Rudolf Henning

Something all of us like... free things.

Thanks to Ruari for sending me this link. There is a free book available online for upgrading VB6 to .Net at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/staythepath/AdditionalResources/UpgradingVB6/default.aspx

This will be a great asset in the .Net Juniors sessions!

It might be the last day but Tech-Ed still rocks! So far its been one big rush and I enjoyed it very much. I gave my first Chalk and Talk session on BizTalk and it went fairly well. Next year I definitely want to do it again!

Thanks to Microsoft for the oppotunity to be here and contribute to tech-ed myself.

Yesterday we met Julie whom herself leads a community usergroup in the state. She gave us a lot of tips and ideas how to improve things on ouir side.

But, got to rush for another session!

Namespaces in general could be a wonderful thing - sometimes. Other times like I just discovered it could just plain make life difficult. Take adding a web reference to a VS project where you want to dynamically change the URL to another web service (that might be on another machine somewhere in the world). My basic requirement was that the web services must just implement a plain simple method interface to be 'universally' accessible. The idea is to just change the 'URL' on the fly and don't place restrictions to the designers/developers of the web services except for one or two methods. Turns out it is a little more complex than that.

When you make a 'web reference' from some VS project it also 'hardcode' the target namespace of the web service (soap namespace). Unlike the URL it cannot be modified (easily) at run time. I'm sure there are ways to dynamically call the wsdl, run wsdl.exe to generate a stub class and using reflection compile and instanciate the class but that is a lot of overhead just to change just one little stupid 'value'.

Another way could be to use the UDDI SDK but once again that is a lot of extra overhead. Preferably the whole process must happen quickly and without any dynamic 'recompilations' behind the scene.

Any bright ideas?

I hope they(MS) don't mind but I'm so excited about the launch (finally) of VS 2005 that I'll post the dates here on my blog.

Are you ready.....

Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

SQL Server and Visual Studio: Great Separately. Even Better Together.

From Microsoft .NET Framework support to tight integration with Visual Studio, new features in SQL Server 2005 provide developers with the ability to more easily create secure, robust database applications at a lower cost.

The release of Visual Studio 2005 is one of the most significant releases in the history of the Developer Division and SQL Server 2005 is Microsoft's next-generation data management and analysis software.

Register now, visit www.ready.co.za for more details!

Johannesburg: 17 November 2005
Sky Raiders, Hangar 41/42, Rand Airport, Germiston
Registration from 13h00
Event starts 14h00
Click here to view map and directions.
Click here to register for the event.

Durban:  22 November 2005
ICC, Hall 2ABF, Ground Floor, 45 Ordnance Road, Durban
Registration from 13h00
Event starts 14h00
Click here to view map and directions.
Click here to register for the event.

Cape Town: 24 November 2005
Thunder City, Exhibition Hangar, Tower Road, Cape Town International Airport
Registration from 13h30
Event starts 14h30
Click here to view map and directions.
Click here to register for the event.
 

Yesterday I came across an article (a few days old) where the author make some interesting but true comments on game pirating. It is common knowledge that most games can be downloaded from the Internet sometimes even before it has been released officially. There are 'gangs' of crackers that crack games 'just for fun' or to simply compete with other 'crackers'. No matter what kind of copy protection the game producers come up with it only takes days at most for these gangs to crack and remove it.
The irony is that 'legal' owners of the games are now taxed so much with hassles and stuff that gets installed on their systems (just to try and stop pirating) that it is often more convenient to rather get a cracked copy than to buy a game. In fact, (and I'm confessing here) it is usually better to buy the game (for legal sake) but immediately get a crack for it to get rid of the stupid CD requirement just to play the game. The guys making UT 2004 realized quickly and removed the cd requirement in their very first patch! Now that was a smart move!
When are these game developers going to learn that copy protection is not helping anyone - in fact, all it do is to make legal owners lives more difficult while the pirates don't care. Why can't they rather focus on making the games cheaper to begin with, produce add-ons that also are cheap resulting in more people buying the game and wanting to continue to 'invest' in the game producers? It will eventually make it pointless for pirates to try and crack the game since there would be no 'challenge' or honor in it. This way everyone 'wins' (even the pirates since they have more time to play the games and not figure out how to break it)
The author of the article I mention had a paragraph which is particularly relevant :
While these copy protection methods are finding their way onto an increasing amount of videogames, the ironic thing is that despite all the hassle they create for honest users, they don't work all that well. I've seen as many cracked copies of "protected" videogames on the Internet as unprotected games. The real joke is the fact that the cracked versions of the games do not come with the disruptive copy protection - meaning that the pirates do not suffer the ill effects of the driver that are inflicted upon legitimate paying customers.
Link to the original article: The War on Game Pirates
Come to think of it the same goes for other industries like software, music and movies. They all can learn from this idea.

In a move that could turn up the heat on Microsoft Google and Sun is going into the 'Office' market where Microsoft has historically been very strong. Actually, Sun has been pushing it's OpenOffice for some time with limited success.
I have played with the Beta 2 of OpenOffice and its not bad at all. For anyone that has a budget to look after (and all of us do to some extend) it might be worth while looking at. People like 'our' mom's and dad's who do not use Word or Excel every day and don't want to splash out a couple of grand just for a simple word processor or spreadsheet this is the perfect answer.
Lets face it, MS Office is good but at the price its going it might not be for everyone - like I said, the non-IT people among us. As for the corporate world I think it will be a while before OpenOffice will be any serious challenge.
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