The altdotnet.org.za site is now online.

The purpose of this site is to bring together South African developers who are following the international ALT.NET discussions. The idea is not to replace or duplicate the international community but to create a local space where we can collaborate to discuss the things that affect us in a Southern African (and African) context.

Please feel free to dive in, add content and start some conversations!

I heard about this for the first time on Friday afternoon and it really hasn't seemed to have generated nearly as much noise as I would have expected (or perhaps I just missed it?).

The Interop Forms Toolkit effectively allows you to run VB6 code and VB.NET code right on top of each other, as if they were the same application (the managed code will run inside VB6's process).

This has the result that. You no longer need to upgrade your entire VB6 codebase in one shot, you can do it gradually one Form or component at a time. This actually even applies down to the Control level - you can host a VB.NET control on a VB6 Form!

For business this is huge - the main reason that most businesses (and there still are a lot of them) made the decision to stick with the VB6 platform was because there was simply no easy upgrade path and therefore no business case for going through the expense and disruption of upgrading to .NET. I firmly believe that by leveraging the Interop Toolkit to remove the immediate need for upgrading at all, this deciding factor no longer applies.

PS:- If anyone reading this (I am based in Johannesburg, South Africa) has found themselves confined to VB6 because of the reason(s) above and would like some advice on how to take advantage of the toolkit - and indeed what exactly the advantages (and disadvantages) are, then I am available to consult with your company and assist you in choosing the correct way forward.

Something that has been on my wish-list for a while now, Exec-Inline from Leon over at secretGeek allows you to highlight a line of code and execute it.

If you don't already subscribe to the secretGeek blog I would highly recommend doing so, the content is often useful, and always entertaining (mostly software development related, with a Microsoft slant).

PS: For those people outside of South Africa wondering why they are seeing all the lame 1cm of snow pictures and all the unbridled excitement from grown men and women, these pics are from Johannesburg. It doesn't snow in Johannesburg. Ever. Well, maybe every 30 years or so, but basically never.

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For people who will be in Johannesburg in June, this is the place to be on the 14th! Red Five Labs, the company I used to work for is having a Real Geek Evening® - i.e. not one of these Check-us-out-how-cool-are-we geek evenings that marketing-types seem to think are so in at the moment*.

You can get all the details of the event here. The guys at Red Five are really at the top of their game when it comes to software developement, so I think it should be a good night out. If you have been thinking about creating your own startup and persuing VC funding, chat to Dusan or Mike. I am sure they will be more than happy to share some of their experiences with you.

See you there. 

* How do you know if you are a real geek? If you can't enter the Mindstorm competition, you aren't. 

This refers to a problem that arose when converting a Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 solution to a Visual Studio 2005 solution using the Conversion Wizard.

Background: We have several samples that we are shipping with our upcoming CTP. Because the outputted binary is included as part of the integration build I included it in the project so that I could check the whole set in at the same time without having to find the files in Windows Explorer (I use the Ankh VS plugin for SVN). This has worked fine up until now.

Problem: Yesterday QA came back to me with an odd bug: When one of the samples that I recently created was opened on a machine with only VS2005 installed and the project (which is shipped as a VS03 project) was run through the conversion wizard, it failed to build with the following error:

Error 1 Unable to copy file "C:\Documents and Settings\redfive\Desktop\Samples\Smart Stock\bin\Debug\SmartStock.exe" to "bin\Debug\bin\Debug\SmartStock.exe". Could not find file 'C:\Documents and Settings\redfive\Desktop\Samples\Smart Stock\bin\Debug\SmartStock.exe'. SmartStock

Strange.

Issue: It turns out that problem was the above mentioned inclusion of the output binaries in the solution file. When the Conversion Wizard ran it added the property "Copy if newer" to SmartStock.exe. This caused the build to fail.

Resolution: Remove the reference to the exe in the project. This shortcut works fine if your solution is going to only be used in VS03 or VS05 but as described above it will fail on conversion.

(this posted so that anyone googling the same problem will get a hit, unlike I did!)

