chullybun : the mtb coder

PDC2008 - Day 2...

2008-10-29T11:03:00.001+10:00

An improvement over Day 1. The Keynote was much more about the UX today. It kicked off with Windows 7 which was much more incremental versus radical in terms of change - possibly a good thing. The main UI change demonstrated was around the Start/Task bar and how that operates - looks good. Will it be the compelling reason for everyone to upgrade, probably not. They demonstrated the touch capability, first showing how non-touch aware application were able to function and secondly an application designed to take advantage of the platform. Will it be enough to warrant an upgrade, maybe, I think I want it!

The development platform changes look interesting; Visual Studio 2010 is being rewritten in WPF and looks to offer some really cool extensibility. (As an aside the C# compiler is also being rewritten in .NET so that it can be more extensible). Further enhancements to WPF include the Ribbon, DataGrid, Calendar and DateTimePicker (about time). So really impressive WPF applications were demonstrated.

Live Services (which builds on Azure) includes stuff like the Mesh, Contacts, etc. will have an API exposed which looks to offer some interesting possibilities. Some of the Office 14 applications were demonstrated which leverage these services; interesting to note that their also appears to be Web Versions of the Office applications.

The sessions I attended today were:

PC24 - Windows 7 Desktop: not too bad, a bit more detail than the keynote.
PC46 - WPF roadmap: absolutely terrible session - the presenters sucked. The content was more looking at the past and current versus future roadmap.
ES02 - Oslo the language: good presentation skills from Don Box; although I am not sure I fully get Oslo yet?!?

PDC2008 - Day 1...

2008-10-28T13:06:00.001+10:00

I went to an Expression session where the presenter said "first impressions count". If I were to apply that to Day 1 I would say Microsoft missed the mark.

The Keynote this morning by Ray Ozzie just missed the mark completely - it was the opportunity to wow the crowd and set the tone for the week. He was a pretty good presenter but seemed to lack emotion and enthusiasm which was needed to help sell the vision for Microsoft Azure - the OS for the cloud. I think the platform/OS sounds promising; however, a services based OS with no UI is difficult to wow and that is what today needed to set the tone for the week. The demos were weak and the additional presentations added little.

Tomorrow they are set to announce Windows 7 and UX - that had better be something else to make up for today.

Also, I do hope they have something for Windows Mobile 7 as there were iPhones galore amongst the attendees. Microsoft are going to get smashed in the mobile space if they don't do something quick smart - Windows Mobile is old, stale and boring. I asked the Windows Mobile team why I should not buy an iPhone and the response was pretty weak. Something along the lines of Windows Mobile has a more open development platform and there are more devices. When quizzed about Mobile 7 it was a big no comment. Zzzzz.

The sessions I attended today were (not going to cover in any detail as I am sure there a heaps of other blogs that will, and most sessions have been recorded anyway):

ES16 - A lap around cloud services part 1: not good; less information than the keynote.
PC47 - Microsoft Expression Blend tips and tricks: ok, nothing startling.
TL16 - The future of c#: awesome, Anders is a great speaker. The theme for C# 4.0 is the melding of Dynamic Programming - new keyword "dynamic".
PC21 - ASP.NET MVC: not bad content, a good presenter.
BB15 - SQL Server Database to data platform: awesome content and speaker - very interesting stuff.

The $10 fridge...

2008-10-27T03:55:00.001+10:00

This is not the worst hotel I have stayed in by any stretch – but it is still a pretty crappy rundown hotel. Anyway, when I stay at a hotel I like to have my own cereal so I keep the milk and other drinks in the fridge ensuring they remain nice and cold. So when I arrive I open the fridge cavity door and am greeted with:

Thank you for choosing to stay at the Marriott. The in-room cooler is currently out of service. We would be pleased to offer a refrigerator for your convenience. Simply touch "0" and our At Your Service team will have one delivered to your room. Based on availability. A $10.00 charge applies for the length of your stay.

So I am clearly delusional as I had always thought that a hotel room had a standard set of amenities, such as a bed, television, shower, toilet and fridge. Clearly I am mistaken; thankfully the remainder of the items in my list have remained.

I just love how they apologise and admit the fridge is out of service. So instead of fixing and returning to the room they rip it out and offer a new fridge only if you are willing to pay a further $10. Should they not have offered my room rate at $10 less to start with given the lack of fridge?

Anyway, I got the stupid $10 fridge – some dude just wheels it in and dumps it on the floor - classy :-)

American taxi-head...

2008-10-27T03:28:00.002+10:00

What is up with taxis in the US. We jump in a cab at the airport, travel to the hotel and hand over a credit card to pay – I would consider this standard practice. We are then informed that because we had not indicated we would pay using a CC when we got in that he could not accept it; so we were then forced to pay cash?!? There was no reason given and certainly no flexibility shown by the driver in helping tourists – what a w*****! So next time you are in the US and want a cab remember to declare your payment method before getting in – dumb!

Stock Icons for WPF...

2007-10-12T14:13:00.000+10:00

A link to code that allows access to the stock icons from WPF.

WPF vs Windows Forms...

2007-09-06T13:09:00.000+10:00

I saw this post where some dude postulated on WPF vs. Windows Forms, which almost coincided directly with a conversation I had yesterday with an esteemed colleague pretty much discussing this very topic.

My take on this is as follows:

Make Obsolete - Windows Forms has reached the end of its useful life from a Microsoft investment perspective, they should continue to support through the next .NET release, then deprecate (decorate with the ObsoleteAttribute), and finally remove altogether. Support should continue for some time on those versions for those who continue to have applications which need this functionality – they can exist side-by-side with latter versions of the .NET runtime. Reason to remove is two-fold: shows intent and reduces bloat.

Provide Tools – The tools story around WPF needs to improve, a lot, and fast. These tools, Cider and Expression, need to be out there yesterday, and totally free. Microsoft should look to encourage adoption of the platform and stop looking to try and make money off these tools. There more people who use the tools, the more applications that are created, the greater the demand for the platform – ergo more sales of the OS. Whilst on the subject of the tools, why don’t Microsoft just have a single version of Visual Studio that is free to everyone – it is the hobbyist developers that often create the most ??? applications.

Dog Food It – Microsoft need to demonstrate that they are serious about WPF and the .NET platform and start to deliver their own applications on the platform (other than Expression). By not doing this they are sending a confusing message in which they see the platform as not being good enough for their own use, and if they don’t fully trust should I? All these Live applications, such as Messenger, Writer, Photos; what about NotePad and Calculator, etc – these should all be WPF apps demonstrating the awesome power of the platform.

Partial Methods

2007-07-16T12:59:00.000+10:00

Finally Partial Methods have been added that complement Partial Classes; which in turn makes Partial Classes much more interesting and a hell of a lot more flexible.

A major challenge with Partial Classes previously as I saw it was where code was generated there was then no flexible opt-in means to hook in additional user code that the generated code would initiate, other than providing virtual or protected methods and subclassing which all just adds another layer of redundancy (and comes with a performance hit).

A Partial Method provides similar functionality in that a method interface/template is created and optionally the corresponding implementation can be added within the same class. Where it is not added the compiler is smart enough to ignore – zero performance overhead – nice!

There are some limitations and rules - see the first link for a decent run through.

Merida 24hr Race

2007-05-02T20:35:00.000+10:00

On the weekend of April 21/22 Fabian and I once again did the Merida 24hr Race at the Kooralbyn Resort; again it was a well run event that was largely a lot of fun.

We (Ange, boys and me) arrived on Friday just after lunch to give us the opportunity to set up camp the night before to make the morning before race start a bit easy than last year. We checked into our room at the resort, it was ok although the place is starting to look and feel really tired. We then went down to the track and set up our tent, keeping all our gear in the car as you are not allowed to camp overnight except on the night of the race proper. At around 4pm-ish we went over to the resort facilities near race start/finish just before one of the worst storms I have ever seen hit. Over the next 30 odd minutes we had some brutal winds, thunder and lightning, torrential rain, and hail stones about half the size of golf balls. The amount of water that fell in such a short period of time was unbelievable. Once it stopped I went over to check out the tent to make sure it was alright, only to discover that a new river had been created and was flowing quite happily past and through the back end of the tent. It ended up collapsing the back end, breaking one of the poles and leaving us with a couple of inches of water down one end. The next hour of so was then spent cleaning out, fixing and re-setting the tent before we headed off to dinner and sleep.

The next morning was magnificent sunshine but brutally humid because of the previous days storm. We finished unpacking the car and setting up camp before race start. Even though I had kept my fluids up I ended up being pretty dehydrated with a head ache that lasted the remainder of the day regardless of the number of drinks and Panadol I consumed. We started off doing two laps a piece, and after 3 sets I needed to rest as I was exhausted and the head ache would not stop – needed to have a sleep to try and recover. So at 12:30am I went to sleep whilst Fabian went out and did his next two. When he got back he tried to wake me for my turn but I was out to it and not ready to go again, so he choose to sleep as well. He got up at 5:00am to do another couple, at which point I was up minus the headache to start circulating again. After my next two laps I was feeling better but with the heat coming and still feeling pretty exhausted we switched to single laps. This was a good move as I found my next two single laps the most enjoyable as the timing was such I could go quite hard and it gave me enough time to recover before the next.

In the end we completed 24 laps, with twelve each, and came a respectable 8th in the 2 Person Open category – we were pretty happy with that result.

In summary, here are my thoughts of the race. The track was largely the same length as the previous year, although the changes resulted in more climbing and more challenging downhill section towards the end which resulted in lap times around ten minutes longer than last year. The extra climbing was ok, the downhill just after was not rewarding at all – it was very rocky with nasty off-camber switchbacks – it would have been much better if it was a much faster more flowing ride back into camp. There was also this silly little section added to the start across a grassy area that didn’t really fit into the feel of the rest of the track that they should look to get rid off for next time.

The race for me was reasonably uneventful, in that I had a couple of minor tumbles resulting in a few little bruises and scrapes. In fact it was Caleb who had the worst injury of the family after running into a pole playing tag. Apparently, he hit it and flew backwards onto the ground and amazingly did not cry – he is one tough little bugger. Rumours are circulating it was because I hit him – it’s not true :-)

Finally, thanks again for Ange and the boys for being there and supporting me through the highs and lows - cheers guys!

The unknown World Champions...

2006-08-28T13:17:00.000+10:00

Question: In what recent World Championship did Australia men finish 1st, 3rd, 5th and 6th – that is four in the top 6.

Answer: The 2006 UCI World Mountain Bike Championships – Elite Downhill

So how come we read so little of this in the mainstream press; how many other sports does Australia compete in which they dominate to such a level? So why is there no coverage in the papers or on television, why is not more money being invested in a sport where there is obvious success? For goodness sake Australia invested in and sent a competitor to the winter Olympic to do luge – what the – this is not even a sport that anyone can participate in locally – so why?

Sam Hill and Nathan Rennie should be household names for their achievements!

Let’s also see how Australia/NZ went in other categories from a top 10 perspective at the event:

Junior Women Downhill – Tracey Hannah (Aus) 1st.
Junior Men Downhill – NZ 1st and 2nd, Aus 5th, 7th and 9th.
Elite Women Downhill – NZ 7th and 9th.

Update: SBS will show highlights on Sunday, September 10 at 11am.

12hr MTB race...

2006-08-03T11:29:00.000+10:00

Well, this past weekend was the “RACE FACE 12 HOUR MOUNTAIN BIKE TEAM CHALLENGE” – that is quite the mouthful! Anyway, it was a 12hr MTB endurance race ran out at Kooralbyn Resort, the same venue as the recently completed 24hr race. Again, Fabian and I teamed up and entered as a pair.

