tons of RSS integration throughout the site. I do wish they had made it more discoverable, but I guess that just leaves them with some room for improvement. Here are a couple of links that I found handy.

http://mike.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FBABF8E542F5D5DB!8320.entry

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb447761.aspx

Technorati tags: Windows Live Spaces, RSS

A couple of Windows Live requests

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:32:41 GMT

In my previous post I talked about my impressions of what Window Live is doing and my overall excitement around how MS is evolving the Live platform. That praise aside I do have a couple of critiques/requests.

1. Clarify the role of www.live.com, home.live.com, and your Spaces home page. I haven't seen meaningful changes to www.live.com in a while and while it has similar functionality to iGoogle it doesn't have enough to make me switch and frankly my interest in iGoogle and it's usefulness to me is decreasing as well. I find that between my Live Spaces page and home.live.com I get the information I need. I would like to see home.live.com and the home Live Spaces page integrated together. To me having them separate is silly they have subtle differences I suppose, but not enough to make them two sites (if for example you didn't have a Live Spaces account, but wanted to use home.live.com you just wouldn't see the Live Spaces content that someone who had an account does). The content on both sites is sparse enough that integrating them seems to make sense to me. Having www.live.com in addition to them seems silly unless there is some kind of collaboration between the three. Perhaps some gadgets that show the content that normally is displayed on the home.live.com and Live Spaces home pages.

2. GOOGLE READER - I love the RSS integration in Windows Live Mail, IE7, and Vista in general, but web-based aggregation is where it is at. That gives me access to my feed content on my mobile device, any PC I want, etc... This is one area where I feel like Google just continues to stomp MS even though MS has a decent RSS integration story in its client products. Where is the web-based aggregator - Please bring it - add in integration between it and Window Live Mail (the client software) and wham - what you have would pull me away from Google Reader. Of course Google Reader is more than just web-based aggregation. I love the starring and sharing features - the sharing especially with the Link Blog concept (RSS feed of your shared items) that so many use (Scoble notably) is tremendous. Come on MS this is a huge hole in the Live family! If you aren't anywhere close than buy Bloglines. They are right up there and with some refocusing of their system inside of the Live family (and some simplification and addition of sharing and starring of course) maybe you can get relevant in this space faster!

All in all I love what MS is doing with Live which is a marked change than what I thought and felt 6 months ago that is a tribute to the product teams that continued to churn out lots of new capabilities over the last 6 months. I hope the next 6 are equally exciting!

Technorati tags: Windows Live, Google Reader

Windows Live Continues to Deliver

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:15:08 GMT

The news community has quite a few reports on the release of many of the Windows Live services/products from beta as well as the introduction of at least one new beta (Windows Live Calendar).

I have been using Windows Live Mail (which in what is still a little bit of a branding nightmare is the name for the desktop client to the Windows Live Hotmail service), Windows Live Writer, and Windows Live Photo Gallery for quite some time in their beta forms. I have been impressed as they have been solid over the beta period that I have used them.

I have been on the Windows Live Mail bandwagon for a while. I have moved several of my family members over as it is a light-weight client and with the RSS integration I now have my grandma reading my blog and others through RSS! I wish that Windows Live Calendar was integrated into it (there was minimal integration at some point in the product evolution).

I love Windows Live Photo Gallery. I was using Photoshop Elements for organizing, but no longer. Live Photo Gallery does that stuff so much easier and I can map multiple machines to a share on my home network and base the Photo Gallery store off that and have it work. Photoshop Elements would never load when I tried to do that. The Photostitch stuff is fantastic - I have to stop myself from always shooting panoramas! I love how easily they stitch together and create cool pictures (at least cool to me - any shortcomings in them is due more to me as a photographer than anything else). The basic editing in it does most of what I need (and probably most of what the everyday Joe does as well). I have Elements to shift into any really fancy editing if I really need to (which I rarely do).

Windows Live Writer is a great blogging tool - the add-on community is always introducing cool new things (the Live Spaces and Skydrive integration is cool and the Silverlight integration looks cool as well although I haven't tried it personally yet!).

