Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity

RSS Feeds - Have a peek at these

At the saArchitect session we mentioned the following BLOGs and promised to post the details ... make sure you add them to your favourites:

Chris Menegay's WebLog       http://weblogs.asp.net/cmenegay/rss.aspx
Rob Caron                             http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/rss.aspx
Beat Schwegler's 2 Cents       http://blogs.msdn.com/beatsch/default.aspx
Craig McMurtry's WebLog       http://blogs.msdn.com/craigmcmurtry/default.aspx
Don Box's Spoutlet                 http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/

Our team is posting on the following feeds:

saArchitect January 2006 Community Session - Thank You

The saArchitect January 2006 session has come and gone. Although we tempted and were obviously struck by the demo gods once again, we still scored 77.7% average for the presenters, a 78% average for the session overall and received requests predominately for sessions on WinFX and VSTS. A very presentable result!

It was good to see such a good turnout and to feel such a positive vibe. Thanks to all involved for the sponsorship, the effort and especially the passion you have invested in the community.

Please note that all presentations and demo scripts we use for these sessions will be posted on http://www.drp.co.za/default.asp?id=media/content_editorials in due course. Watch this feed for details.

February session will focus on WCF/Indigo, while March will see the start of a number of VSTS sessions. See you there!

What's new in the TFS Release Candidate?

saArchitect Community Session – Looking Promising

Even with gale force winds in Cape Town and tremors (3.6) in Johannesburg, we are preparing for tomorrow’s event. With over 55 RSVPs we are looking at a bumper event and are really looking forward to tomorrow. Ernst has unfortunately had to fly down to Cape Town (business always seems to interfere with fun), giving us all a near heart attack ... until our colleague Garret volunteered to run Ernst demo tomorrow … we will not be able to evangelise VB as much as Ernst would have liked to do, but instead we can answer questions on WCF and VSTS ;-)

If you see two tired faces tomorrow, please accept our apologies. We are facing a long project workshop at Microsoft which runs until 5, then run over to event to setup and prepare for the software factories session.

To everyone other than Garret (who is preparing the hands-on demos) and I (preparing the high level demos) a peaceful night.

See you at saArchitect tomorrow.

WinFX/WCF CTP January 2006 ... a mini upgrade journal of guts and glory - part 3

Right, I have ported all my Indigo ... sorry WCF ... demo code and companion solution of our latest book to CTP WinFX February. Although I was most concerned with X509 certificates, all code compiled first time, ran first time, including the services implementing message based security using certificates.

Wow ... this means we can give WinFX CTP February the thumbs up, whereby we recommend that you upgarde to this latest CTP as soon as possible.

The only drawback is the huge download size which is obviously not an issue in the US, but causes major headaches in South-Africa where most of us have limited bandwidth.

NOTE: If you attend the saArchitect session on Thursday and bring your laptop, you can copy the WinFX downloads during the teabreak or after the session. Alternatively bring a blank DVD and we can make a copy of our master DVD.

VSTS Release Candidate on the horizon

Have I missed something ... are cyclists not bound to the rules of the road?

Completely off the topic. Has anybody ever wondered why cyclists moan and groan about the co-inhabitants of roads ... cars, taxis, etc. ... yet seem to be taking the road regulations far less serious? Are cyclists tired of life? I watched two tandems riding next to each other, with a single seater wingman drinking his Energade and blocking off the remaining width of the lane, while drivers overtook them hooting and visually upset. When it came to navigate through intersections red lights did not appear to hinder their heroic or rather lunatic journey up Beyers Naude … instead the first to cross shouted “clear”, while the whole bunch followed through the red light (which I believe states danger and stop) like lemmings.

You may think I am one of those upset drivers ... but, I am one of the cyclists who believes that the rules of the road apply to all and did not really appreciate the fact that these cyclists were actually upset that we had stopped at a red light and they had to swerve around us when they speeded through the intersection like a Kamikaze pilot through Peal Harbour.

Have I missed something ... are cyclists not bound to the rules of the road?

WinFX/WCF CTP January 2006 ... a mini upgrade journal of guts and glory - part 2

The first news is positive, because my saArchitect demo solution, including a service and client, with a duplex interface, transactions and reliable messaging compiled and ran without any glitches.

Summary: No upgrade issues encountered so far from Nov CTP to Jan CTP.