The previous day’s rain had dampened the track, but we arrived to a perfect morning of sunshine which is what we had all day, could not have asked for more. The track was a bit tacky for the first few laps but dried up pretty quickly apart from one large muddy bog in a darkened corner. The track was fairly similar to last time except some additional climbing was added to the end after the switchbacks section so the final stage of the lap got a bit harder before the fun downhill run into the bridge setting up the start/finish straight.

We hooked up with the boys from Ashgrove Cycles again, this time it was Hayden and Andy in the two man category as well. They were going for the win, and were leading the category until about the 9th hour when they both pretty much ran out of gas. They ended up finishing 3rd, which I guess is still a pretty good effort, although they were a little disappointed.

The race got away right on time at 8am with a ride start versus the standard run to your bike affair. This caused some confusion as a number of us had expected the run and had left our bikes along the start/finish straight and had to go back and collect them. The start was fairly uneventful and we all got away ok. Although, I did hear some dude broke his chain within the first few hundred metres – bummer.

I did the first two laps this time round, a 39:10 and 40.08, reasonable time and was feeling pretty good when I came in. Then I chilled out and ate some food whilst Fabian did his set, 40:17 and 41:21.

Next up, I did another two laps, a 40:29 and 42:08; started feeling it on the last lap from probably going out a little hard on the first. Fabian machined out his next two laps, a 41:14 and 42:58.

Up again. I was feeling really good and set off with the intentions of doing a really good lap, it felt fast and was expecting to be rewarded with a good time, it was a 42:37 – I was really gutted – it really messed with my head and the next lap just sucked, a 47:16. Fabian went out and did his next two, 43:37 and 44:36 – and had some brake problems that he had to fix before his final set in the dark.

The next two were going to be the final two laps, with the last in the dark as the sun was starting to go down. Started out really well and was going along comfortably until I got to that large muddy bog, and I thought I would try the outside line, versus the inside I had done successfully every other time. Well, as luck would have it, the bike slipped out from under me and I went down right into the muddy mess. The only bonus was no one was there to see it and laugh at me – phew! I was now covered in thick mud all down the left hand side, and my glove and grip were super slippery and holding on with that hand became a challenge for the remainder of the lap. I completed the lap a respectable 47:02 considering the unexpected stop. I then stopped on the way back out down the start straight to change gloves and clean the grip to regain some control. It was now dark and it was lights on, I was now starting to feel it in the legs and I slowly crawled around the lap, an almost laughable 55:15. Fabian completed his last two in the dark, with a solid 45:45 and 49:03.

So we completed a respectable 16 laps in total which was exactly what we had planned prior to the race so that was pleasing, and we can 11th in the two person category out of 19 which we thought was pretty good. So overall we came 55th out of 104 starters/teams – which again we were happy with as that meant we beat a bunch of 3 and 4 person teams. Yeah us!

Finally, I would like to thank Two Wheel Promotions for organising another fantastic event, and Ange for being my support crew again; making up my drinks, getting my food, organising my changes of clothes, putting up with my grumpiness after a bad lap, and looking after the kids.

Go away rain...

2006-07-28T08:55:00.000+10:00

So it doesn't rain here in Brisbane for months, then the day before the 12hr MTB race it rains - rain, rain, go away, come back another day!

Windows Workflow (WF) Hosting…

2006-06-26T16:32:00.000+10:00

My current engagement has me writing a paper (Microsoft Word is my new IDE) on a Lotus Notes to Microsoft application migration. Specifically, targeting SharePoint, InfoPath and custom – from the analysis to date it seems that the new versions of these products (SharePoint 2007 and InfoPath 2007) offer the best fit. Primarily due to the Workflow capability within SharePoint and the forms services within InfoPath (i.e. you no longer need the InfoPath client to run forms; they will run in a browser).

To me the most exciting aspect of all of this is the workflow hosting by Windows SharePoint Services V3 (a freely downloadable component for Windows). A developer introduction article has been published the highlights the capability; the following extract provides a pretty good summary of the capability.

The WF run-time engine provides the services that every workflow application needs, such as sequencing, state management, tracking capabilities, and transaction support. The WF run-time engine serves as a state machine responsible for loading and unloading workflows, as well as managing the current state of any workflows that are running. WF allows any application process or service container to run workflows by hosting WF—that is, loading WF within its process.

So does that mean we can use SharePoint Services for hosting all of our workflow where we require the likes of state management, etc.? I am not so sure; maybe someone else can add some more light on the subject – it would be fantastic if you could.

ADO.NET Entity Framework…

2006-06-26T14:33:00.000+10:00

Following are some links to some excellent reading on where Microsoft is going with entities with respect to the RDBMS; as stated previously entities are more often than not the best way to represent data within an application - an entity utilising object-oriented semantics and constructs:

It is great to see Microsoft are looking to make Entities foundational to the next version of ADO.NET, and having them fully integrated with the likes of LINQ. Hopefully, this will encourage developers to largely ditch those nasty DataSets as the default mechanism for working with data within a C#/VB.NET application.

Some snippets that resonated or sounded interesting:

An ideal environment for creation of business applications should allow developers to describe the business logic and state of the problem domain which they are modeling with minimum or no "noise" coming from the underlying representation and the infrastructure that supports it.

Often, proponents of a particular presentation or programming model will argue that their particular "presentation" view is the one truth. We believe there is no "one proper presentation model"; and that the real value is in making the conceptual level real and then being able to use that model as the basis for mapping to and from various presentation models and other higher level services.

The Data Platform will include the capabilities of a low-memory footprint, embeddable database engine to enrich the services for applications that need rich middle-tier caching and disconnected programming experiences. The embedded database will include a simple query processor and non-authoritative persistence capabilities to enable large middle-tier data caches.

It will be interesting to see how some of the other Object-Relational
Mapping (ORM) solutions, such as NHibernate, perceive this
threat?

Enjoy the reading; and the obligatory wait (months/years) for the goods ;-)

VSTS / TFS...

2006-05-31T14:46:00.000+10:00

I have spent the last few weeks on a customer site installing Visual Studio Team System / Team Foundation Server and proving to them that the capability within will meet their requirements. Right of the bat, I think these together are a pretty darn good set of tools, that really do meet the needs of improving the toolset and adding rigour to the methodology – they just need some extra spit and polish.

My initial thoughts are as follows:

Work Item tracking and integration is awesome; but it totally sucks that there is no web based front end, unless you look at something like TeamPlain. This looks like a pretty good solution on the surface; Microsoft should just buy them and integrate.
Team Build looks a little half baked, there is no built in scheduler or continuous build functionality – these should just be checkbox options. The build itself works and produces some reasonable reporting and automatic source control labelling.
The Source Control functionality looks great, it absolutely makes VSS look like the silly little product it is. I especially like the check-in policies in that it enforces developers to perform Work Item assignment and other activities such as unit testing prior. It would be nice to see some additional granularity added here, so certain actions happen where certain file types are checked-in, or from specific projects, etc.
The Check-in Notes functionality is weak; it should be set up so that the reviewer is a role or user. Then the reviewer can either confirm on the check-in persons session by providing user/password authentication versus just free-form text. Where the reviewer is not available it should then send a workflow for them to review prior to allowing check-in.
The Unit testing provides pretty much the same functionality as with NUnit and is well integrated into the product. I would happily give up NUnit.
The Coverage testing looks to perform the desired job and provides the appropriate information.
The Code analysis, FxCop also does it thing – all good.
The Performance testing looks ok, although the reporting UI could be improved.
The Web testing and Load testing look good also. The recorded Web tests work well and the automated code generation produces reasonable code – good stuff. What I like most about the Load testing is that you can include Unit tests as well as the Web tests, so functions can be tested under load without UI – very nice!
Where is the NDoc equivalent? We all need to create good quality documentation and the code comments functionality is awesome – we just need a great tool to help pull it all together nicely.

So in summary, Microsoft has done a pretty good job first up – it exceeded my expectations :-)

A nothing post...

2006-05-31T13:26:00.000+10:00

This is really a nothing post, a link to an amusing article about google, sheep and kiwis - I thought others might appreciate it!

Weekend Warrior 24hr Challenge...

2006-04-25T11:24:00.000+10:00

This weekend, a mate (Fabian) and I teamed up for the Weekend Warrior 24hr Challenge at Kooralbyn Resort, Queensland. It was a very well run event, at a fantastic location - as it was at the resort - this meant that the resort facilities were available to the riders also. Although most chose to sleep in tents, some went for the soft option of a room (with a warm bed and shower – hmm, maybe they are the smart ones). There was a playground for the kids, proper toilet block, foods and drinks from the bar, all separated from the main complex bordering the golf course.

The course itself was, in a word, awesome! It was just under 10kms in length and had a good mix of trail type - some interesting single track, some sweet fast and rolling trails, some tough climbs, some technical switchbacks, and plenty of variety of terrain to keep it interesting. It was almost the perfect length, as it meant that you were out there anywhere from around 30-50 minutes depending on your ability; unlike the Mont which is now out to around 17km which results in some ridiculous lap times, especially where batteries for lights barely last that long.

We (Fabian, Angela and our two boys) hooked up with Hayden and Mike from Ashgrove Cycles who were riding solo. They had scored a top piece of real estate at one end of the start/finish straight, so that the riders would pass by before going into transition and would ride out again a minute or two later. They had erected a couple of sun shelters and there was an area behind for all our tents; so we shared all our kit and helped each other over the next 24+ hours.

The race ended up starting a bit late, so instead of setting off at 12 noon, it ended up being just before 12:30pm. It was the typical le-mans (run to bike) start. Fabian took a leisurely stroll to his bike (no point in injuring yourself before the race has even begun!), then set off on and completed our first lap. Then it was my turn – the main challenge was to not go out too hard and kill myself for later, so I paid very close attention to my heart rate to ensure I kept the max under 95%, and ignored the girls passing me (just let them go!), so when I finished up after 37 minutes I was felling pretty good. The only scare I had was at one of the tricky switchback climbs where I spun out and I almost ending up cramping my left calf.

It was time for Fabian to go again, but this time we decided that we would now complete two laps each before changing. He machined out another two laps and I was up again. The first of my two went well, and I completed it again in 37 minutes, so for the second I decided to step it up to see whether I could better the time. All was going well until about 3/4 through the lap when I washed out on one of the straights and crashed out on to the track stopping traffic for a little bit. In crashing, I ended up cramping the left calf and I was in excruciating pain until I could stretch it out, and I also had sprained my right thumb quite badly. The bike, however, was all good once I had re-straightened the handle bars and I limped it back home. My once great lap turned out to be a disappointing 40 minutes.

Once I got back, the calf was really sore and I had to get Ange to give me a massage to see if we make it a bit more comfortable. There was some improvement, but there was still some pain – the thumb, on the other hand (excuse the pun), hurt like hell especially given I would need to use it extensively to change gears. Once Fabian was done with his next two, it was pretty much dark so I had to set up the bike with lights for a couple of dark laps. When Fabian returned he mentioned he too had an off, something about running into a tree (turns out it must have smacked it pretty hard as he had some great grazing on his shoulder and thigh). [As an aside, the worst accident of the weekend went to some poor woman who apparently amputated her finger – how? I am not sure yet?]

The next two laps in the dark were hard work, the calf was sore and the thumb was damn sore – when I could I would use the other hand to change gears to give it a rest, and the constant jarring was also causing me some grief. I gritted it out and completed the two laps, the second with a small stop to change one of the batteries. They were around 46 and 47 minutes respectively.

Fabian then went out and completed another 2 laps, so at around 9pm we had completed 12 laps (Fabian 7 and me 5). It was time to call it a night; and we needed to recharge our batteries for the lights. I had a huge plate of pasta and hit the tent. Fabian did some bike repairs and went to bed later on. I woke up just before 4am and was back on the trail at around 4:15am. They were slow laps out in the cold, but also some of the most enjoyable. There is something special about riding at this time, and with the sun coming up as well, it was just the boost I needed to start the day. The calf was getting better; the thumb was still giving me grief. The lap times were 50 and 48 minutes respectively.