Windows Live Calendar looks very promising with the iCal integration - I'll report back once I have had a chance to play with it some more.

I think the move to bring Live clients to the desktop to connect MS desktop properties (Vista especially) with the work being done on the web with the Live Services was brilliant and enriches the experience (Live Photo Gallery being a prime example - terrific move there MS). Frankly it is these innovations that get me excited where MS is headed with Windows Live. I have two key requests/complaints that I will detail in my next post - overall though Windows Live is taking shape nicely I think.

Technorati tags: Windows Live

Windows Live Photo Album Screen Saver

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:37:30 GMT

Now that I am using my Windows Live Spaces extensively for blogging and posting pictures I started to look around software that would allow me to use as a screen saver the pictures in my Photo Albums. I use a couple of different computers and I love to have personal pictures as my screen saver, but it was such a hassle to have to copy new ones from time to time over to each machine. At one point there was an MSN Screen Saver that purported to have this capability, but I couldn't get it to work with my Windows Live Spaces account.

This was a great opportunity to play with VS2008 and LINQ. I have had the Express Beta 2 version on my machine for a while, but done little with it up to this point. I took the Screen Saver starter kit from the VS2005 Edition and upgraded the project to 2008 (by opening it in 2008). That worked without a problem and so it was on to customizing the project to pull the files from my Windows Live Spaces albums and hooking that into the Screen Saver code.

I have uploaded the source code zipped to my SkyDrive. There are many changes to be made, but the code is working. I don't have the options dialog working yet to configure through the GUI the Live Spaces Album feed to use so you'll have to change the hard-code and recompile. Before too long I will update the code to include that as it isn't hard to do. When you compile it copies the exe output and a helper dll to the system32 directory and renames the exe file to an scr file which is what Windows wants to show you the screen saver in the Screen Saver tab within the Display options. REMEMBER YOU MUST HAVE .NET 3.5 Beta 2 INSTALLED FOR THIS TO WORK!

The RSS feed you provide can be for all your albums or from a specific album the code automatically detects it and will parse it accordingly. The WindowsLiveSpacesPhotos.dll holds the parsing code which isn't very complicated really. I use LINQ in it to examine the XML and find what I need. I love LINQ. It changes the whole way I look at solving problems. If I need to query data (however that data is stored) I can now express it in common terms rather than having to primitively code my queries in a sequence of loops, ifs, and temporary variables.

   1: public List<Uri> ProcessFeed(string feedURL)   2:         {   3:             SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(new Uri(feedURL));   4:             var Result = (from extension in feed.ElementExtensions   5:                              where ((XmlElement)extension.Object).Name == "live:type" && (((XmlElement)extension.Object).InnerText == "photos" || ((XmlElement)extension.Object).InnerText == "photoalbum")   6:                          select ((XmlElement)extension.Object).InnerText);   7:     8:     9:             if (Result == null) throw new ArgumentException("The feed URL provided is not a feed of all photo albums or a feed for a specific photo album and thus it is not a valid feed");  10:             var PhotoFeedType = Result.SingleOrDefault();  11:    12:             if (PhotoFeedType == "photos") return EnumeratePhotoAlbums(feed);  13:             if (PhotoFeedType == "photoalbum") return EnumeratePhotos(feed);  14:             return null;  15:               16:         }

Windows Live Spaces extends RSS feeds with extended properties if you will that identify the feed if it is a photo album or if it is photos which means that it is a list of photo albums (where as photoalbum means the feed consists of a list of photos that comprise the single album).

I then use LINQ to inspect the feed to extract the items that I need. The code snippet below I am especially proud of as it is my most advanced LINQ query to date where I am nesting queries and from one of them querying over the return from a method call. The thing I like is the way it goes into each photo album RSS feed extracts out the links to the actual images and then returns them flattened out with all image links from all photo albums in one list. I would try to explain it, but it is much more effective to play with this sequence of code and work with the debugger to inspect the different ways that data can get returned (nested differently). It took some playing with it along with a little Internet searching to figure out how to get it flattened out correctly.