Observation: It appears that overall load time and establishment of communication channels have speeded up, however, I need to confirm this tomorrow when I port the New Horizon companion solution ... not expecting issues with MSMQ and COM+ interoperability, however, X509 certificates make me tremble on my keyboard for tomorrows migration q;-)

Bottom line: Thumbs up for January WinFX CTP, in terms of WCF, whereby I noticed version 2.0.50727.

WinFX/WCF CTP January 2006 ... a mini upgrade journal of guts and glory - part 1.

1. Uninstall of CTP Nov from my R&D Virtual machine ... took 5 hours in total, although progress bar kept promising 41 minutes for a long, long time.Note that all uninstall instructions were followed and uninstall utlities used.

Question of the day: Is 512MB RAM, which I have granted to my VM, actually enough these days? I wonder ...

2. Installation of CTP Jan WinFX Runtime painless, but no readme evident with "what has changed" as part of installation.

3. Installation of CTP Jan WinFX SDK ... again it took quite a while using the VM ... then failed with an error claiming that compact framework 2.0 installation is invalid.

4. Scrap VM.

5. Recreate VM, re-install VS2005 Team Suite.

6. Install CTP Jan WinFX runtime again.

7. Install CTP JAN WiNFX SDK again ... this time it worked well.

8. Installation of CTP Jan WinFX VS Extensions painless ... after installing MSDN that is.

Moral of the story is that our previous decision to install CTPs only on new installed systems was the correct one and could have saved me a lot of time and frustration today. Unfortunately I am unable to port the saArchitect demo code and New Horizon companion code from CTP Nove to CTP January tonight ... the bats are flywing around and I am simply too tired.

See you tomorrow for a continuation of the saga up the CTP upgrade beachhead.

Is there a place for early research and adoption of technology in South-Africa?

It is that part of the binaryage again where I am having some second thoughts about early adoption and evangelism of technologies, especially those of third parties in which we as a business and/or technology partner have little to gain in terms of business value.

Why is it that some of us get passionate about some technology, sacrificing endless personal time and even evangelizing and taking “flak” for it during design sessions or simply “in the passage” discussions ... while it is not even ours?

Why is it that many of us will tolerate the vendors of these technologies not giving us any real insight into the technology, yet expect us as “partners” to evangelise and use it in solutions we build for business?

I have no answer to the above questions, other than ticking it off as our passion for technology, passion for solutions and passion for findings ways of creating business solutions smarter and more efficiently.

Questions I have to the SA community are as follows:

1.     Is there a place for early research and adoption of technology in South-Africa, i.e. are we adding any business value by researching forthcoming technology?

2.     Am I the only one who would benefit from having access to structured self-paced training material (i.e. MCSD Packs) for new technology before or at the worst when it ships, rather than seeing it crawl into the market months afterwards?

3.     Would there be any value in creating self-paced training content for technologies such as WinFX, WinWF, WinPF and WinCF today, while the products are ploughing themselves through the volatile CTP (community technology preview) phases?

I am wondering, because I have been asking companies such as Microsoft to ship training content sooner and have even offered to create some of the content … to this day my cries have vanished in the black holes of the IT universe …

No fear, I am not loosing any of my enthusiasm and will continue evangelising the technology that I believe adds or will add value to business … I am merely wondering if I am on my own on this specific topic.

Let me get back to spending yet another Saturday looking at ... technology [8-|]

WCF Community Site

Welcome back NGen!

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2006/060112.Shim.computer.html ... for all those who have worked with and appreciated the CTOS Ngen computer series back in the 80's and 90's will get the sparkle back in their eyes when they notice the "similarity" with the new (or old?!?) personal computer design that won a prize for innovation.

http://www.sunsoft.no/bilder/ctos.jpg shows the NGen series which was so popular in the 80's and is still operational in many production environments of today. BTOS, CTOS and Ngen designers, I believe credit for the innovation also belongs to you.

WCF/Indigo … surviving the port warp from BETA-1 … log #8: WCF versus pre-WCF technology usability

Commenting on technology ... from our perspective:

 Comparing it to Indigo/WCF ... again from our perspective after early adoption evaluation to date:

Click on the pictures to get a better view of our perspective. In a nutshell we believe that WCF delivers immense developer benefits, with the exception of X509 certificate based security. The latter is stikll far to complex to configure to guareentee a better adoption thereof and thus more secure solutions.

WCF/Indigo … surviving the port warp from BETA-1 … log #7: Q&A

We are busy finalising the saArchitect WCF session and have gathered the following questions and answers on WCF to date ... let us kjnow if there are more good nuggets to include in the Q&A.