Fabian was off again just in time to not need any lights. As I ate breakfast, Ange found some pain killers which I quickly consumed, along with some V for that special pick me up, and a whole bunch of Herbalife supplements that Ange had been plugging all day. I was ready to go! The first of the two was great, my thumb pain was bearable and I could now use it at will. So, as the lap went on, the better I felt and the quicker I decided to go, and I finished at just over 38 minutes feeling on top of the world. All was going pretty well on the second until I chased one of those damn women who had been passing me the whole time (bloody six woman teams!), and then I basically bonked and felt like total crap - turning the legs over became a real chore. I came in at 42 minutes and pretty much collapsed. I think I had run out of energy, so it was a case of stockpiling all the high carb food I could muster before the next set with enough time to allow me to digest it.

Again, Fabian completed his two laps and I was up again. I was feeling a bit better, although still suffering the effects of the previous laps. The next two were largely uneventful and hurt more than the others, although I did manage to sprint out the last couple of minutes as I knew there was not enough time for me to complete another lap. The times were 45 and 42 minutes respectively. Fabian then completed one final lap and the 24 hours were up. Our team, “insert witty team name here” – yes, that is the team name - had completed 23 laps (Fabian 12 and me 11). We had finished a respectable 5th in our category (2 person: male).

To put our effort into perspective, the leading solo male, Andrew Bell, completed 40 laps (400 kms) by himself – unbelievable. He was so keen to do the 40 laps that he completed his 39th lap in 32 minutes so he would have enough time to go out and do one more – amazing. Also, in between circulating he entered the “track stand” competition – is this dude Superman?

In summary, I found the event exceedingly enjoyable, and overall more fun than the Mont 24 in Canberra (it has just gotten too big, and I certainly didn’t miss the -5 degrees Celsius overnight). Would I do it again, you bet ya. Time to step up the training – ah, I love this sport. As an aside, having a full suspension bike was the trick – the Yeti 575 was such a sweet ride. Finally, I think Two Wheel Promotions should be congratulated for their efforts in organizing the event and my wife did a wonderful job as support crew (thanks Ange).

Beware the rip…

2006-04-18T14:05:00.000+10:00

This Easter, the family went on a camping trip to the North Shore, which is just north of Noosa in Queensland. Some friends of ours own some land out there just on the beach. It was the hard-core style camping, no mod-cons, no showers or toilet blocks - grab a spade and dig a hole ;-) The beach was great apart from all the dickhead four wheel drivers who drive along the beach as if it is a motorway (some four year was hit by one further down the beach). We stayed in tents with about five other families, cooked on the camp fire, went surfing, rode bikes, played soccer – it was awesome.

The water was amazingly warm and we spent a lot of time swimming and playing around in the waves. At one point I was talking to some others in the surf and when I turned Caleb, our youngest who is six, had drifted down the beach and was caught in a rip and was slowly being dragged out to sea. His older brother who is eight was trying to swim after him to help but was also struggling. So I ended up having to swim over and pull Kyle back to make sure he was ok, then swim out to Caleb. It was just awful looking at Caleb’s face, as he had this look of total fear and helplessness as he was floating out – he did a remarkable job of keeping his head above the water (thank goodness for all those swimming lessons). I managed to swim out and grab hold of him and swim back to a point where I could stand and some others helped us in. In all, it was pretty darn scary and a reminder of how quickly things can go wrong.

Lesson learned: Make sure you keep an eye on the kids at all times, and make sure you check for rips ahead of times!

Custom Entity Classes...

2006-03-29T16:43:00.000+10:00

I have been a proponent of Custom Entity Classes over DataSets for some time; and fully acknowledge that the latter has value in certain situations, specifically prototyping or basic two tiered applications. Where as the former, offers greater flexibility for some extra effort that really pays dividends within an Enterprise solution.

The project that I am currently architecting/managing has implemented this style of Entity; this was a foundational decision and certainly a departure from the way the customer currently chooses DataSets. These have worked out extremely well within our solution and I hope they (Customer) will look at this as an alternative in the future for other future applications.

The real benefit I see is that by utilising OO concepts we can realise the benefits of encapsulation and inheritance with our Entities, and we have a clean decoupling from the database (there is in fact no reference to the DB within these whatsoever – data management classes were created for this that lived in an appropriate logical data layer tied directly to the DAL). For a number of our Entities, code generation was used which sped up the creation and also improved the consistency of the code. Typed collections were created that made the experience of using these Entities very natural. Then of course, other Entity specific methods can and were added to these Entities/Collections that offer there own value-add function.

So when I discovered this old article last night I was very pleased to see this very approach promoted. This is an excellent article that articulates the benefits in an easy to read manner, with clear examples, and is an added resource I can now use to help convince future Customers of the benefits of Entities.

My experiences with VB.NET...

2006-03-27T09:36:00.000+10:00

For the past four months I been involved in a project where we exclusively developed in VB.NET. This is the most time I have ever spent in this language, and in the end, I would have to say my overall experience was decidedly average.

To me C# just seems more natural, it is somewhat simpler and certainly a lot less verbose. There are some really annoying things with VB.NET, the following being my highlights (main peeves):

And vs AndAlso and Or vs OrElse – why would you ever want the former, apart from bitwise, yet that is not the default?
DirectCast(value, type) – versus just casting (type)value; simpler, more obvious.
Dim – how annoying; it is not even consistent as it is not required for class declarations.
Public readonly property Name as Type – that’s a mouthful, surely the compiler could determine by looking at whether both a get and set have been defined.
End – ending everything, bring on the {}.
Auto formatting – sometimes I want my code to look one way, but “no” the IDE comes along and makes it look another
Visual basic .NET compiler system error &hc0000005& after a VSS Get Latest - nearly every friggin day! Close VS.NET, cross your fingers, restart and hope for the best – works again first time about 50% of the time.
VB.NET 1.1 XML comments – why was this missing – hello? Thank you VBCommenter from GotDotNet.
Nothing vs Null – couldn’t we keep it the same between the languages; so if a parameter is nothing an ArgumentNullException is thrown – huh?

I am sure there are more, but that is all I could come up with for now.

New DbException in .NET 2.0...

2006-03-27T09:30:00.000+10:00

There was some talk at work the other day about using Enterprise Library, specifically the Data Access stuff that enabled database agnostic code. There is an issue with this in .NET 1.0 and 1.1 in that not all of the database .NET Types support this capability. Here is an excerpt of my response:

My point was more targeted at the SqlException versus the OracleException type, more specifically where you want to use the likes of the database error code to perform some sort of conditional business logic. The SqlCommand and SqlDataReader et al, implement the likes of IDbCommand and IDataReader so these can be cast back and generic database agnostic code created – great. The likes of SqlException and OracleException inherit from Exception so you are sort of stuffed from that perspective, there is no consistent means to access this database information other that sticking to the known type – not so great.

There is however a happy ending to this story, this has been cleaned up in .NET 2.0. The SqlException and OracleException now both inherit from DbException so this will be possible in the future.

User interface technology options...

2006-02-25T13:55:00.000+10:00

Following on from a previous post, Browser vs SmartClient, I thought I would also point to this post from Tim Sneath who does a good job of rounding up the various technologies. Partial extract included as follows:

Last question. Windows Forms, ASP.NET/Atlas, DirectX, WPF, Win32 - that's five UI technologies to choose between. How do I decide?
Really the variety of choice isn't such a bad thing - it enables you to pick the best technology for the job rather than having to pick a lowest common denominator that tries to serve all masters and ends up serving none.
Building a forms-based application and looking for a mature technology to use with good tools and component support? Check out Windows Forms - it's got everything you'll need to turn out a well-designed, service-orientated client application.
Is platform ubiquity or wireless mobile device support the high order bit? ASP.NET with or without the Atlas extensions is a good technology to choose. (Don't forget about the .NET Compact Framework for rich mobile devices, of course.)
Want to build a first-person shooter game, a CAD/CAM workstation application or something similar where polygon count is the major technical requirement? DirectX is a natural choice - don't forget that the .NET managed APIs for DirectX are maturing rapidly and starting to be worthy of serious consideration.
Looking for complex data visualization, superb text flow content rendering or dynamic interactive experiences? WPF should probably be your top choice. I'll be posting in future entries about a few sweet spots that early adopter customers have been exploiting to great business gain.
Lastly, don't let all this talk of managed code convince you that Win32 is anything other than a vibrant general-purpose way to build applications. There are thousands of new API functions in Windows Vista for Win32 developers to do everything from integrating with the Aero Glass theme to implementing live preview icons and ink-enabled applications. Don't write off Win32, or let others convince you that it's no longer core to Microsoft. It's the platform of choice for tens of thousands of applications. Long may it continue!

SMS Emulation...

2006-02-21T13:35:00.000+10:00

A tip provided to me today by none other than Jarrod “BizTalk will deliver my next baby” Jones - the ability to send an SMS to yourself within the Smartphone emulator – very handy!

Update: It seems there are more magic numbers.

Automated Unit Testing; it works…

2006-02-10T13:04:00.000+10:00

I shouldn’t sound so surprised! Previously I have been a casual proponent of Unit Testing in an automated sense, in that I knew it was a good idea, but often did not implement as thoroughly as I should. I was fan, but not quite a convert – this has since changed.

On the current project I am managing I decided that automated Unit Testing (using NUnit) was to be a first class deliverable within the development phase due to the complexity of the solution. I have since personally discovered that bugs are often discovered during the construction of the Unit Tests due to extra thought involved in attempting to test the various logic paths, so these are often corrected before the tests are even executed or constructed – nice outcome! Then of course, there is the constant execution of the tests to verify that new code changes have not since broken existing functions – I am pleasantly surprised at the number of times little errors have been picked up quickly and early – very nice :-)

I am now a *real* believer!

0x24 - enough said...

2006-01-23T14:51:00.000+10:00

Well, yesterday marked the passing of yet another year :-(

Browser vs Smart Client...

2006-01-14T11:44:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, I got into a discussion with a number of my esteemed colleagues at work about my disdain for the likes of AJAX and Web based applications. For the record, I do not have a problem with the technologies per se, more with the way in which they are used and abused. In essence I believe there is a time and place for each type of technology.

Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should!

Browser

I think that there is a place for browser based Web Applications – specifically where reach is of the up most importance. This is the obvious choice for the likes of organizational home pages, e-zines, search engines, blogs, ebay, or amazon for example.

The challenge with these applications can be the browsers themselves, in that they all do not support the same Web standards, and as such there is an additional cost associated with the development depending on the features being targeted for often a small percentage of users. What version of IE, what about Firefox or Opera, etc? Sometimes I believe an organization is better off ignoring a small percentage of users to focus on the majority to provide them with the best possible experience, than provide an average experience to all.

My real issue with browser applications is where the applications are targeted behind the corporate firewall. These organizations typically have an SOE rolled out, so hardware and software specifications and versions are controlled and understood. Where these applications have a high user count and are highly interactive, then they are not best served with a browser application – an improved user experience can be provided by a Smart Client.

I know a lot of organizations in the past looked at Web applications as a way to solve deployment issues, but with Click Once and other related technologies for rolling out updates this point is now largely redundant.

Reach and application context should be the driver!

AJAX

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is cool, and it certainly solves the constant post-backs for updating lists for example, and it can greatly improve the user experience. (I like some of the stuff on Windows Live for example.)

But I fear it could really be abused, where all sorts of little pop-up style windows with right-mouse context menu options are going to scare off the mom & pop user – i.e. the average consumer.

Use wisely!

Smart Client

Where an application has significant user interactions and reach is confined to a specific operating system then a Smart Client application is the best choice. I think OWA is fantastic for checking emails etc. when on the road, but Outlook kicks its ass for improved functionality and experience – there is a time and place for each (context)!