   1: private List<Uri> EnumeratePhotoAlbums(SyndicationFeed albumFeed)   2:         {   3:             var Results = (from item in albumFeed.Items   4:                 from extension in item.ElementExtensions   5:                     where (((XmlElement)extension.Object).LocalName == "itemRSS")   6:                     from photolink in EnumeratePhotos(SyndicationFeed.Load(new Uri(((XmlElement)item.ElementExtensions[3].Object).InnerText)))   7:                     select photolink).ToList();   8:     9:             foreach (Uri uri in Results)  10:             {  11:                 Console.WriteLine(uri.AbsoluteUri);  12:             }  13:    14:             return Results;  15:               16:         }

I won't bother showing the Screen Saver code as I didn't change too much there. I do spin off a new thread to check the feeds for updates and then I store them in a temp folder and when I am done downloading the images (I save them local so that the screen saver can work in the rare instance that the computer might not actually be connected to the Internet). I then signal the UI thread and inform it of the new folder and it then switches the screen saver from using the old image folder to using the new and voila! we have our screen saver.

Once I get a little more work done on this I plan on posting it to CodePlex. I want to clean up the code by adding in an object model to express more appropriately the domain model that exists as well as making the options dialog work like it is supposed to. I would love to have the same image layouts and transitions that the built-in Vista Screen Saver has, but that for now is beyond me, but who knows maybe getting the code to Codeplex will help me find someone who has the know-how to do that!

Technorati tags: Windows Live, LINQ, Windows Live Spaces

What everyone should know about using Bitmap Indexes with Oracle

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:12:27 GMT

I am only through part one of the three parts of the article that Jonathan Lewis wrote about bitmap indexes, but it was so good that I had to post it now. He takes on the common understanding/misunderstanding with bitmap indexes.

Technorati Tags: Oracle

Tech Ed 2007 Day 2 Birds of a Feather – Agile Planning Tools and TDD/Mocking

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 03:05:39 GMT

I took in two BOFs tonight – one led by Joel Semeniuk on Agile Planning Tools – that included the likes of Steven Borg and Clementino Mendonca as well – there was some lively discussion – not all of it about Planning tools per se, but perhaps approaches to planning – I thought it was an excellent discussion and in the least made people think and hear the views of others which I think captures the essence of Birds of a Feather very well.

One of my comments in the session was that there is no ONE tool for Agile planning – I believe there is tooling (perhaps it is Excel or Project which were the two most common mentioned) needed for Iteration planning (tactical planning if you will) and perhaps with co-located teams a sticky board is good enough (although having the traceability that you get with a tool like Team Foundation Server is valuable and you can see teams like what David Anderson is doing at Corbis where they use cards on the wall and TFS).

I also think there is a need to manage the strategic space and the needs of the strategic space are different than that of the tactical. Another gentleman in the room captured that well in a comment about the decrease in granularity that is tracked as you move farther out on your roadmap. The items farther out are broader strokes of functionality or ideas that represent where you "may" go.

At the end I chatted with Clementino, Steven Borg, and Martin Danner (from Accentient along with Steven), and Rob Lowe from my group at Intel about how easy it would be to put out a simple tool to enable card like planning. I was thinking something in WPF (it would be fun) and Steve mentioned using AJAX and the web (can you do drag and drop – maybe a Silverlight alpha test?). It wouldn't be too hard to make it such that you could plug in adapters for the backend technology that you used (VersionOne, TFS, etc…). We are going to talk some more on it and CodePlex seems like a good place to host that – we'll have to see where that goes.

