Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Apparently there are some issues with getting the correct Microsoft.Web.Atlas.dll and other annoyances when downloading the December bits. Jonathan Hawkings has a good summary of what to do on the ASP.NET forums, and I reproduce it here: It looks like there is a replication issue with the ASP.NET ‘Atlas’ December ’05 release family on MS Download Center (download.microsoft.com). The December bits were originally released with the October release family (a download center deployment term) and they suspect this lead to the October bits continuing to be downloaded. The download center folks have since re-release the ‘Atlas’ December bits with a new release family. Please try the steps below to clear our prior ‘Atlas’ versions from the IE cache, VS project templates etc. 1. Make sure you are running ASP.NET 2.0 RTM, Visual Studio 2005 RTM or Visual Web Developer RTM … ASP.NET ‘Atlas’ will only run on the RTM releases. Beta2 ...

Richard Grimes has a very recent piece here about comparisons between managed and unmanaged code. He points out specifically: "The problem is that when most people think of .NET they think of other frameworks with a runtime, like Java or Visual Basic; or they may even think about interpreters. They do not think about applications, or what they do; they do not think about limiting factors like network or disk access; in short, they do not think. .NET is not like those frameworks. It has been well though out and Microsoft has put a lot of effort in making it work well. In this article I will present some code that performs some computationally intensive operation and I will compile it as both managed C++ and unmanaged C++. Then I will measure how each of these libraries perform. As you will see, .NET is not automatically much slower than unmanaged code, indeed, in some cases it is much faster." . Grimes presents FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) sample code for Unmanaged, Managed ...

The world is abuzz with acronyms. One that's getting a bit overheated IMO is Service Oriented Architecture -- "SOA". Why is it that architect - developer people get into this "Baffle 'em with Bullshit" mindset anyway? Let's keep it simple, folks! What is "SOA" anyway? I prefer the simple definition: "A service-oriented architecture is a collection of services that communicate with each other. The services are self-contained and do not depend on the context or state of the other service. They work within a distributed systems architecture." Now that's pretty simple; it doesn't baffle us with high-falutin whitepaper B.S., and we feel better since most of us are already doing this kind of stuff anyway . Note that it doesn't say "whose" system, or "what brand" or even what language / platform. SOA has been around for 20 years. The only real difference is that we have more interoperability in the form of...

A couple of people had an interesting conversation today. It went something like so: A: If a theory is presented as a theory, what is the harm in teaching it? The "theory" of evolution is taught. How is teaching Christian kids the theory of evolution ok but teaching the theory of intelligent design to non christian kids not ok? B: The theory of evolution is based on science. Einstein's theory of relativity was based on science, even though it took 51 years for it to be fully proven. Intelligent design is not based on science, it's based on the supernatural, which is not science, but religion. Astrology is based on the supernatural, not science. I'll defend Christian kids' right to learn about Intelligent design in church 100%, but not in the public school biology classroom. A: I went and read up on that case. They weren't simply asking to teach it in addition to Darwin, they wanted it to be a replacement for. It also appeared to be against a vast major...

I grew up in NYC. It's a tough town. Tough people, but they can also be very nice. One good thing I learned in NY is how to drive. You stick your nose out into traffic until somebody chickens out. Problem is, here in Florida they don't get that this is just etiquette, and they shoot you, or at least try to run you off the road! Idiots! Now look, transit strikes are illegal. In New York State, they have the Taylor Law, which unequivocally makes public transit strikes illegal. The City of New York went and got a court injunction against the union, barring them from going on strike. A judge fined them a million a day. And yet, after all this, Roger Toussaint, the president of the Transit Workers Union, had the unmitigated gall to stand up at a rally and yell to the crowd, "If Mayor Bloomberg wants to know what we think about this lawsuit, I'll show you," and he tore up the legal papers in front of them. If the Transit Workers Union defies a court injunction, bre...

Scott Guthrie has posted a mini-site with a download of the new Web Application Project "add-in" (the one that makes VS.NET 2005 act like VS.NET 2003 for ASP.NET Applications). The site is here. . At this point there is a C# Tutorial ready (link on the same page as above) and a VB.NET tutorial should be ready shortly. I'm going to spend a short amount of time on this and post some more, because I think it is an important step, er (forward?, or perhaps backward?). Scott informs on his blog that "This preview is not a feature-complete version of the functionality. There are several important features that are not yet implemented, as well as a set of bugs that are currently active", and that "Our goal with putting this first release out is to get early feedback from the community, as well as to provide a core feature-set that enables some developers to start using this project model option immediately (with workarounds for the missing functionality which wil...

Scientists analyzed the portrait of the Mona Lisa, a woman with famously mixed emotions, hoping to unlock her smile. They applied emotion recognition software that measures a person's mood by examining features such as the curve of the lips and the crinkles around the eyes. The findings? Mona Lisa was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry, according to the British weekly "New Scientist." They also found out that she likes Fajita Burritos from Chipotle Grill, drives a Lamborghini, and likes to wear push-up designer bras by Verdissima. As can be seen here in the after-scan photo, Ms. Lisa did not take kindly to being "scanned". Many people are not aware that Mona was also an expert object - oriented programmer. The only problem is, nobody has ever been able to find her code... Ain't technology grand?