Smart Client enables us to utilize the power on the users machine, to effectively integrate with their day to day tools such as Office. Advanced UI controls and application integration can more easily be achieved with Windows Forms than ASP.NET controls, state management and caching is simpler as it no longer needs to be managed directly on the server. With Web Services, WSE and the WCF enabler we now also have an effective means of communicating between the client and server. With SQL Express we have the ability to effectively cache data on the local device.

The story for Smart Client applications is continuing to improve, with Click Once, and WPF on its way. Deployment is no longer an issue, security is not a problem as the applications run in a security sandbox, and they can also be set up to run within the browser. It is with WPF that these applications will really match and surpass the advanced user interface style introduced by the browser providing a rich and immersive experience for users.

In the future I think we will see the likes of the standard Amazon web pages, with an enriched shopping experience enabled by WPF - as first eluded to back at PDC03.

Take advantage of the power and flexibility of the user's machine!

Conclusion

I think it is now time for organizations and technologists to reconsider their choice of application enabling technology, and to look to choose the appropriate technology that best serves the organization and its users.

Finally, why invest in these great PCs and Laptops and not really take advantage of their inherent power?

Bindows, but why...

2006-01-08T15:19:00.000+10:00

Why would anyone want to develop Windows looking applications for the browser? Surely they would work better as Windows Forms applications that run on Windows if they are designed for Windows? Would a Mac or Linux biggot/user suddenly want their favourite site to look like Windows - me thinks not!

The beauty, and I use that term loosely, of Web applications in some respects is that their interfaces are somewhat unique, in that they project personality, not the grey Windows 95 interface. This is why WPF excites me, as more immersive/rich looking/functioning applications will hopefully be built that have personality!

This Bindows is another demonstration of *browser* application development gone bad; again, thanks to the likes of the new style of virus - AJAX.

Shingle bells...

2006-01-05T09:38:00.000+10:00

… scabby rash swells; I want this f**kin pain to go away …

Thanks Santa (you bastard) for the gift that keeps on giving this Christmas - a case of poxy Shingles. Man this sucker hurts! There are no antibiotics for it and it is something that I have to put up with until it eventually disappears. Luckily I appear at this stage to have a fairly mild case, although I am still in the very early stages – the painful rash can last anywhere from 3-5 weeks, with the associated nerve pain potentially lasting for several months. Sleep is almost impossible and the constant throbbing pain 24/7 is starting to wear pretty thin on my patience :-(

So let’s see, I ...

don’t do drugs
don’t smoke
only drink light beer
exercise regularly
eat mostly healthy foods
get plenty of rest

... and this is how my body repays me!

Once this over I will pay it back by reversing all of my habits – teach it a bit of a lesson – it won’t mess with me again – ha!

Merry Christmas, ho, ho, ho…

2005-12-26T09:38:00.000+10:00

Merry Christmas everyone, I hope you have all had a fun filled day! Santa was pretty good to me this year, with the number one gift being a Polar S725 watch, which measures heart rate, speed, cadence, altitude, etc. – very cool. [Weird thing is I bought it myself off eBay and then the family steal it then wrap it and put it under the tree?!?] The boys were spoilt again getting far more than they deserved ;-)

Kyle has his special present today, which is tickets to Narnia, which he is looking forward to. Kyle is a complete Narnia nerd, read the books, watched the BBC TV Series many times, and listened to the CD stories over and over and over again. Caleb isn’t allowed to go as we feel he is still a bit too young, and normally we wouldn’t let Kyle but given his level of interest we feel it is OK this time around.

For Caleb we have organized tickets to see a soccer game, unfortunately not the World Cup next year, but the next best thing :-) It is the next Queensland Roar game – should be fun as Caleb is an absolute soccer nut.

So all the best for the holidays and have a great New Year.

Design time in VS.NET 2005 – aarrgghh…

2005-12-08T14:54:00.000+10:00

I wrote some custom controls for the Pocket PC (.NET CF 2.0) using Visual Studio 2005 recently. They were working fine in the designer right up to the point where I needed to do a P/Invoke – at which point the designer experience disappeared – just a generic bounding box. This obviously sucked and needed to be fixed!

This then lead to this article and this article. Something about adding a “DesignTimeAttributes.xmta” file to your project; now go look in the .NET help for a reference to this. I dare ya! That’s right there is nothing – wow, fantastic, a new undocumented feature – that is just marvelous. It seems like a good feature, just a weird and undocumented way of getting to it.

Well, just having this file is not enough to fix the problem, you now need “DesktopCompatible(true)” as identified in the next page of the first article. Again, no mention of this in the .NET help.

So I compile again, errors – wtf! Now I get some cryptic “genasm.exe” error. This then turns up this thread which helps to identify that I have a public generic List property that is causing the problem, which Microsoft acknowledges, but they *might* get to it in Service Pack 1. This is RTM right?!? Holy crap, so now I have to dumb down my class to get it to compile.

It now compiles and the design time experience is back. So now I have some undocumented file and attributes defined within my project and a dumbed down class – fantastic innovation within the platform – NOT!

So the questions is – do I have an ordinary design experience or a fully functioning class that can use a generic list? I chose the latter!

One year of blogging...

2005-12-02T12:28:00.000+10:00

Well today represents the one year anniversary of my first blog post. Over this past year I have managed 122 posts, which I think is not too bad. Let's see if I can last another year :-)

Mobile Messaging...

2005-11-30T10:16:00.000+10:00

Microsoft has recently published a white paper on their mobile messaging strategy with the catchy title of "Mobile Messaging with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and Windows Mobile 5.0 Messaging and Security Feature Pack". It is a better read that the title suggests ;-)

Use IM to ask Encarta...

2005-11-23T15:04:00.000+10:00

This is just so freaken cool! Chris Sells just posted about this:

If you add encarta@conversagent.com to your MSN IM contacts list, you can ask it questions, e.g.
What is the size of Mexico?
When was Leonardo da Vinci born?
How many calories are there in an orange?
I want to see the map of Italy.
When was Abraham Lincoln born?
Solve 2x^2+7x=5

Transactions in .NET 2.0...

2005-11-21T14:57:00.000+10:00

Here is a good article that discusses the new System.Transactions available in .NET 2.0. I think it is really exciting to see that transactions are becoming a first class citizen in .NET, with appropriate plumbing provided by the runtime. Enterprise Services previously just meant there were too many compromises, such as having to inherit from ServicedComponent. Now we have a much more flexible and perfomant means to manage transactions. Nice :-)

Couran Cove Island Resort...

2005-11-21T10:57:00.000+10:00

This past weekend, our Brisbane office had our Christmas function at the Couran Cove Island Resort – it was great as our partner / wife / husband / significant other / friend and children were also included – a very nice touch. This was organised by our Social Club who arranged the boat to the island, put us all up for the night, sorted out babysitters for the kids, and had a very enjoyable dinner and drinks put on – it was awesome!

The resort was really nice, it was huge! I liked how there were no cars and the only real transport was by bicycle. The facilities offered were all really nice and the place seemed well looked after.

I did think that a number of the services offered there seemed a little overpriced, given that the rooms were not exactly cheap; I prefer the types of resorts where you pay a little more up front and then everything is provided, so you are not stressing about all the little activities as they add up really quickly.

The biggest let down of the place was the service; it was farcical. We ordered lunch on both the Saturday and the Sunday – and the result was the same. Each persons food came out at different time. In fact on the Sunday, three of us had finished eating before the last person's meal was served! At the bar, the same with the drinks, two served, then 10 minutes later the latter two – these were not complex drinks – the two glasses of lemonade arrived last. The advised room check-out was 10:30am, but between 10:00 and 10:30am we had two people come to do servicing before the allotted time. The first had even let themselves into the room before we could get to the door to answer it – aaarrrggghhh! And finally, for the ferry ride home all the staff got on the ferry before the resort passengers and took up the majority of the seating inside so that families were unable to sit together – they should have got on second so the paying guests had seating priority.

So in summary, great location, nice facilities and an excellent night out; all let down by absolutely crap service.

Visual Studio 2005 up on MSDN...

2005-10-28T10:07:00.000+10:00

No more Beta; this is the real deal! It is now time to blow away all the Beta stuff and get ready for the final product install. Haven't seen any specific instructions on uninstalling Beta 2; however, I followed the Beta 1 uninstall as below:

Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional" or other related IDE installs such as (Visual Studio Professional/Standard/Enterprise Architect/Team Suite, etc.)
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Tools Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Native Client"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta"
Remove "Microsoft MSDN Express Library 2005 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System 2005 Runtime Beta"
Remove "Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Mobile 2005 Development Tools"
Remove "Microsoft Visual J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta".
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta".

Everything seemed to uninstall correctly. Now just awaiting the download to complete to perform install - fingers crossed ;-)

Update: There is also this uninstall tool from Microsoft; I ran this and it found another component to delete - nice one!

A seven bike family...

2005-10-28T09:21:00.000+10:00

This is ridiculous, we are now a family with seven bikes! Time for a garage sale or ebay me thinks :-)

Both of our boys had their birthdays this month, and being the really nice dad that I am I decided it was time to upgrade their bikes. I got them Mountain Bikes versus BMX style so that we could do some off-road riding together. Finally the bike manufacturers are beginning to sell decent bikes for kids, which have gears, front suspension, decent brakes, aren’t made from solid steel and don’t weigh more than my car. I have always found it puzzling that a kids bike weighed more than the average adults bike – no wonder they struggle riding them up hills.

In the end I went with Trek; and so far I have been really impressed. They are really well made, have good components (SRAM and Shimano), v-brakes, and they look great (boys love the flame graphics). The bikes are the Mt. Track 220 and Mt. Track 60.

Aussie politics...

2005-10-20T15:44:00.000+10:00

Fabian posted a questionnaire to find out what party most aligns to your views. Was quite an interesting exercise, turns out I am "Family First" - probably not that surprising given I have a young-ish family. I guess I now need to become an Australian Citizen so that I can vote!

MSN Search is boring...

2005-10-11T08:33:00.000+10:00

Scoble linked to a post about the search engine of choice for teenagers, being well, duh, Google – surely this is not a surprise to anyone. For teenagers it is all about what is cool, what has the best branding – image is everything. I have just asked my two young boys (5 and 8) and they both know Google and have never heard of MSN Search.

Look at the iPod! A lot of this has to do with the branding/naming of the product; the iPod Nano would not be so successful if it was named by Microsoft, as it would probably be something along the lines of “Apple Music Player 2005 Really Diminutive Edition”. Same with search, MSN Search, it just sounds boring, it sounds so corporate!

Why doesn’t Microsoft (or any search provider) provide additional entry points, branding, etc., over the same search engine? So you have MSN Search for the corporate stiffs, and some other “cool” site targeted at the various demographics – sometimes one size does not fit all.

So why not have a kiddies site, a teenagers, adults, oldies site, where the look and feel are targeted to the age group and the search is contextual. If my 8 year old is looking for “Disneyland” then he should get results more fun oriented, links to games or the characters, age appropriate movies; for an adult this might contain links to the site for opening hours, cost, hotels, flights, etc; for a teenager it would be perhaps to the roller coaster rides, music, movies, etc.

Just a thought?!?

.NET CF Performance counters...

2005-10-07T10:34:00.000+10:00

Here is a post that describes how to turn on performance counters so you can see how your application is performing on the device - didn't even know such a feature existed. I wish I had known about this a number of months ago when I had a bad performing application; as it took a lot of trial and error to resolve the problems. It does require a registry update, so be careful out there.

Time for a mini rant – the registry?!? Why oh why did Microsoft decide to bring that bloody thing over to the device. Given that the mobile platform was new surely that would have been a perfect time to ditch that nasty Win95 legacy. When will Microsoft see the light and really support xcopy deployment and do away with that #$@%&*! registry?

Kitty litter-robot...

2005-10-06T09:05:00.000+10:00

This can be filed under the category of unbelievably sad: an automated cat poo self cleaning robotic toilet thingy – all this for a stupid cat!