The second session was on TDD/Mocking/Dependency Injection and facilitated by James Kovacs. Again it was interesting to hear people's perceptions on mocking and TDD. I think in general most in there with a couple of exceptions perhaps were behind TDD. There was a little bit more variability in mocking and the levels that people were using mocking and even what mocking was. My input was

TDD is about driving your design and development through testing – it isn't ABOUT THE TESTS – the fact that you have unit tests as an output that you can run for validation – to me – that is like a side product to a degree. TDD is a great at helping the right design emerge from your code (and I love ReSharper helping me get there!)
Mocking is a tool to help you test in places that may be difficult – the example I used where it came in handy was when I was trying to mock a successful windows authentication for a login procedure. I didn't want to hard-code a correct account with the password so we injected the authentication object in and mocked it so that it always returned true (since we didn't care to test the windows authentication procedure – that is MS job). In that case and many others I see mocking and dependency injection working hand in hand. And I believe (as do most of the patterns books) that dependency injection is a key principle to produce loosely coupled systems. Mocking is great at helping test in those dependency injection scenarios. Several others brought up using mocking more generally and I am sure there are cases – I guess my advice would be mock when you have to and no more.

In all the discussions about mocking and mocking frameworks Rhino Mocks was the only name mentioned of course there are others, but it was the only one called out by name perhaps speaking to it's popularity in comparison to the other frameworks right now.

Tech Ed 2007 Day 2: What a day! - ADO.NET Entities (EDM), LINQ, ASP.NET, and Data Mining, Performance Point, and a little WPF

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 02:03:36 GMT

Dynamic Languages
There was supposed to be a chalk talk about this that John Lam was supposed to be at, but for some reason it got cancelled so I swung by their booth and had a good (but quick chat with them). It mostly involved talking about the DLR console written in Silverlight that is available. We talked about some of the challenges in trying to enable .NET on those languages while still allowing those languages to maintain the uniqueness that people like about them. In another discussion with the EDM folks (Entity Data Model or Entity Framework) they mentioned Jasper which is the codename for a project that allows dynamic languages to take advantage of the Entity framework (think a combination of NHibernate and Rails) such that you get NHibernate type of ORM mapping and when coupled with the ASP.NET Dynamic Data Control (which literally is a one line definition of the control) you create a complete web interface for administering your data. The reasoning behind this effort is to enable dynamic languages but without requiring the early binding that languages like C# do. The scenario presented was that you would pass a connection string to a method that connected to the DB and would pull back all the tables, etc… in your DB and allow you to program to them (remember you don't have to have pre-defined them in languages like Python, Ruby, etc…) without them being explicitly created.
As one of the MS guys said they have felt the pulse of the community around dynamic languages and are working to support the movement by the development community in that area.
ADO.Net Entities (EDM)

This topic is covered extensively in Internet articles and so I will just highlight a couple of points – EDM will ship "out of band" from Orcas perhaps sometime March 2008. It represents an ORM-like implementation similar to NHibernate – I am not an NHibernate expert so I can't comment on what is different etc…, but I would imagine that most of the major NHibernate capabilities are covered with some of the edge cases (or perhaps many) not covered which will likely cause great commotion when it comes out as people like their edge cases and get upset when they are not covered.

Perhaps the one scenario that really stood out here is the opportunity to leverage this defined Entity Framework in other places. The example that comes to mind is in the Adhoc reporting arena. Say that you create an object model and use that in your apps that you write and then you maintain a report model (whether you do that for SQL Reporting Services or the Universe concept that Business Objects uses). Well now you have two models to maintain – which if you want them to be two is good, but if you don't (and I would suggest that as often as you don't want them to be the same you do want them to be the same) then that is bad. Well now if Reporting Services leverages the Entity Framework you can expose that model to both your programming and adhoc reporting users. I plan on dropping by the SQL Server Reporting Services booth and raising my voice that I want this type of integration.
LINQ and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Control

