C’mon, you wanted sooo badly that I post another free book: http://www.charlespetzold.com/dotnet/
Enjoy! :)
Category Archives: .NET
Intelligent Software Agents – A .NET Example
Software Example
In the February 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/), Matt Neely describes a .NET implementation of mobile agents:
“The term agent originates in artificial intelligence and describes a logical entity that has some level of autonomy within its environment or host. A mobile agent has the added capability to move between hosts. In a computing context, a mobile agent is a combined unit of data and code that can move between different execution environments.”
(Neely, 2006)
The idea described in the article is that of a small family of .NET classes that literally “jump” from a computer to another, performing tasks in the host computer, through a mechanism called Remoting:
“An example of a traveling agent app could perform operations control. An agent is sent out with a list of machines on the local network it should traverse to inventory hardware and software (…) built-in services that facilitate the componentization and mobility of code, namely object remoting and serialization.(…) Mobile agents have their uses and their pros and cons. The autonomous and mobile nature of mobile agents can lead to reduced network traffic, decentralization, increased robustness and fault-tolerance, and easy deployment.”
(Neely, 2006)
(Source: Neely, 2006) Continue reading
Quick Comparison of C# and Ruby
Introduction
I have been working as a software developer since 1996, and as such I’ve used a variety of different languages, both compiled and interpreted. But the who languages that I know and use most today, are two somewhat different ones, C# and Ruby. I will begin my presentation with a short explanation of both, providing their major similarities and differences, and then providing some code samples of both.
Both languages are ranked #7 and #21 respectively in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, as of February 2006 (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm).
A new programming language every year…
Somewhere I read that it was a good thing to learn at least one new programming language every year; I think I have kept up that trend since 1992:
- 1992: QBasic
- 1993: Turbo Pascal
- 1994: C
- 1995: Delphi
- 1996: Java
- 1997: JavaScript
- 1998: VBScript
- 1999: Transact-SQL
- 2000: C# and Prolog
- 2001: C++
- 2002: PHP
- 2003: Objective-C
- 2004: Visual Basic.NET
- 2005: Ruby
And this year’s winner is: LINQ. The main purpose of learning it is to prepare the LINQ conference in the TechDays next week… and this is huge indeed!
Tip for ASP.NET developers out there
Again from Redmond… A quick tip for all of you, ASP.NET developers in the field: stop everything you are doing, and learn all what you can about these two technologies:
- Windows Workflow Foundation
- Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Services (not the same thing…)
This applies particularly to those developers working in “pure” business environments with Microsoft technologies; do not reinvent the wheel; if your application involves any of the following:
- Tracking and reporting scenarios
- List or libraries with items or documents
- Forms or views of items of data (whatever the type)
- Applications with typical workflow logic
- Role-based security
Then stop looking and use SharePoint. There is not any other portal product in the market that is so tightly integrated with Windows, SQL Server, Active Directory or Office; I must say that what I’ve seen so far in the MOSDC 2006 is really impressive. The SharePoint platform provides a complete design, development, deployment, execution and management scenario for building business applications, and really, you should not reinvent the wheel.
Microsoft Office System Developers Conference
Tomorrow is a great day; I will be attending the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006!. This will be happening in Redmond, WA, near Seattle, and I will be travelling tomorrow morning to the USA.
The last time I’ve been to the USA was in 2001, and lots of things have happened since. It will be a great opportunity to see what will be included in Office “12″, Sharepoint “V3″ and Windows Workflow Foundation.
More on the conference in this very blog during the week!
Get the facts – I mean, get them
If you enjoy Microsoft PR material, you may find this “Get the facts” page somewhat interesting. For those of us who really deal with MS and Open Source stuff day by day, please just don’t laugh too loud.
My CV says I’m a “.NET blah blah blah”, and I’ve spent most of my professional life using and deploying MS technology. But you know what? I’ve had too many headaches with it. There’s always a gotcha; you cannot rely in their technology to do things more complicated that what the “getting started” demos say at first glance. Their APIs are often not completely implemented, and you cannot modify them if needed. You have to find workarounds to do things that you need, because their support website says that they won’t fix that problem until the next service pack, or worse, until the next version. And so on.
For example, in .NET 2.0 you can serialize DataTable instances into XML natively; nice. You can then use them (even if it’s not the best practice) as the result of a web service call. Cool. But did you know that the WSDL.EXE utility included in .NET 2.0 does not handle DataTable as return type for a web service? This is not documented either (at least I haven’t found it), so that the proxy generated by WSDL.EXE is completely flawed and you don’t know why your application does not work… until you Google on it. And since you cannot change it nor fix it, you are stuck to find another alternative.
They have a great contradiction between their approach to first-time users and hardcore development. There’s a mismatch; it just does not work the way they say it should. Continue reading
Starting a new adventure
So here we go again.
Last week I started my new job, as Software Solutions Consultant for Getronics, in Lonay, near Lausanne (where I live), Switzerland. Yeah, the commune of Lonay has an awful website. Anyway. The good news is Getronics, actually.
My job, as usual, will be one with multiple faces. I will be in charge of technical consulting for the pre-sales and development teams, and also architecture and training. As you can see, nothing to make you feel bored. But in any case, a big improvement over my previous employer, mostly in terms of growing possibilities, infrastructure, diversity of clients, and learning opportunities. Continue reading
Interoperability (ahem!), the Microsoft way
I’ve just re-discovered that web services interoperability is not that easy. Right after creating some SOAP web services with Ruby on Rails, I’ve opened Visual Studio .NET 2005 and tried to create an application that consumes those web services… and this is all I got:
No comments.
Inversion of Control, Ruby & Rails
Next week I will be in Belgium working with the Thales team in Brussels, building a new software solution (for a customer of the public sector that I cannot disclose here) using the following technologies:
Personally, this seems like a rather new (Microsoft-less) way of doing a .NET application, and I like this! To understand what Spring is, I dived into Martin Fowler’s Inversion of Control (IoC) / Dependency Injection paper… not an easy trip, believe me; but a rewarding one. Continue reading