Solution selling...

2005-09-28T10:12:00.000+10:00

Earlier this week I had an epiphany, dunno if that is the right word for it but it will do for now, that was initiated by a Solutions Selling course I attended – this would have to be the best course that I have attended over the last couple of years (and it is not even technically focused!) This course really resonated with me, highlighting the areas in which we focus on mistakenly when selling, being the products/services of the selling organization versus the value-add for the customer that these contribute to. It is about repackaging the selling message that will more effectively resonate with the customer, assisting with identifying and solving their problems, all in a collaborative win-win fashion. The technical implementation details come later; most of us technologists are all guilty of thinking through the technical solution too quickly without fully understanding the customers’ issues – we need to be better proponents of Active Listening. Listen more, talk less!

What else did I get out of it? It really demystified the selling process for me, introducing a clear repeatable methodology to follow with a style of selling that I feel comfortable with. So am I about to be turned, do I want to be salesman – hell no! I just figure I can assist these folks from a pre-sales perspective more effectively now that I understand the “process”.

So what book am I reading now, “The New Solution Selling” by Keith M. Eades.

Also, check out this article as it provides a good overview.

The old MsiExec 2103 error…

2005-09-22T15:46:00.000+10:00

Had a problem today performing an installation of an MSI from a scheduler that was failing due to “Error 2103: Could not resolve path for shell folder 26”. What the? That is certainly one very helpful error message! So after a chunk of googling I did manage to find some info, the relevant stuff as follows:

By default, all MSI commands run via MSIEXEC will be attempted to be installed on a “per-user” basis. This means that if Sally uses an MSI application, Fred should also install it to ensure it’s properly installed for him. Instead, you can specify that the package be installed “per computer” so that anyone who uses the application won’t have to go through the motion of installing it again. To that end, the MSIEXEC command can also be garnished with an “ALLUSERS=1” or “ALLUSERS=2” command as seen here:
msiexec /i \\server\share\package.msi ALLUSERS=1
If ALLUSERS is set to 1, the package will be set to run as a per-computer installation. This is only valid if the person performing the MSIEXEC command has administrative privileges on the computer.
If the ALLUSERS property is set to 2, a per-computer installation is attempted. If the user doesn’t have administrative rights, MSIEXEC falls back and then tries to
install the application as the user.

Wanted WebApp.csproj.user…

2005-09-21T15:53:00.000+10:00

Have you ever wondered where your user settings are kept for a web application when using Visual Studio? For a class library project they are stored in the same directory with the .csproj which is nice and simple. But oh no, this is not the case for a Web Application! As it turns out this file is stored in the %UserProfile%/VsWebCache under a further series of sub directories (MachineName\WebAppName). Thanks to Adam Friedman for pointing me in the right direction.

Poxy proxy...

2005-09-21T14:51:00.000+10:00

Had an issue earlier today that Visual Studio was complaining that I did not have .NET Framework 1.1 installed when creating a Web project; I do damn it! Turns out it was related to my proxy settings, must "Bypass proxy server for local addresses". See very helpful link for details.

PDC Top of the Pops...

2005-09-19T13:34:00.000+10:00

As a PDC voyeur here are my favourites, ordered by my excitement level whilst also tempering this with their availability:

WPF – The promise of really rich interfaces heralds a new era of the good, the bad, and the extremely ugly applications – let’s just hope it is all good. I look forward to applications that provide an immersive user experience where the 2D and 3D worlds meld (where they make sense) that can be leveraged by all developers regardless of whether they live in the managed or unmanaged worlds.
Sparkle – The designer tool for building WPF applications, built using WPF and WinFX – proof that Microsoft really believes managed code can be used for building complex rich applications. Have I mentioned how impressed I am by this application? And, will we finally see the convergence of designers and developers as a single development unit? Let’s hope so.
WWF – Workflow has been desperately missing as a core foundation of the operating system and I believe that with WWF we will finally see the rise of a single integrated workflow system within the Microsoft environment. The promise of complex application integration driven by business process will be finally realised – I just hope it effectively hooks into the workflow systems from the likes of SAP.
WCF – The communications foundation is important as it becomes the one shop stop for communication and inter-application/system integrations. It combines Remoting, Web Services, WSE, Sockets, etc. providing a simple, consistent and configurable interface so more time can once again be spent on building the applications themselves.
WPF/E – This is taking WPF and making it available “Everywhere” – well a subset at least – across multiple browsers and devices. Sounds exciting but I have seen little detail as to what exactly this means. It would be fantastic to be able to write similar code, use the same tools, and target generic browsers and rich Windows style applications.
VS2005 Team Systems – Finally Visual Studio will be fully integrated with a decent source control system, manage work tasks, enforce unit testing, FxCop, etc. This will be very welcomed in larger team and/or complex software developments. I am really looking forward to this and enforcing appropriate disciplines within the software development process versus expounding its virtues ;-)
Windows Vista – Obviously I am excited by a new operating system coming along, that will improve Security and add most of the above features natively. It is further down the list only because I lust the individual components and they are worth of lusting in their own right; plus importantly they are back-ported to Windows XP as well.
Office 12 – Fantastic UI, I think many will upgrade when released for this feature alone. Unfortunately not much else was really detailed so it will be interesting to see what comes out over the next few months – looking very promising.
WinFS – The new File System is back and we welcome it with open arms. An extensible schema, meta-data and file storage system – supported by a database-like query capability – cool. This will provide for some fantastic search style capability in the future as well that far exceeds what is available today.
C# 3.0 – The new features of implicitly typed local variables, extension methods, lambda expressions and anonymous types, etc. all sound wonderful. The problem is that we have not had C# 2.0 officially released so I can’t help but feel that we are getting a little ahead of ourselves.
LINQ – This will provide a means to perform data style queries within .NET that utilises the new features being introduced in C# 3.0; again, it is great that this solves a real world problem it just sounds too far off – we need this stuff now!
Atlas – For building whizzier browser based applications, this probably sounds exciting to the browser folks – ew ah! This is basically a Microsoft framework encapsulating existing technologies within the browser, specifically DHTML/AJAX. To me this sounds like an alternative to WPF/E previously mentioned, so why two? Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on a single standard being WPF/E?

Robert Scoble promised a week of Shock and Awe – I think Microsoft delivered. I feel like a little kid in a candy store ;-)

It Sparkles...

2005-09-15T14:09:00.000+10:00

Now I am drooling – check out this demo video - WOW! Sparkle and WPF rock! I just want to play with this stuff in the worst way :-)

I really do feel we are at the beginning of an awesome new chapter of software development where the UI is only limited by a person’s imagination versus the underlying platform. Where any developer/designer is able to create fantastic user interfaces without a massive development effort in: building the UI bits, creating custom controls, let alone implementing complex animation and 3D. The significant time can now be spent building the actual functionality and we can pass on the design activities to a professional designer who really knows how to make a great looking UI.

In case you didn’t notice I am excited by this stuff – bring it on!

As an aside Sparkle has been fully developed in .NET and C# from the ground up – it is great to see Microsoft really dog-fooding their technology – now we can see that .NET is a serious platform for building serious applications.

WWF Smackdown…

2005-09-15T08:34:00.000+10:00

About darn time! This is something that I have ranted about for a few years, that for Workflow to become really useful it needs to be a foundational service within the platform similar to the likes of message queuing (MSMQ). Look at how the different Microsoft products have even had different, non-compatible, workflow features – how confusing has that been for everyone. This just made it hard for application developers and customers to build/have a single workflow engine that everything flowed through. This is all about to change :-)

Windows Workflow Foundation is a new feature of WinFX that forms a platform service for managing/developing workflow.

Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) is an extensible framework for developing workflow solutions on the Windows platform. As part of the upcoming Microsoft WinFX, Windows Workflow Foundation provides both an API and tools for the development and execution of workflow-based applications. Windows Workflow Foundation provides a single, unified model to create end-to-end solutions that span categories of applications, including human workflow and system workflow.

Woo-hoo!

Office 12 challenge...

2005-09-14T18:36:00.000+10:00

Well it seems at PDC they have been showing of some of the enhancements to the User Interface in Office 12. Wow, wow, wow! What an improvement over the last version!

I was never really sold on the last version of colourising itself to match the Windows theme. It just made the Office menu, task pane, toolbars, etc. stand out like a pair of dogs balls – and meant that Office did not match the rest of the operating system from a general look and feel perspective. It really irks me how Microsoft provides a series of guidelines for the User Interface and then the Office team come along, then ignore and change the standard controls? There is a saying for this sort of thing, “putting lipstick on a pig”.

That is until now! Finally an Office innovation that looks like it will make a real / tangible difference to the user. Well done team!

The Office 12 challenge for Microsoft: I hope (they won’t) make these new ribbon (or whatever they are calling them) controls available to the masses to reuse, both internally and externally. These should now become part of the base operating system, to be used in other Microsoft applications where applicable; for example Acrylic, where there are toolbars splattered all over the show. They should also now become standard controls in WPF for all developers to use, as we would like to take advantage of these controls to provide equally excellent interfaces for our users - imitation is of course the highest form of flattery. This would provide a consistent interface metaphor across the platform regardless of the vendor, which surely is in the best interests of the end users - is it not?

What is LINQ...

2005-09-14T09:04:00.000+10:00

LINQ is a codename for "a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations". But what does that mean? This document as authored by Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg describes in relative detail what is LINQ. Basically, with C# 3.0, developers will be able to write rich queries for accessing .NET Types, Database (DLinq) and XML (XLinq) using a consistent C# shorthand – this stuff looks really interesting. When will we see it for real (released); that is the unknown?

Microsoft integration options...

2005-09-13T14:35:00.000+10:00

There are many options for integrating applications/systems on the Microsoft platform that at times it is difficult to know which to choose and more importantly which is best suited to a particular scenario. This article provides a very good high level summary to aid would-be integrators make the best choice (note that I said “best” not “right” – as we are typically constrained and all options are not always available to us). Choose wisely ;-)

Inane PDC chatter...

2005-09-12T12:58:00.000+10:00

Just about every blog, primarily Microsoft related, at the moment is about going to / arriving at PDC. Not interesting content about the technologies at PDC; just the fact that they are about to leave, are at the airport, have arrived in LA, are in a toilet next to a guy also going to PDC, or heard about a friend of their sister in LA who drove past the convention centre and saw a geek going to the PDC! It would be nice if people could stick to the point and not blog the inane stuff – please!

You guessed it, I am just jealous as I am not going to PDC; I will just have to live vicariously through everyone else :-(

An alternative to hollywood...

2005-09-09T16:14:00.000+10:00

Not sure how I discovered this, it has been open in my browser for the last couple of days. Have not looked at any of the content so I can not comment on quality. It seems this is a site for independent film distribution, that is free, over the web. Who knows there could be come real gems on this, or a whole lot of crap? Good luck ;-)

SqlCeResultSet...

2005-09-05T11:29:00.000+10:00

One of the issues with working with data on a CE device is the constraints with memory and performance. An area where this problem can really manifest itself is related to data – with respect to moving between application and database. I am not really a fan of DataSet’s on the Server or Desktop, and would go as far to suggest that their “bloatness” has absolutely no place in the mobile world. Seems Microsoft and others agree and with SQL Mobile and .NET Compact Framework 2.0 we have a solution; the SqlCeResultSet:

In previous versions of SQL Server CE, to bind controls to data you had to use a System.Data.DataSet. While a SqlCeDataReader provides better performance than a DataSet, it is a forward-only, non-updateable cursor. In SQL Server Mobile, the SqlCeResultSet provides a combination of functionality: the updateability and scrollability of the DataSet with performance similar to a SqlCeDataReader.

A very nice solution to solving a real technical challenge!

Near death experiences...

2005-09-05T09:24:00.000+10:00

A friend of mine attempts to kill himself and I feel partially responsible – NOT!