Full disclosure – I love LINQ – it is really cool – I would like to excuse that by the fact that I like SQL as well, but the more I am around it the more I am convinced that it is not just me – LINQ is just cool. LINQ is well known so I won't spend much more time on that – the Dynamic Data Control I referenced above in the Dynamic Language discussion, but in short it allows you to in one line define the control and map it to the Linq model that it will use to inspect your DB and then spit out the relevant web pages. It gives you an abstraction layer such that you don't have to adhere to design/naming rules like Rails requires (I am not a Rails expert so if I am butchering things on Rails I apologize). The one thing I don't know is if you have control over the styling of the output of the dynamic data control – I would hope so, but I don't know for sure.
Scott Guthrie
The guy does great talks – I wonder if the guys that work for him get mad because he gets to do all the cool demos? I think it is awesome that someone so senior still codes. I have the same kind of respect for Brian Harry as well. Not knowing them personally or how the people who work under them feel I guess it is an opinion from afar, but senior people who have to handle the management and technical together and seem to be staying on top of it are impressive to me.
Performance Point
With KPIs available in Excel 2007, Analysis Services, SharePoint, and now in PerformancePoint (and I don't know, but probably ProClarity as well) MS obviously needs to do some consolidation. From talks with them I think they realize that – one of the key messages to take away is if your KPIs are in Analysis Services then everybody seems them so at least there is a convergence point within the technology stack. We have been looking for a dashboarding type tool – I know that there are tons out there, but with the technology we have available to us due to MS licensing already PerformancePoint begins to look appealing. It is definitely something that we are going to take a longer look at when we get back from the Conference.
Data Mining
I went to several Data Mining sessions two years ago and am revisiting them today – not much has changed in the server landscape and they haven't said anything about changes coming in SQL Server 2008, but they did release Data Mining Extensions for the Office platform (2007) and they demo'd the Excel plug-in – it was very impressive and made it easy to running data mining algorithms across Excel data – the wizard that is used does a good job of hiding the complexities and enabling you to just get at the Data Mining results.

Tech Ed 2007 – Day 1 : Business Intelligence and SharePoint

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:58:46 GMT

So today started off a little slow after the keynote – at least for me. While I had a lot of sessions that interested me – none brought the “I can’t wait for this” feeling. I spent a fair amount of the data in sessions talking about SharePoint, Excel, and BI in general. This is a hot topic at work as of late as is reporting in general. The best part of the day so far surprisingly is the Hands-On lab I did where I published an Excel workbook to Excel Server. It was interesting to see what MOSS gives you. It exposed named elements in Excel and in the sample I had two named tables, a chart, and a named range (which was actually just one column). So put an Excel Viewer on top of it in the browser and I could see those items (with the visualizations as well). You can also create a filter that links different web parts together so that they can be parameterized together (kind of like having an area parameter that governs all the data displaying on the page when they are on different web parts). Couple that with a better connection between SharePoint and ASP.NET with ASP.NET 2.0 and SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint as a platform may be coming of age.

I am in a session covering the upcoming features in SQL Server 2008 or “Katmai” (I think I spelled the codename right). They talked about ADO.NET entities which is interesting to hear them plugged into that effort – that feature got pushed out from release with Orcas to lag Orcas by a few months to align the strategy there – I wonder if aligning with the SQL team was part of that? Now the presenter is talking about storing “beyond relational” data in SQL Server.

I closed up the sessions for the day by going to Scott Guthrie’s Silverlight session – I had seen most of the demos in a recent webcast, but it was still really cool. When you see the ease of creating an RIA (Rich Internet Application – perhaps RIE would be better – Rich Internet Experience) that connects to web services and leverages the investment that many shops already have in .NET it is easy to see how really remarkable websites can be in the future. I ran into a friend that works for JetBlue who was in the same Silverlight session and I told him that I would fly JetBlue if they made it as easy to fly and book routes as it was in the Silverlight Demo that Scott showed (you drag and drop your flight plan and your dates). One of the other demos that was just incredible was the Video Editing one. You could cut videos, splice them together, break them down into frame components, and all in the browser. They also had one that mimicked the recent Microsoft Surface Computing experience to a degree (with a mouse of course).