Back at the MVP Summit in Redmond in late September, I had a chance to talk at some length with my buddy and fellow MVP Daniel Cazzulino . Daniel was up to his eyeballs in the GAT, along with Victor Aprea and a bunch of other contract people working out of the Redmond campus. I asked a lot of questions, and Daniel and Victor responded, and at that time, since i realized GAT really hadn't been "born" yet, I kind of "tucked it away" in my head for later. Well, I'm happy to reveal that it's born, and developers should take note. GAT is a first, but a very big step into extensions to Visual Studio 2005 that allows architects to author integrated user experiences for reusable assets that include frameworks, components and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages are composed of templates, wizards and what they call "recipes" (it ain't Martha Stewart, folks), that can help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture ...

I came into the office this morning and my machine had been rebooted. "OK", I thought, and I looked in Event Viewer, and sure enough, at 3:00 AM just as expected, there had been some WIndows Updates installed. Then the bad news came. I brought up Internet Explorer and when I clicked on a link in my Favorites or tried to enter an address in the Address Bar, IE would freeze. The only way to kill it was to go into Task Mgr and kill the IExplore.exe process. At first I didn't think that a Microsoft update could have done this. So, I tried all the "Fixes" from the MVP Internet Explorer site and a couple of others. No dice. I had to use Firefox to go look for the fixes! To make a long story short, after a couple of frustrating hours and no relief, I did what any intelligent developer would do. I booted off the Windows XP CD, went through the entire installation sequence to the point where it identified my existing Windows XP installation, and chose the (R) repair opt...

Yup. They're finally getting around to it. W3C has its first set of Recommendations around the Binary XOP concept , which essentially takes the XML InfoSet and provides a standardized binary format encoding set of rules. Of course a lot of people are unhappy with how XML has evolved and with the involvement of organizations like the W3C. The fact remains that even though the transport cost of textual XML is untenable for a lot of devices, the cost of parsing of text-XML completely overshadows it. By having a BinaryXML standard, we would see XML adoption in areas where its use is not currently widespread and we would see increased communications over what we have today. This would be good for all of us. The only problem is, it needs to be "a" standard, not "twenty different" standards. I remember being on the SOAP list back in 2000. Dave Winer, Don Box and other luminaries did a lot of arguing and crying. But, they eventually gave birth, and it was "One S...

With this week's NYSE merger with electronic market operator Archipelago, the New York Stock Exchange has instantly become the world's top publicly listed stock exchange - and made a decisive plunge into electronic trading. They used a reverse-IPO listing process - Archipelago, whose stockholders now own 30 per cent of the combined $10 billion entity, was already a public company. Although 99 per cent of Big Board orders reach the NYSE electronically, only about 14 per cent are settled electronically. The remaining 86 per cent are executed using a technologically-updated, but still very recognizable version of the face-to-face trading floor that, in one form or another, has been used by the NYSE throughout its 213-year history. I know how archaic it is - as a rookie broker for Merrill Lynch, they let us on the NYSE Trading Floor one day right after the close during broker training school. There's paper everywhere, people yelling and bumping into each other, and you literall...

Steve Michelotti exposes an interesting limitation of polymorphism with Generics: In .NET 2.0, Generics is clearly the single most important language enhancement. However, to use generics to the full potential, developers should understand both the capabilities and limitations of generics as they relate specifically to polymorphism. In short, while generics do support some polymorphic behavior, the use of Interfaces should still be the preferred polymorphic mechanism in many cases. Here's my code take on this, as a little "exercise". This is pretty "linear" so it should be fairly easy to follow. The actual demo "test" code lines are in the "class program". You can paste this into a VS.NET 2005 Console app if you want to play around with it by uncommenting some lines: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace GenericVsInterface { public abstract class Developer { public string FirstName; public st...

They've been making improvements over at gotdotnet.com, not the least of which is their new SCC plugin to use the GotDotNet Workspaces source control arrangement. Not only does it work very nicely in VS.NET 2005, it also works with VS.NET 2003! It's just like working in VSS; the only difference is that since you are working via WebServices, it's a bit slower. But everything works! Really a boon to developers who like the Gotdotnet Workspaces concept and have small groups of developers who work together on a project. The only downside is that when you want to get a project out of your regular VSS provider, IIT BREAKS and doesn't work! But there are several fixes, the best one I've found is Soenke Schau's Sourcecode Control Switcher . This little tray app tells you your current provider and let's you switch at will by changing the Registry entries for you. And, you don't need to leave it running. Just put a shortcut to the desktop and bring it up when you ...

As an aside to my recent link about how to fold a T-Shirt, I present for your viewing pleasure the official tutorial on how to Serialize a Dictionary: BTW, I don't usually do the "Me Too!" mentality thing of linking to other people's blogs since it tends to just muck-up the blogosphere. In this case Brian Johnston has a very funny and revealing poke at the JAVA vs. .NET space here . If you work with Microsoft technology for a living, maybe its time to just count your blessings... (Sorry like so many good things, apparently this went bye-bye. Thanks to Mr. Anonymous Coward commenter who brought it to my attention.).

Recently we got a frustrated post from somebody on our eggheadcafe.com forums to the effect that "VS2005 is a Piece of Garbage and is bug Ridden" -- rant, rant.. After I got over the initial amusement, I went back to the MS C# newsgroup and noticed the same guy was stirring it up over there too. In fact, a few people did chime in about their own problems. And, to be fair, at least a couple more chimed in with their happiness and warm fuzzy success stories. I mean, look. Everybody agrees this was an extremely ambitious release. And lots of people accused Microsoft of pushing it out the door too soon; these complaints started way before RTM. This particular developer was attempting to preserve work he had done in 2003 with SqlDataAdapter by bringing it onto the Component Designer from the Toolbox (its not even in the default list, they want you to use the new SqlDataSource - which is actually quite cool). So he had a legitimate beef, although I think it's really kind o...