A comedy of events for young Fabian where everything that could go wrong - does! Sleep was probably the best act of self preservation under the circumstances ;-)

C#/VB.NET syntax comparison...

2005-09-02T13:34:00.000+10:00

Stumbled across this today; thought it might be useful to someone or in the future.

When dogs attack...

2005-09-01T13:55:00.000+10:00

My wife was out walking today and was attacked by a dog, ended up getting bitten on the hip – luckily the skin wasn’t broken, but some fairly nasty bruising is starting to come up. She was just walking along when all of a sudden the dog came sprinting out of the gate and leap at her and she was unable to make it stop until a man on the street chased the dog away. She was obviously really distressed and frightened, and when the owner came out to see if all was ok he offered for her to come in for a cup of tea – she naturally declined (yeah right go into the damn dog’s house!).

As it turns out another lady was attacked by the same dog last week, fortunately for her it did not bite her. The local council had been to see the owner and had instructed him to keep the dog locked up – clearly he didn’t listen. So the council man came around and we had to fill in a report, have photos taken of the injury, and the really funny thing was she had to look at dog mug shots to confirm it was the same dog. So anyway the council will be returning to see the owner and “encourage” him to keep his dog locked up.

I like dogs, but I can not understand their owners sometimes; why would you not lock up the dog after the first attack? So what should happen now; should he be fined, should the dog be taken away from the owner or should it be put down? I don’t know what the right answer is, but something clearly needs to be done.

Interesting to read that the Kelpie has a tendency for this type of behaviour, yet they are kept in city homes versus on the farm where they are intended.

With reference to aggressive behaviour, some breeds of dogs are recognised for being more reactive than others, that is they show higher motivation and a greater tendency to become aroused. From the above discussion of aggression in dogs in general, it shouldn't come as any surprise that breeds tending to display these qualities include working breeds which include guard-types such as German Shepherd, Rottweiler and Dobermann, hunting types such as terriers and herding types such as Kelpie, Cattle Dog, Corgi and Collie.

So in the meantime I would suggest bypassing upper Burnham Road, Bardon (Queensland, Australia for those out of towners).

Tablet PC platform in trouble...

2005-08-31T13:12:00.000+10:00

I see from this post and a number of other over the past day or two talking about the Tablet PC being in trouble based on some IDC forecast. Whatever!

It amazes me sometimes the weight that these so called analysts have in the market with their reports. They remind me a lot of weathermen, they come up with some forecast based loosely on some fact and some posturing, work in a sensationalist element to sell for their network/organisation, and then inevitably get it wrong! And much like for the weatherman, in time the errant forecast is forgotten - trouble is someone in the meantime has acted on the advice and made a poor decision based on this crystal ball analysis.

I think the Tablet PC is a fantastic concept; there are times where the pen is the more natural way to interface with the device versus punching away on a keyboard and chasing a little mouse. To me the greatest limiting factor of the device is the price, in general we all just can’t afford it. When the price of these devices comes down and laptops by default are Tablet enabled then everyone will want it and use it. Look at Windows XP Media Centre, now that they are not so expensive and a number of the restrictions on its use have been relaxed it is the biggest sellers in the desktop market – price was the primary reason – everyone wanted one they just couldn’t justify it.

Somehow Microsoft needs to convince Dell to sell and then the device will really gain mass credibility. So when the tablet is a $100 premium over an equivalent laptop on Dell I’ll definitely get one.

Finally, I am surprised there has been little/no comment from Scoble on this seeing he is typically such a strong supporter of the device.

WinFS is Beta 1

2005-08-30T08:26:00.000+10:00

Well, WinFS is in Beta - who would have thought it? This is one of the original three pillars of Longhorn that was previously dropped. Great to see that it wasn't dropped completely and is following closely behind the other two pillars, WPF and WCF. It will not make it into the initial Windows Vista release unfortunately :-( It will be compatible with WinXP though :-)

I have to commend Microsoft for making all of these technologies backwardly compatible with Windows XP, it is a very strategic decision, creating an infinetly larger market than Vista could attain on release. Means developers can target these features knowing that a greater percentage of users out there will be able to run the applications - very nice!

All Blacks haka...

2005-08-29T13:27:00.000+10:00

The All Blacks delivered their new haka this Saturday before the South African game. Good to see that the are continuing with this great tradition, and have updated it with the times. The All Blacks won the match 31-27 - yeah!

Engadget 1985...

2005-08-23T08:42:00.000+10:00

One of my favourite blogs in Engadget, a site dedicated to reporting all the news related to the latest and greatest gadgets! They just re-posted this page from 1985 - it's wicked! Love the ASCII art, and they slammed Microsoft Windows 1.0 - boy did they get it wrong with this quote though:

"We don’t really know how they think they can take on the Macintosh user interface, though, so don’t be surprised if the little Arizona startup that could, well, can’t."

VS 2005 Web Project System

2005-08-23T08:32:00.000+10:00

Here is an article by Scott Guthrie on the new Visual 2005 Web Project System; seems that there is a lot of goodness in the new version for those Web folks out there!

Late change to Nullable type...

2005-08-15T10:12:00.000+10:00

Don Box posted a link to this post that describes some changes to the way the nullable types operate. This is excellent news as I believe these types are going to be used in a significant manner with .NET 2.0 and above, so getting it right first up is the way to go. Well done Microsoft for listening to the feedback.

Parents game rage…

2005-08-12T17:52:00.000+10:00

Here is an article showing the consequences of over enthusiastic parents at a Rugby League game in Sydney, with their eight year old being kicked off the team. It is amazing how passionate parents getting whilst watching their kids play sport. I better make sure I behave myself at soccer tomorrow morning :-)

Media browser...

2005-08-11T14:00:00.000+10:00

Just found this little video up on Channel 9 and what can I say - WOW!

This is an application that has been created by Microsoft Research (not an actual product) that demonstrates a new way/style of working with media files, specifically photos and videos. Hopefully we will some of this stuff move into the next version of Windows, being Vista. It is very very cool!

GenerateMember...

2005-08-10T15:46:00.000+10:00

Daniel Moth has posted an article about a feature that I wasn't aware of that I think is actually pretty cool. You can select in the Visual Studio 2005 Forms Designer for a control, such as a label, whether a member variable is to be automatically generated. Set this to false for all labels, panels, etc., that will never be referenced and they won't appear in intellisense and will apparently save you some memory - nice!

Rich client, poor client…

2005-08-10T14:50:00.000+10:00

This would make a great title for a book ;-)

I know I have made the case previously for the Smart Client (rich) versus the Browser (poor). Here is a pretty good video from Channel 9 that supports this and demonstrates the benefits of looking for the appropriate application interface depending on your audience and they features they desire. It demonstrates the difference between an ASP.NET Web Application and a .NET Smart Client equivalent.

First up, let’s remember that the Rich Client is a concept, versus a product. The Rich Client can be a custom built application, or the likes of Office connecting to a Web Service or Database, etc.

There are times where “Reach” is important, being many users on any number of browsers and operating systems, then I agree the browser offers the best solution. However, if the user base fits the minimum Windows requirements for .NET, as most users do within corporate firewalls then a Smart Client should seriously be considered. Another reason many organisations build Browser applications is due to the misconception of deployment, agreed this was a nightmare in the old COM days, but with .NET and the likes of ClickOnce this is no longer an issue.

From a business perspective the benefits are significant:

Richer data entry experience; faster, more effective, more accurate data capture and richer UI controls
Reduced network access; less round trips – saved network/internet costs
Offline and synchronization; application works without network - supports mobility
Reduced development costs; Windows Forms simpler than ASP.NET

See the Dell Case Study to see how switching to a Rich client has improved their business.

Quoted in a magazine...

2005-08-10T09:22:00.000+10:00

Just over a month ago I was asked to talk about Mobile development in a phone interview with Technology & Business magazine. This month the magazine has come out and I have been quoted - how exciting. It is a 6 page article and I featured in two paragraphs - better than nothing ;-)

"Web Services has come a long way in helping the integration of these devices," says Eric Sibly, solutions architect with solutions development giant Avanade. "A reduction in filling out manual forms means companies can get their processes moving a lot quicker, and built in reference data can improve the timeliness and quality of information they are getting. However, in applications where you need to do real time updates, you've got to look at the type of connectivity and make sure you know what happens if the wireless link fails."

Avanade had to address this exact problem during a recent project with Queensland Rail, which recently worked with Avanade to build a shipment scheduling system that used PDAs and the CDMA mobile network to let train drivers bring detailed information on shipments with them. With uncertain wireless coverage in regional areas, the application had to be designed with enough data permanence to ensure that they remained usable even in black spots. Collected data is stored on the devices until it can be synchronised back to the home server once the CDMA signal is picked up again.

Well that is kind of what I said. Close enough :-)

Update (28-Sep-05): The full article is now online.

Threading and Concurrency...

2005-08-09T10:41:00.000+10:00

As our applications get more complex we need to look at ways to better utilise the available hardware and operating systems (such as multiple processors) to improve performance. This means writing software that utilises multiple threads to break down the task into smaller units of work that can be executed concurrently. This then creates issues with concurrency, in that multiple threads can being working on the same data structures at the same time with potential for creating some really nasty bugs - these suckers can be nigh on impossible to debug! To assist with concurrency we can look to synchronise (lock) access to the data structures, but now we need to be wary of dead locks or over locking creating additional performance issues. So, buyer beware - with great power comes create responsibility! This article provides a good overview of concurreny and it potential pitfills, and offers good advice on how to effectively code in a multithreaded manner. Good luck!

The NZ trip...

2005-08-06T18:18:00.000+10:00

The holiday pretty much went as follows:

Thursday: Arrived in New Zealand around half nine, picked up by Rob from the airport and back to his new “pad” in the city - very nice. We also went out for a couple of quiet beers, the nice kiwi stuff.

Friday: Rob had to go to work, and I got to sleep in – no boys or wife to wake me – ah! Went and closed our old bank account, our final NZ legacy, and took out the remaining money for holiday funds. Met Rob after lunch, and then met Graham for a couple of beers at the Loaded Hog to catch up on what had been happening and collect keys to the Taupo house. Rob and I then went to the movies to kill some time before meeting up with some of his mates, saw the new Batman Begins movie – it was actually really good. Drank lots and lots and lots of beer, got home at 3am feeling pretty wasted / drunk / seedy :-p

Saturday: Woke up feeling pretty sorry for myself due to previous night’s consumption - required Panadol to assist in healing process. Caught up with John Aiken for lunch after checking out his house that he has recently purchased in Ponsonby with his new girly. Heard all the great news about how well things were going, and am excited about seeing his book that comes out soon. That night was pizza with some other old Ernst & Young friends, Jos and Mark and families.

Sunday: Up bright and early, car packed, time to drive down to Taupo. Weather is decidedly dodgy, with rain, rain and more rain all the way down. Finally get to Taupo four or so hours later, with the weather looking slightly brighter with a few showers. Did some shopping for food supplies to last the next few days, then set ourselves up at the house in Taupo. Decide that the break in the weather offers a chance for a quick ride, so we get the bikes ready and head off to Craters of the Moon. We start riding the trails, which are fairly water logged, large puddles, gooey mud and slippery roots making it all a bit of a challenge. We get onto a second more challenging trail when we encounter a bit of a steep downhill section, I shoot down first and go up other side to wait for Rob. Rob comes down, gets a little too much speed up, gets the wobbles and ends up running into a tree stump at the bottom, does a Superman over the bars and comes down hard. I run down to see how he is and find he has a puncture in his knee from landing on a stick or rock, lots of blood oozing out – when he stretches leg it starts spraying blood out - wicked! I rip the bottom half of my polypropylene shirt and wrap that around the wound and then tape up with some electrical tape from within the backpack to stop bleeding. This appears to work and we walk / hobble it back out with bikes to the car and make a visit to the local hospital, turns out the wound is fairly clean and doesn’t require stitches, just some bandages and rest. This basically put an end to Rob’s ridding, and our skiing for the holiday as he could barely walk for the remainder of the holiday. Took it easy that night :-(

Monday/Tuesday: Carbon-copy days. Basically hung out in Taupo, and I went for a ride each day back at the Craters of the Moon trails whilst Rob read the paper or a magazine in the car, followed up by a movie (The Island and Fantastic Four – both not bad). I managed to explore some new trails that I hadn’t been on before and had a great time ripping up the trails. This place really does have some of the best riding I have ever done. The trails consist or largely rolling singletrack, with some small, medium difficulty climbs, fast-ish downhills, with most riding being middle ring at speed – a real blast. The new bike was just awesome, it ate up everything the trails could throw at it, and with the track drying out more and more each day it just got faster – it was wicked! I could just keep going back for more – maybe I should move to Taupo and just ride for the rest of my life!