The evening was the reception in the Exhibitor Hall the food was good. I talked with Infragistics, Dundas, DevExpress, and BusinessObjects - there may have been a couple of others in their as well. Dundas really stuck out to me in the charting space – they have a rich set of functionality for Reporting Services, ASP.NET, WinForms, and now for SharePoint – very, very nice and definitely worth a look. Infragistics also was pretty impressive as they talked about the work that they are doing in the Silverlight control space. I was glad to hear that as MS will likely ship some controls, but is no doubt counting on partners to fill in the control gap there. They already had charting components up there (I thought they were real demo components anyway) which is key as we have been bouncing Flash around as a platform and part of the reason is the charting interactivity that you get.

All in all a good day – it got better as the day went on – time to take some of the capability I saw for a spin and get some sleep as well!

Technorati tags: Tech Ed 2007, Tech Ed, Silverlight

Tech Ed 2007 Begins!

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:49:36 GMT

I have been meaning to blog all last week about my impending departure to Tech Ed. I noticed that I felt like I had an extra bounce in my stop all last week. Coming to Tech Ed is something I look forward to. 2005 was great with the impending release of VS2005, SQL 2005, and TFS. 2006 didn't have anything as compelling, but this year with Orcas on the near horizon (hopefully) and with Silverlight there should be some really good stuff.

I am sitting here waiting for the keynote to start – we are running about 5 minutes late so far. Bob Muglia is the guy this year – we'll have to see if they have anything good to share. Last year's keynote was pretty good I thought with the 24 theme.

The Attendee party should be great – never been to Islands of Adventure and definitely .

I flipped on my Bluetooth on my phone as I walked through the main hall and I got a lot of advertisements – I guess they would like to call them coupons, but ads were what they were – as if you don't get enough of that in your Tech Ed bag alone (which is much, much improved from 2006 thankfully). We'll have to see as the week goes on if the Bluetooth broadcasting that they are doing has anything more useful (they call it Bluecasting).

Looks like it is showtime – Back to the Future theme – good start – Doc Brown (was that his name?) – spoofing Hailstorm back in 2001 – Doc Brown called it a big waste of time. WinFS and Clippy get hit next – then an entrance in the Delorian – nice – well done.

Talking about the 70/30 split in IT with 70% of resources spent on maintenance and 30% on new capability or value.

Brought out Tom Bittman from Gartner to talk about IT and Agility. Tom said that Agility in IT is a major differentiator and the gap between the Agile and the non-Agile companies is growing. Tom made a key point that not only does the process need to be agile, but also the communication between Business, Development, and infrastructure.

Being Low-cost and High Quality is no longer good enough – you have to be Agile as well – spoke on how to measure Agile – said go ask your customer.

It is interesting – here I am sitting at a MS conference and the Keynote is talking about how Agile has now joined Cost and Quality Service as a foundational principle of IT. For those Agilists out there that has to feel like a nice pat on the back and validation for the journey to acceptance. Tom even took a shot across the bow of CMM and said that you can't just focus on process – that isn't enough – in a survey Gartner did process was an issue to getting to a real-time infrastructure for a quarter of the people, technology was another quarter and culture/organizational was another.

Interesting commentary on the Agile Manifesto

Thu, 17 May 2007 15:19:34 GMT

http://www.exampler.com/blog/2007/05/16/six-years-later-what-the-agile-manifesto-left-out/

Very interesting take on the reasons behind the Manifesto by one of the originators with some commentary on what it should include today. I have had similar feelings over the last couple of years as our group has embraced Agile. Many individuals I have talked to speak highly of the technical practices (TDD, CI, Pairing), but the human challenges that crop up when trying to adopt those are often glossed over in my opinion. Agile is hard because it encourages and really requires active communication, requires skilled people, and for people to be motivated on their own. Those things are rarely givens in any environment and if they aren't there the Agile practices breakdown and thus Agile teams feel like they are failing in their execution. Good to see Brian call attention to some of those elements and identify them as important to the success of an Agile team.