Willy-Peter blogged about the upcoming SAF on the 3rd April here in JHB (2nd April in Durbs and 30th March in CT). Here are some other pertinent links:

1. What Wikipedia has to say about SaaS
2. SaaS predictions from around the Web
3. Microsoft's official SaaS site
4. Jürgen Pfeifer's (the main speaker) blog
5. Jürgen's slides for the event
6. Kevin Sangwell's blog (the second speaker)

So what is SaaS? And where did SOA, last years Golden Child, go? Brian Lyttle from SourceFoundy.co.uk sums it up thusly:

"Software as a Service is not a new concept or term. There is a lot of serious research material on the subject. See http://www.service-oriented.com/publications/index.html. My undergraduate dissertation was supervised by members of that academic group.

SaaS is the academic terminology for SOA, which is in turn the use of web services to loosely couple components and applications. SOA was slow to take off since the vendors - Microsoft, IBM, BEA etc forgot to include some useful things like security before releasing the first round of tools. Marketing want to use a new term for future releases to distinguish themselves from previous efforts.

The problem with all this is that SaaS is an abstract software research term that involves until now, theoretical items such as software agents through to orchestration (BPELWS/BizTalk).

Most of this is beyond the comprehension of many Web developers and designers, since it’s operating system level complexity with associated power at the Internet level. Microsoft just make tools, like Indigo (Windows Communication Foundation) that make this stuff usable for normal people.

That said, I think a lot of this stuff is looking for an application, rather than solving the problems that 80% of people experience. Most people can get by integrating apps with some simple XML over HTTP."

Personally, I would recommend going to the SAF. It should be interesting to see the Microsoft take on things, and I am sure there will be lots of interesting people there to meet and chat to. Just don't buy into marketing and don't change your current direction because some really smart guy from Microsoft told you to. SaaS may be exactly what you have been searching for all these years - if it is let me know, I am currently available as a SaaS Consultant ;)

Here is a very useful mashup of the recent spate of aerial photography apps (Google Maps, Microsoft VE, Yahoo! Maps etc). You can choose which set of maps to view without moving from your spot - so you can easily find the app with the best coverage for your area. Nice.

I am a happy man - Shanaaz agreed to marry me on the 21st of December on a little bridge at a little lodge in a little place called Vic Falls!

We stayed at an awesome place called ' Gorges Lodge' perched over the edge of the Zambezi gorge. Over the four days there we packed in a helicopter trip across the falls, a jet boat trip UP the rapids to the base of the falls, an evening game drive, a half day of rafting and a sunset cruise, not to mention a visit to the falls themselves and shopping for bargain carvings in the town. It was an awesome once in a life time experience.

We took a ton of photos. Here is a selection of them, if you are interested...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24273216@N00/sets/72157594453831704/

TCP/IP, SMTP, HTML, WYSIWYG. The tech community has a habit of picking really dry and, perhaps, boring names for technologies. Bluetooth is a notable exception.

So where does the name, and the ubiquitous symbol (left) come from? Well, Bluetooth is actually named after Harald Bluetooth Gormson. He was a Danish king who live around 1900 years ago. He is credited with unifying tribes from around Denmark, Sweden (where Bluetooth was invented) and Norway. Bluetooth was decided on as a metaphor for how the radio transfer protocol was originally intended to unify disparate technologies.

The Bluetooth logo combines the Nordic runes of H and B.

You learn something new every day...

PS: This post inspired by this item on ThinkGeek. I couldn't find any reliable source to confirm that the Bluetooth moniker was actually given to King Harald due to his love for blueberries...

I haven't started to read it yet, but Charles Petzold wrote it. Nuff said.

[link]

Don't know how this one slipped by my attention for two whole days, but MSRS has now gone '1.0' - I think probably due to outside pressures, I would have preferred to see some rolling betas for a while so that they didnt lock themselves down too soon in terms of implementation and API.

Also, I see there is now a 'Free Non-Commercial Licence' and a $399 (about R2800) 'Commercial License' which, although nominal, is a bit early in the game as well in my opinion.

Is anyone else out there playing with this?