Wednesday: Cleaned bikes and packed up ready to head back to Auckland. Had to call in Electrician for the house as the hot water cylinder had stopped heating, turns out the master switch in the house had melted itself as somebody had previously wired it incorrectly – nasty! This crazy electrician turns up in his van with “Phone SEX” painted on the back; an acronym for “Scotty’s Electrical Xpertise”, with a website, http://www.teamsex.co.nz/ – dodgy bugger! Went via Rotorua and did the obligatory luge - good fun! Stopped off to catch up with Derek Fairweather (ex SAP guy from EY - who is now the CEO of Innovation Waikato) – he then showed Rob and I around the premises and showed us some of the things they were investing in – it was really interesting; then we caught up some more over a few beers. Went onto some other bar in Hamilton and got abused by the bar girl – the story too embarrassing to tell :-( Arrived back at Rob’s just after midnight and crashed.

Thursday: Awoke at around 10:30am – totally unheard of at home where the wife or kids would have kicked me out of bed well and truly before an obscene time like that. Anyways, after breakfast, we went off and played 9 holes of golf; was fun smacking around the little white ball again, it has been a long time since I had last swung a club in anger. Another movie, The Longest Yard, then onto drinks again catching up with a couple of other guys I hadn’t seen in a long time. Packed the bags ready for the 6:50am flight home.

Friday: Awoke early, caught flight, spent the day with the missus, then picked up the boys from school.

All in all an awesome holiday, I would like to thank the wife for letting me go on the trip and Rob for putting up with me for the week :-)

Windows Longhorn aka Vista...

2005-07-28T10:35:00.000+10:00

Well, they have finally released the final product name for the next version of Windows, it will be "Vista" (formally Longhorn). Don't know about you but my initial reactions to this name is *boring*, safe even?!? Surely, the marketing folks at Microsoft could have come up with something a little more inspirational than that?

We have all waited eagerly for a few years, and will wait eagerly for another 1+ years until its late 2006 release - what we are all expecting is something that will really blow or socks off– this has been the promise. A name (branding) can generate emotion, create excitement and enthusiasm, and Microsoft should have taken this opportunity to create a truly inspiring name to provide interest and momentum. Ah well :-(

Anyways, the Beta 1 is out, minus all the User Interface goodies (we have to wait until Beta 2 for that). Paul Thurrott has posted an article giving his initial thoughts and provided a bunch of screen shots – check it out, looks ok so far.

If you are interested in the main pillars of Vista (*sigh*) they are as follows:

WinFX - The managed code programming model; this is exciting and will offer man opportunites for developers to simply access the core components of the operating system.
Windows Presentation Foundation - formally known as Avalon. This is the foundation for building User Interfaces, and we are talking some seriously cool UI stuff here.
Windows Communications Foundation - formally known as Indigo. This is the foundation for building communications and interoperability.
Aero - This is meant to be the new fandangled UI that will really blow our socks off.

MTB and Snowboarding in NZ...

2005-07-27T10:38:00.000+10:00

Tomorrow I head off to New Zealand for a weeks holiday; and the real kicker – no wife and kids – yeah baby! Although I love them dearly, there are just times when a bloke needs to go and hang out with the lads :-)

I am off to Auckland to stay and hang out with me old mate Robi-Dobi. Will also catch up with some old friends from my time with Ernst and Young (now CGNZ) at the Loaded Hog on Saturday night.

Going to also have a beer (or two...) with my old friend from school and best man, the now very famous John Aiken (well in NZ anyway). It is awesome to see he has gone onto great things, from his cricket career to now “TV Psychologist & Next Magazine Columnist” – ha ha ;-)

Then, the fun really begins, a road trip to Taupo via Rotorua, for some snowboarding and mountain biking (at the most excellent Craters of the Moon). Will be staying at Mr. Robertson's (best darn project manager I have ever worked for) Taupo house - thanks mate.

Let the fun times begin. Awesome!

.NET CF Interop - Extending the GUI...

2005-07-25T08:56:00.000+10:00

Here is a very extensive post describing interop to the native GUI controls and features within the .NET Compact Framework.

Goal and goal...

2005-07-23T10:42:00.000+10:00

The boy is on fire! Caleb scored two goals this week leading Bardon to a 2-1 victory over Moggill. The first was a volley over the keepers head, and the second in the last moment of the game where he dribbled it up to the box and fired it past the keeper. Nice one :-)

YAGNI, a rule to live by...

2005-07-21T15:37:00.000+10:00

The project I am on at the moment has a number of developers working on functionality that has questionable or unknown requirements, and certainly no known end consumer - perceived value only. This then begs the question as to why this would be a priority over other identifiable/tangible requirements?

As software professionals we need to make sure we follow the principles of YAGNI (as per vpeia.com):

In software engineering, YAGNI, short for 'You Ain't Gonna Need It', is a reminder for programmers that one should never add functionality until it is necessary. The temptation to write code to that is not necessary at the moment but is perceived to be necessary in the future has some overlooked disadvantages.
Delays what the programmer was originally working on.
There is a chance that the requirements will change and the functionality either need to be changed or won’t be needed any more. The situation now is that the programmer has now wasted the time to add the functionality and now has to waste additional time to clean it up so that it’s not buggy, matches the API requirement or doesn’t clutter up the code.

.NET Compact 2.0 change list...

2005-07-13T09:46:00.000+10:00

Check out this blog, it pulls together a very good list of changes in the .NET Compact Framework 2.0. My favourites are:

DateTimePicker – Can’t believe this was never there – duh!
Native Emulator – Real debugging on a native equivalent
New C# features – Generics, Anonymous methods, etc.
User Control – Can now create composite user controls
Designer support for inherited forms and custom controls – duh!
Docking / Anchoring / Auto scrolling – Another must have!
New managed device classes – PIM / Telephony / Notification Broker

Majura under lights...

2005-07-13T09:43:00.000+10:00

Last night went for a mountain bike ride with Scroppy at Mt Majura under lights. It has been a while since I have done a ride in the dark; it is such a difference experience - wicked! You get a different perspective on things with your limited field of vision, certainly keeps the concentration levels up – look out for those trees.

To right effectively at night you absolutely need a pair of lights, here is my set up: one on the helmet (15w) and one on the handle bars (5w). Remember to keep the helmet light off riding in the non technical areas to conserve battery life.

Captain Underpants...

2005-07-09T19:19:00.000+10:00

This afternoon I spent a bit of time with Kyle playing some computer games on the net. One of his favourite books is Captain Underspants. Very funny, with lots of little boy humour; farts, boogies, wedgies, underpants, etc. Personally I love this title, Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman.

I suggest checking out some of the games, they are actually pretty good. Kyle ended up having to plead with me to let him have a turn - ah, being a kid again - priceless!

It's number 2...

2005-07-09T19:12:00.000+10:00

Caleb scored his second goal for the season in leading Bardon to a 1-0 victory over Taringa (the first). It was a pretty solid kick that the goalie wasn't able to stop flying through his legs. Well done Caleb!

He went to a two day soccer camp over the past school holidays and I am amazed at how much his kick has improved - it has a fair amount of power behind it now!

.NET 2.0 String recommendations...

2005-07-04T09:10:00.000+10:00

The String data type is probably the most used data type within .NET, so it probably makes good sense to understand what is going on behind the covers to make the most informed choices. Read this MSDN article to gain an inside to the usage of Strings in .NET 2.0.

Generics, Predicates and Anonymous methods

2005-07-01T13:21:00.000+10:00

Ah, got to love .NET Framework 2.0 - it is full of some really useful features. Here is some code that demonstrates three new concepts; Generics, Predicates and Anonymous methods. Its beauty is in it simplicity:

public class SalesOrderItemCollection : List
{
    public SalesOrderItem FindByItemId(int itemId)
    {
        return this.Find(delegate(SalesOrderItem i)
        {
            return i.ItemId == itemId;
        });
    }
}

ItemId unique identifier…

2005-06-21T16:27:00.000+10:00

In Windows Mobile 5.0 we have the ItemId class that is used to uniquely identify PIM and Messaging items. This class has a constructor that takes an integer, which is the unique code of the identifier which will load the appropriate PIM object. Nice :-)

Let’s say within my application I use the ChooseContactDialog class to select a Contact. (This is a really nice feature of Windows Mobile 5.0 and the corresponding Contact.ShowDialog and alike provide the means to write some really cool integrated applications with the PIM.)

Now I want to save the selected Contact for future reference, maybe store a reference in SQL CE. To do this we should save the unique identifier for the contact which as we know is represented by the ItemId. The only thing is that there is no publicly accessible property to get access to this integer value – which you would think would be perfectly logical?!?

All is not completely lost as I did manage to get access to this value via a hack; but it means outputting it as a string and converting back to an integer – ew! Code as follows:

// Show contact chooser.
ChooseContactDialog ccd = new ChooseContactDialog();
ccd.ShowDialog();
 
// Get the selected contact.
string text = ccd.SelectedContact.ItemId.ToString();
int id = Convert.ToInt32(text);
 
// Show the contact using the identifier.
Contact c = new Contact(new ItemId(id));
c.ShowDialog();

A quick joke...

2005-06-20T11:25:00.000+10:00

Two blondes walk into a building... you'd think at least one of them would have seen it ;-)

Campbell wins US Open...

2005-06-20T11:22:00.000+10:00

Congratulations to New Zealand's Michael Campbell who won the 105th US Open beating a charging Tiger Woods.

I have always been a fan of Campbell since the very early days having watched him play at Manor Park Golf Club in Wellington. In my early teens I used to attend holiday coaching sessions and Campbell was there – he was "WAY" better than the rest of us. Of the many good New Zealand players he was the guy who had that something extra, and it was only a matter of time before he won the big one; he had come close at a British Open a few years back.

The great Aussie bank robbers...

2005-06-16T11:40:00.000+10:00

NOT! This is so funny, how stupid can some people be? Two Australians are currently pleading guilty for armed robbery in the US. Here is the best bit (see here for the whole story):

Firstly, the robbers' accents were a give away.
The alleged robbers also wore name tags from a sports store they worked at in Vail.
Vail police knew of Prince and Carroll after arresting them on January 4 for shooting windows with BB guns. Similar guns were used in the hold-up.

Herbie: Fully Loaded...

2005-06-16T09:05:00.000+10:00

Last night the family went to see the new Herbie: Fully Loaded movie at an advanced screening (Caleb's class were given free tickets - nice one!). It was actually a pretty good movie, a good clean family movie; we all really enjoyed it - very funny. Some of it was a little far fetched, but what do you expect? After all, it is about a car that is alive ;-)

The weird thing was because it was an advanced screening, has not yet been released in the US yet, there was heightened theatre security?!? On entering you had to hand over your mobile phones and any other recording devices; they even had hand held metal detectors like at an airport to make sure none were smuggled in. All a bit of a w*** quite frankly; I don’t think that Herbie is that much of a big deal to warrant all of the fussing.