Technorati tags: Agile, Agile Manifesto

Initial Silverlight impressions

Sun, 06 May 2007 04:17:29 GMT

What a week - Scoble mentioned a while ago that there was a decided lack of buzz out in the industry, that was changing prior to this week, but after Mix07 the growing buzz became a roar. With Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight and Adobe's recent announcements (open source Flex, Apollo) even before Ajax and the accompanying user experience it delivered has even settled into the market we are evolving past that.

Now whether Silverlight is for real is obviously still to be determined. MS isn't afraid of a fight though and certainly has cash to burn to invest and win in this space. They needed a product to combat the gains that Flash is making as well. I downloaded Silverlight tonight for the first time (been meaning to all week and just haven't gotten around to it) and tried out a couple of the samples - the http://www.silverlight.net/fox one was particularly cool. I was amazed at the quality of the streaming and the smoothness of it - my ancient laptop generally doesn't handle all very well and it worked great. The install was amazingly painless and light as well.

I am also very excited about the .NET support in it and as soon as I get the replacement motherboard for my main machine I am going to update to Orcas Beta 1 and install the dev extensions and try developing against Silverlight.

Technorati tags: Silverlight

Work breakdown at MS

Tue, 01 May 2007 00:32:57 GMT

I love this article and how it describes work breakdown at MS. I have been looking for it the past couple of days and couldn’t believe that I didn’t have it shared or blogged about anywhere. I love the work breakdown ideas migrating customer value to experiences to actual features that attempt to deliver the value. We use different terms on my development team, but the concept is the same. I also love the visualization that is given with the project dashboard at the bottom. That is one of the things that keeps me sold on TFS – the ability to communicate up and down the management chain off the same data store without tons of overhead to grab and record point in time status, but instead deliver real-time status updates of how product development is going.

http://blogs.msdn.com/teams_wit_tools/archive/2007/01/15/internal-tfs-usage-high-level-visbility.aspx

Giving Microsoft Dev Division their props

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:57:35 GMT

I have been meaning to blog on this for a days now - today I decided to stop procrastinating. Most have by now seen the news about MS buying TeamPlain to add a web interface to Team Foundation Server. What a great move! I was talking to Steven Borg from Accentient a little over a month ago about this very thing - when I heard the news I was pumped. This fills a major gap in the product and will at least here at Intel help us foster adoption of Team Foundation Server. We now have a corporate instance available for people to start to leverage - the next step for us is to make sure people are educated on how to take full advantage of TFS's features.

The publishing of the Team System roadmap was very cool as well - Rosario hasn't been a secret as Mary Foley and others disclosed the codename for the VSTS post-Orcas release, but it is nice to have it out there so that we can "officially" talk about it. The stuff I have seen related to it looks very exciting and promising and I can't wait to see some bits out there - but I suppose we should wait for Orcas first. Orcas has some great stuff as well - LINQ looks awesome (I have played with it just a little bit) and the CI stuff coming from TeamBuild will be nice as well.

Oh and I am excited to hit Islands of Adventure at Tech Ed this year as well (I am sure the sessions will be good as well!).

Technorati tags: vsts, teamplain, tfs, teched, teched 2007

My link blog

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:34:49 GMT

On my Spaces site to the left of my blog I am syndicating my link blog from Google Reader - I love that feature that they allow me to mark items as "Shared" and there is a public site for it as well as an RSS feed - very, very cool feature. It has reduced the need for me to do a link parade or party like in the past because I just share it from Google Reader - I love Google Reader by the way. I track about 160 plus feeds these days and push out the interesting stuff to my link blog so subscribe to it there is tons of good stuff in there!

Technorati tags: Google Reader

Agile Journal - High Performance Agile Teams: An Overview of Collaboration

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:31:50 GMT

In particular I liked the case study - not sure that I have always seen that be the case in my own organization - but it is a reminder for those smart guys out there - that you can be as smart as you want, but if the next guy is as well and you try to take your smart thing and his smart thing and put them together they just may make you look dumb because many times they don't work together. Communication/Collaboration is king!

Link to Agile Journal - High Performance Agile Teams: An Overview of Collaboration

Technorati tags: Agile