December 2004 - Posts
Well, best wishes to everyone for this new year! I hope this is gonna be a great year!
Things I personally have in mind for the coming year:
- With .NET, put some time in the Enterprise Library, that should be released this January
- With these blogs, hopefully install the new Community Server :: Blog this month!
- With my life, enjoy my two daughters and cut down on the "krachttermen".
- With my job, hopefully make it a lot more interesting, as this was a very bad year for me.
At least it feels like that this last day of the year.
- Update: And I'm gonna be playing a lot of BattleField 2 this year!!!
I'm also planning some time for Knights of the old Republic II, get my hands on Visual Studio 2005, Yukon, Team System and perhaps some BizTalk and InfoPath, as I think I should know some of these, to be able to make the right decision at customers which path to take.
Again, best wishes to all of you. And don't forget to donate some money to the tsunami survivors!
Okay, this is it... I'm convinced. I'm using FireFox!
The reason is this plugin I found, which uses BugMeNot. BugMeNot is a website that 'liberates' sites, as they seem to call it. In other words, people register an account at a certain website, and then register it at ButMeNot. From that moment on, everyone in the world can use these login credentials to visit the site and access the other features.
Offtopic : So the first thing I did was register a new account at my own website and register it at BugMeNot. Now I'll have to add a little functionality to my own website, that users cannot login under this account. 
Anyway, the plugin for FireFox automatically retrieves a username and password for the site you're on, fills the form and submits it. Then you're logged in and you can access the other features. Worked flawless for CodeProject.
You can find the plugin on this page.
A while back I read the article from Frans Bouma about the WinFS delay.Not until today I read on Roland Boon's website that Robert Scoble responded to his article. I cannot just sit here and see this Microsoft evangelist twist the truth.
For example, he's telling Hotmail can't deliver the 1GB Google is giving out to people (for free!) because Hotmail already has an installed base of millions of users. That's why Hotmail only is handing out 250MB to everyone. Well, first, I still only have 2MB because I'm European. I know there's a workaround, but why can't we just get the 250MB as well? Second, why do I have to sign in every 30 days or loose my account? And is Microsoft counting all these deleted accounts as well? And, does every GMail owner have the full 1GB filled up? And is every Hotmail user? I think not! I only have a few MB's of data on my GMail account. And it's not because of the 1GB I think GMail is better, but because of the supreme functionality GMail offers!
Also, Robert is talking about the fact that Hotmail is adding more customers per (undefined) period then GMail. Or, he's hearing this in the hallways, to quote him. He's probably hearing this in Microsoft hallways alone. But, GMail isn't officially released yet, all users are on invitation only. You can't just surf to gmail.com and subscribe. Most people I know don't know about Gmail because they never heard of it, or because they didn't get an invite yet.
Robert is also saying they can't just “hack out code” and putting it on the internet, like the open source people can afford to do. But what are all those releases of Visual Studio.NET 2005 we're testing for Microsoft, right now? Must I list all products that aren't even beta or rc's?
Finally, he's referring to bad pr that Microsoft can't have, when something goes wrong in WinFS if one file can't be found on a users system. If that happens, currently the product goes back into development, and testing is done again and again. But how come then, that still a lot of products I use contain so much bugs, just so much, that Microsoft is aware of but just completely ignore? Or do have patches for, but are just plain unsupported by Microsoft. And I can't even bring to my customers and install there, but they have to personally call Microsoft for the download link and install it themselves?
Really, don't get my wrong, I love using Microsoft products. But Microsoft has to be realistic and give us good reason why they don't bring WinFS to Longhorn. Why everything is being delayed again and again. While they're already advertising all those new products for years now, with a lot of early adaptors and other people eager to use those products.
I think in the end, it is all about bad PR. But they just can't handle all the bad PR. Although this company owns a large piece of the world with their software on so many computers, I think a large part of it ties together with marketing. And when the marketing can't win the fight against bad PR, the company is doomed.
It seems there are some problems with viewing postings and their feedback. I have no idea what the problem is, and am looking into it. I have no idea what happened as we didn't change anything to .Text or the server, as far as I know.
Just keep trying, as am I. :)
Update
It seems everything is solved now, although I haven't tested everything. So if there are any problems, please e-mail me at dvdstelt at gmail dot com.
I want to pick up some stuff demoscene related. I still love watching an occasional demo and I still get a kick out of showing demos to collegues or friends. Although I love the dos scene much better, still a good amount of great demos is released.
So from time to time I'm gonna be looking back at some of these babies, bring your attention to some newer demos and perhaps explain some parts of the demos or the coding it involves. With my recent discovery of DOSBox that's able to run my old gus dos demos, I'm also able to show you the directions to those golden oldies that are definitly nostalgia for me!
Anyway, I'll al be doing this in my own blog from now on, not in the aggregated feed, as perhaps not everyone appreciates this, although I cannot imagine that myself! :)
By the way, can anyone guess the name of the 64K intro I got the idea for my header from?
(Anyone but Ramon, whom I already discussed this with! :)
Now here's another very pretty tool that can use an introduction. I'm talking about the XmlPreprocessor which has just been released. It's a command line driven utility which will alter, for example, your web.config or app.config based on paramters and some conditions.
The the following example:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<!-- ifdef ${production} -->
<!-- <compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="false"/> -->
<!-- else -->
<compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="true"/>
<!-- endif -->
</system.web>
</configuration>
It will produce the following config file upon production release:
<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation defaultLanguage="c#" debug="false"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
You can insert the tool inside your built process or include it in an MSI script. Very powerfull and probably what a lot of projects need. There's some discussion going on here and a reply here, but I think that it's a nice 'hack'.
Get the tool here : http://xmlpreprocess.sourceforge.net/
Microsoft has placed a new utility online, or suite, as they call it. It's a new version, upgrade or enhancement of the current MSN Toolbar. It's still in beta, but according to Scott Hanselman it indexes sourcefiles and xml as well, which is very nice!
In a comment from Moshe Eshel however, you can read that at Trivex they have small hack so that you can add any textfile to the Google search indexer, so you can search in sourcefiles with that tool as well.
Well, it seems the desktop search war has begun and as read in Frans Bouma's post, it's gonna be the next big thing happening. I don't know about that, but he has some thoughts on why WinFS was again delayed, and those are quite interesting.
Wow, a new host... And what a host! 6GB space, 150GB bandwith per month, unlimited pop3 accounts, etc, etc. And ofcourse the new domain name! We thought about the url for weeks, but everything we came up with was already registrered. And the most disturbing (read: irritating) was that more then 90% of the names were registrered but not used!
Anyway, I hope we can do more with the current space. The hosting is sponsered by LogicaCMG, thanks to them we can all make this possible! :)