All Blacks just scrape in...

2005-06-13T16:49:00.000+10:00

NOT! They played Fiji and kicked their arse 91-0. I feel sorry for the Island nations as they really do not have much of a chance, as the really talented players end up migrating to NZ and playing for the All Blacks. They have little money to attract and keep their players - there will surely come a time when they just won't play us as it is just too lop-sided.

Also, the NZ Maori's had a great win against the touring Lions. Hopefully, they will provide some decent opposition to the All Blacks.

A few good (performance) men...

2005-06-10T09:22:00.000+10:00

Rico Mariani of Microsoft posts a very clever parody based on the famous "you can't handle the truth" scene from A Few Good Men - bloody funny!

He is the main excerpt:

Developer: Why was my feature cut?
Performance Czar: You want answers?
Developer: I think I'm entitled.
Performance Czar: You want answers?
Developer: I want the truth!
Performance Czar: You can't handle the truth.
Son, we run on a processor that often stalls, and those stalls have to be prevented so everything runs. Whose gonna do it? You? Your froofy team?
I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for your feature, and you curse the performance team. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That your feature's death, while tragic, probably saved bytes. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves bytes.
You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me saving bytes, you need me saving bytes.
We use words like L2, swaps, and working set. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very space that I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a profiler, and save some bytes. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.

Assigning a Nullable.Value is expensive...

2005-06-09T14:36:00.000+10:00

Whilst enhancing some existing code today to support Nullable within some highly performant serialization code I noticed a doubling in the serialization times. My tests indicated that the coding resulted in a doubling of the time to perform the serialization on average, it went from 2 milliseconds to 4 per Type to serialize. This is with 25% of the fields being defined as Nullable. Not significant in the overall scheme of things within a total transaction time on the server, but certainly enough to peek my interest to investigate further.

I wrote a little console test app in an attempt to isolate the problem in case I was doing something stupid - which is quite possible ;-) I am using the latest Visual 2005 Beta 2.

The code basically boxes a DateTime/Nullable and then casts each back to the DateTime primitive using a Stopwatch to determine the total ticks. The following is the test code:

private static void PerfTestNullables()
{
       PerfTestNullable();
       PerfTestNullable();
       PerfTestNullable();
}
 
private static void PerfTestNullable()
{
       DateTime dateTime1 = DateTime.Now;
       Nullable dateTime2 = DateTime.Now;
       Nullable dateTime3 = null;
 
       object obj = dateTime1;
       DateTime dt1;
       Nullable dt2;
 
       // Test normal DateTime cast.
       Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
       sw.Start();
       for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
              dt1 = (DateTime)dateTime1;
 
       sw.Stop();
       Console.WriteLine(sw.ElapsedTicks);
 
       // Test generics cast, HasValue and assignment
       sw = new Stopwatch();
       sw.Start();
       for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
       {
              dt2 = (Nullable)dateTime2;
              if (dt2.HasValue)
                     dt1 = dt2.Value;
       }
 
       sw.Stop();
       Console.WriteLine(sw.ElapsedTicks);
 
       // Test generics cast and no value (no assignment)
       sw = new Stopwatch();
       sw.Start();
       for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
       {
              dt2 = (Nullable)dateTime3;
              if (dt2.HasValue)
                     dt1 = dt2.Value;
       }
 
       sw.Stop();
       Console.WriteLine(sw.ElapsedTicks);
}

The results are as follows - I was certainly surprised by the difference - it is significant.

18212   // Test normal DateTime cast.
110856  // Test generics cast, HasValue and assignment
37330   // Test generics cast and no value (no assignment)
 
18047   // Test normal DateTime cast.
107263  // Test generics cast, HasValue and assignment
44612   // Test generics cast and no value (no assignment)
 
24410   // Test normal DateTime cast.
108138  // Test generics cast, HasValue and assignment
51104   // Test generics cast and no value (no assignment)

The following MSDN bug has been created.

Annual sports day - Caleb wins...

2005-06-08T20:08:00.000+10:00

Bardon State School had their annual sports day today, with the kids competing for their allocated Houses - Jubilee (the boys), Bowman and Simpson.

Caleb started the day well by winning the Year 1 (5-6 yrs) Cross Country race; a bit of a surprise as we thought of him as more of a sprinter. He didn't fair so well in the 100m, just missing out on the final by coming 3rd in his heat - still a top effort! His Year 1 relay team also won.

Kyle did really well as he is not reknowned for his running. He was 5th in the Year 3 (7-8 yrs) Cross Country - a fantastic effort! And the 100 and 200m, well lets just say that he did his best :-) His Year 3 relay team also won.

Newsgator re-enabled in Help/About...

2005-06-06T10:06:00.000+10:00

The other day I ran into issue that Newsgator was no longer running in Outlook and I couldn't figure out why. I repaired Newsgator using the installer and still no joy, I then tried a bunch of other unsuccessful attempts of manully re-adding the add-in :-(

Finally found the following article on how to fix.

Now what sort of weirdo at Microsoft decided that the logical place to discover the disabled add-ins was in the "Help/About" dialog under "Disabled Items" - what the? Surely when hunting in the Add-in manager there should have been a means to discover here - or is that just too logical? Who the hell goes to "Help/About" to discover and fix issues?

Surgery success...

2005-06-02T19:51:00.000+10:00

I mentioned the other day that my Dad had gone into hospital because of fibrillations of the heart. Well, on Tuesday they inserted his brand spanking new defibrillator and he was up and walking around the next day so they discharged him - amazing! They are now staying with us until they fly back to NZ on Saturday. Stink holiday; better luck next time I suppose ;-)

XmlWriter.Create...

2005-05-30T10:58:00.000+10:00

I just noticed today in trying to fix a problem that with .NET 2.0 we have the XmlWriter.Create method that is the new and preferred mechanism for creating XmlWriter instances.

There is also a new XmlWriterSettings class to specify which features to implement in the created XmlWriter. So what does this mean; basically, use this instead of creating the likes of an XmlTextWriter directly.

Would have been nice if there was a compiler warning/info message to say that there is a new and improved method – or do Microsoft expect us to re-read the entire MSDN documentation with each release to ensure we are up to speed with all the little subtle changes?

As predicted – Crusaders win...

2005-05-30T10:56:00.000+10:00

As previously predicted the Crusaders beat the Waratahs this weekend 35-25 in the Super 12 final – yay for the NZ team :-)

Not much of a holiday...

2005-05-24T13:04:00.000+10:00

On Tuesday last week my parents flew over to Brisbane from NZ to stay with some friends and to visit us. As it turns out my Dad had some problems last Wednesday with his heart and went into the hospital for a check up, and he has not been out since. He previously had a triple bypass a few years ago and things had been going pretty well, now it looks like he may need a defibrillator. Some further tests are required and then the final decision made; so fingers crossed all goes well for my Dad. At least it happened in Brisbane so we are around to help, as it would suck for this to happen when holidaying in a foreign country and you have no family or friends for support.

My wife is conversational putty...

2005-05-23T12:13:00.000+10:00

What the? Yes, conversational putty – you read correctly! It is self-confessed. My wife is a very chatty out-going and funny person, and during a discussion the other day she informed us of this title for someone who is good at filling in the awkward silences, "gaps", within a conversation – hence, conversational putty :-)

I have discovered a further reference to this title, in slightly different context, here.

Star Wars: Episode III

2005-05-20T09:09:00.000+10:00

On Wednesday, we had a company quarterly meeting in Canberra for all the software developers – it was actually pretty good, always good to catch up with everyone you don’t see very often. Had a number of presentations, the worst being a session from a Microsoft dude (name removed so as to not embarrass) on VS 2005 – he must have thought we were idiots. So if you click this, wow look it changes here – “hello, we professional software developers, we have read MSDN, we have downloaded the beta’s – give me a break!”

After that we went go-karting for a couple of hours – it rocked! I just love blasting around a track in a little car as fast as I can, bumping into those who get in your way (sorry MadDog - not!) – what a rush! Then we went onto a dinner at a pizza joint where the food was pretty average and the beer was great. Then someone had the brilliant idea, "let’s going see the opening of Star Wars Episode III tonight (12:10am)" - it seemed such a great idea after a few beers! Not so brilliant going to bed at 3:30am however with work the next day?

So how was the final chapter of Star Wars – not bad, but not great. It was better than the first two, some of the effects were good, some of the acting and dialogue dismal – but still enjoyable. Check this out for a full on review – not quite sure I agree with it all ;-)

Other highlights, funny seeing the uber Star Wars geeks dressed in the full gear enjoying their moment – haha! I see Darth Vader also has a blog – great to see!

This is how I rate the series (stars out of five), ordered my best to worst:

Epsiode V *****
Episode IV *****
Episode VI ****
Episode III ***
Episode II **
Episode I *

Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone...

2005-05-17T08:57:00.000+10:00

Here is a good writeup on the Windows Mobile 5.0 for the Smartphone. The frustrating part of being a software developer in an ever increasing world of technological change is the challenge of keeping pace; every time a new device or underlying software changes it means going out and purchasing the necessary device etc. to be able to play with it. I am ok with doing this; it is just that the on-going cost is becoming prohibitive :-(

For the Smartphone I am on to my second device within the space of a year (i-mate SP2 and SP3i) – and it seems these won’t be upgradeable – so a new device will need to be purchased to be able to enjoy Windows Mobile 5.0 :-(

I think I will wait a little longer this time until the right device comes along as I am really happy with the SP3i – it would be perfect for me if it had an FM radio like my old Nokia. So, until a new device comes out that has an integrated FM radio and at least a 2.0MP camera – I will not upgrade! I wonder how long I will have to wait?

Hurricanes, Hurricanes...

2005-05-15T19:45:00.000+10:00

Go the mighty Hurricanes! Whew, they have just made it into the semi-finals of the 2005 Super 12, finishing fourth on the table. They are the second of the New Zealand teams with the Crusaders qualifying first, followed by Waratahs (Australia) and the Bulls (South Africa). So it will be 1 plays 4 and 2 plays 3 in the semis, so the two NZ teams will battle it out next week. I don't hold out too much hope for the Hurricanes as the Crusaders are a real class unit.

Next year the competition will be expanded and will become the Super 14, with a new team added from Australia and South Africa respectively. My concerns with this are related to whether this will mean for these coutries that their talent will be spread a little too thin - especially South Africa, as their other 3 teams were all in the bottom 4!

My pick for the finals will be Crusaders vs. Waratahs, with the Crusaders winning the final.

He shoots, he scores...

2005-05-14T14:18:00.000+10:00

Caleb, my youngest (age 5), scored his very first goal at soccer today - yay! I was so proud :-) Man, I just love watching under 6 soccer - it rocks! If I were to write this up for a local newspaper I think I would go something like this:

"Bardon Latrobe White defeated Bardon Latrobe Blue in an intensely fought battle that ended with a 1-0 result this morning. Caleb Sibly scored the only goal at the 10 minute mark after he tackled an opposition player near the halfway line, sprinting away from the opposing defenders, up the field showing great pace and flair. His shot from just outside of the 'D' scorched past the goal keeper, deflecting off the left hand post into the goal. Members of the press were likening his efforts to a young David Beckham."

So that is 3 wins, 1 draw and a loss so far this season; GO TEAM!

Windows Mobile 5.0

2005-05-13T20:45:00.000+10:00

What a week, Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 is finally released. Lots of reading to be had to see what is in this new version.

Highlights for me include a lot of the new API's, especially the managed versions - to enable an application to better integrate with the standard phone, camera, media and PIM functions. The new ARM emulator will provide a better runtime and debugging experience which will mean that applications will work exactly the same on the device and within the emulator - no more weird behaviour between the two.

I have downloaded the SDK to install at some stage - just need to find a chunk of time to play. (Note: VS 2005 Beta 2 is a pre-requisite). Enjoy :-)