Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Peter Bromberg's UnBlog is my personal journal. It is not sponsored by, hosted by or related to Microsoft, my employer, or anybody else but me. I alone am responsible for the content on this journal. Most of my posts here revolve around my profession, which is that of being a professional sofware developer. I post technical and other helpful information,sometimes including my opinions, and other comments about unrelated topics such as politics or world affairs whenever I deem it appropriate to the times. I encourage responsible comments here, regardless of whether they agree with my opinions or not. I do not censor comments, even though a few could be considered by any respectful human being to be particularly insensitive and vulgar. Some of my recent posts, for some reason, seem to have been attracting Comment Spam. This is typically promulgated by people who make UnBlog comments here that really have very little to do with the subject of my post. Sometimes, they are comments ...

In my short happy life as a programmer I've noticed that most code seems to fall into the above three buckets. The biggest offenders in the Sloppy Code camp usually come from the VB.NET camp, simply because the language has become so distorted from efforts by Microsoft at giving it new life instead of a decent burial that they've perpetuated gobs of crutch and helper methods, most of which live in the non-CLS-Compliant Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace. (I see where in VS.NET 2005, this is actually marked as CLS-Compliant for the first time, but I'll need to see proof before I believe it). In order to do the things that .NET needed, Microsoft decided that they had to "break compatibility" with previous VB versions. VB programs had been mostly "upward compatible" from VB1 right up to VB6. A program written in the first version of VB would still compile and run in the next version. But with VB.NET, they found they just couldn't make the language complete...

I have a new article on eggheadcafe.com which details some of the basics of how to successfully uninstall older CTP's and BETA versions of Visual Studio.NET 2005, and to install the newest version which has the final .NET Framework version build number (the same as will be in RTM) . The only issue I still have, which has been submitted to the LadyBug Product Feedback Center site is that the Microsoft .NET Framework Configuration Control Panel applet for .NET Framework 2.0 fails with a "Snapin failed to initialize" error dialog. This is on Window Server 2003 64-bit x64 platform only. I have some ideas why this is happening, but I want to nail it down fast since I need to play around with gotdotnet workspaces configurations for their Windows Forms User Control for source control. Otherwise, I'm stuck with that crappy HTML interface (not to mention the frequent gotdotnet.com "outages", but that's another story). So, if you are familiar with this, have a...

Rescue worker: "One of the teams came in today after having been out for hours at a time. One particular rescuer went straight to a corner and collapsed into tears. I went directly to him and just held his hand. What else could I do? I said nothing. He said it all. They lowered him 26 times and he pulled 26 people to safety. He wants to be back out there but there are mandatory rest periods. His tears are tears of frustration." There are two disasters going on here, a natural disaster with what appears to be an almost incomprehensible lack of planning on the part of the localities, compounded by an equally incomprehensible lack of response by the Federal Government. And the second disaster is the National Disaster, and it's an equally big problem for us all: We're the richest country in the world, we have some of the smartest, best-educated people in the world. And we knew, and our government knew that New Orleans was essentially a huge bathtub just waiting for the ...

Taking all my TFTP Provisioning Service stuff at my day job today and providing an HTTPS alternative. Seems that some VOIP devices want to make an HTTPS call for their configuration files. They expect what the manufacturer programmed them to expect, which in this particular case is what one dood referred to jokingly as "Korean XML" - it has no root element! That's no big deal, I'll do my stuff and send the device whatever it wants, well-formed or not. The big problem is the device is only smart enough to ask for: https://myserver/myfolder/DEVICEKEYWITHLONGMACADDRESS.XML Ok, now how the hell am I gonna map that to my: https://myserver/myfolder/default.aspx?id=DEVICEKEYWITHLONGMACADDRESS The answer? ISAPI_Rewrite from Helicon . They have a freeware version, and it handles very nice REGEX URL Rewrites at the IIS level (e.g., way before you ever get to ASP.NET) - which was exactly what I needed. The Rules file for this particular one is elegantly simple: [ISAPI_Rewrit...

Guess what: Google is talking. And, they are saying Client Choice , Service Choice , Platform Choice . Any client that supports Jabber/XMPP can connect to the Google Talk service. There's service interoperability, and there's platform interoperability. This is about real standards - (not like "Ajax" which is about marketing hype). You can read up on Google's "Talk Posture " here. Now the Talk service may not make Google any real money. It's really hard to measure. But, you know what? Google has clout, and I bet it certainly just woke up the worldwide developer community. Microsoft, are you "listening"? Allow me to explain: The lines are drawn between two protocols working their way through the IETF standards body: the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)-based SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) and the open-source, XML-based protocol XMPP ( eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). Vendors are hopi...

Don't you just love the funny graphics software companies use to promote their releases? Here's one with a custom caption I've added that seems to better describe what's really happening!

One of my recent articles on eggheadcafe.com got some comments. Some were interesting, some were your typical "comment spam", and a couple, while seemingly authoritative, (including one from an author who has a new book on the subject), were actually erroneous. Adaptive Path's guru Garrett's canonical example of his "AJAX" acronym is Google Suggest: "Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web." Immediately thereafter Garrett decrees the "rules" of his premise with these bullet points: "Ajax isn't a technology. Its really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates: standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS; dynamic display and interacti...

Blogger has a free downloadable Word plug-in that allows you to make blog posts from within MS Word. It doesn't support images though, so if you want to upload a picture of your newest product (as seen at left) you'll need to do that separately. Oh, well... We had an interesting post on our Eggheadcafe.com forums today: Question: "What is the best way to establish an http protocol communication link to POST data using a persistent connection ? How can i verify that a connection is made ? what classes will i be using in .NET, what is the easiest way to go about it ? the protocol will be http1.1 Thanks" Answer: HTTP is not like TCP Sockets so when you make an HTTP Request Whether the request method is either GET or POST, the only way you can be sure that you have made a connection is to look at the RESPONSE. The term "Persistent Connection" when referring to the HTTP Protocol is somewhat misleading because it can lead folks to believe they have the equivalent...

Cindy Sheehan isn't responsible for her son's death, nor is the President or anyone who supports the war. Some terrorist in Iraq is responsible. Had her son not gone to Iraq he would probably be with us today, but it was his decision to go there. He re-enlisted after the war had begun knowing full well that he'd likely be headed to Iraq. He was an adult and made a decision. His decision was to continue his service in the military. He clearly believed in the mission, even though his mother does not. When President Bush returns to the White House after his working vacation at his Crawford ranch, Cindy Sheehan will most likely go home and shut up. I'm really sorry she has lost a son. War is not fun. People die. But -- here, the left wing anti-war establishment, desperately looking for poster children, has made a bad pick for a poster Mom. Harry Belafonte probably would be better. At the least, he can sing pretty well, and his face is more familiar. This is what the Sh...