You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Friday, Oct 11, 2002, 10:24 AM in .NET
SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator
Here. "SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (code named OlyMars) is both a flexible and powerful code generator based on database modeling. It allows instant generation of both SQL and .Net code providing a complete library of stored procedures, .NET classes and ready-to-use Windows/Web form controls (including associated documentation). SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator is also fully extensible to use one's own custom templates and consequently can be adjusted to generate any custom code respecting a homogeneous implementation scheme within the company (can be written either in VB .NET or C# .NET)." This isn't particularly new, but it's new to me and it's from Microsoft France. I also saw that Justin Rudd has used it. Can anyone contribute any comments about OlyMars? [pinetree-tech.com/weblog]
Friday, Oct 11, 2002, 7:56 AM in Conference
Brian Jepson Blogs the DevCon
Here. Can't be at the DevCon? Check out Brian Jepson's talk-by-talk coverage on his blog. I'm sorry if you can't be there, though. We're having a blast!
Thursday, Oct 10, 2002, 8:55 AM in Fun
Top 10 Reasons You Know Youve Been Hacking Too Many Web Services...
- You start using URIs to address real envelopes while paying the bills
- You use XPath to refer to family members
- You can't understand why nobody thinks that SOAP is "simple" anymore
- You try to determine what portTypes your spouse exposes
- You don't have any trouble expanding BPL4WS
- You prefer to write code to find something on Google
- You ask for vanilla instead of doc/lit
- You purchase the "Infoset" license plate for your car
- You challenge people to say "UDDI's UUIDs" 10 times fast
- You no longer see the angle brackets, "just blond, brunette, redhead"
Reasons from Aaron Skonnard, Tim Ewald and Chris Sells
Presented at the Web Services DevCon East
Thu 10/10/2002, 8:55am
Wednesday, Oct 9, 2002, 6:01 PM
Giving SOAP a REST
Here. "Many developers will be surprised to learn that SOAP isn't the only game in town for Web services interfacing. REST offers a perfectly good solution for the majority of implementations, with greater flexibility and lower overhead. Developers need to stop reaching immediately for SOAP and start choosing the right technology for the application." I thought that this article would be an interesting counter-point to Peter Drayton's "Designing a RESTful SOAP API" at the DevCon this week.
Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, 11:29 PM
What's New in Outlook 11
Here. "With current versions of Outlook, losing a network connection or working with a slow or unreliable network connection produces horrible results. If Outlook loses its network connectivity, error messages pop up before Outlook freezes completely. Outlook 11 eliminates this problem. Details have not been fully released, but Outlook 11 will work in what is termed "cached Exchange mode." When a fat pipe (a high-speed network connection) is present, Outlook will run much like it does now, where headers and message bodies will be downloaded as new messages arrive. When Outlook detects a slower pipe, either a dial-up or a cellular modem connection, only message headers will be downloaded. If a user wants to display a message, the entire message body will then be downloaded from the server. Outlook's default behavior will be to work against its local cache." Now this sounds more like it!
Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, 11:26 PM
Microsoft's New Enterprise View
Here. "MEC 2002 opened yesterday morning with a keynote address by Paul Flessner, senior vice president of .NET Enterprise Servers, that was packed with product announcements, demonstrations, and promises for the future."
Apparently, Microsoft thinks that .NET Server's support for Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) Virtual Disk Service (VDS) are both really cool. Mr. Fetcher also demo'd the
Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, 9:19 PM
Can You Feel It In The Air?
Here. That's DevCon fever...
Tuesday, Oct 8, 2002, 11:49 AM in .NET
.NET Rocks Interviews Mark Anders
Here. "Carl and Mark talk with Mark Anders about ASP.NET, Framework v1.1, Languages, IIS 6.0, and other great topics. This week we had some celebrity callers: Developmentor's Chris Sells and MSDN Regional Director Stephen Forte ring the show, making for some great tech talk." I couldn't resist calling Mark and giving him a hard time. : )
Monday, Oct 7, 2002, 6:37 PM
Compatibility Considerations and Version Changes
Here. "The following document describes changes between versions of the .NET Framework that might affect the backward or forward compatibility of your application. Information is also provided about the types of changes that can cause incompatibilities, ways to modify your application to work around incompatibilities, and how to test and run your application on different versions of the .NET Framework." And so begins the grand experiment of whether it's actually possible to version the .NET runtime and keep everything running and working.
Saturday, Oct 5, 2002, 11:12 AM
VBXMLDoc - Generates XML Docs from VB Source
Here. "Features present in Beta1: -Generate XML documentation files directly from the VB source files -Integrated into Visual Studio.NET -Integrated into the Property grid for VB projects -Integrated into the Build process -Conversion of regular comments to XML comments -Automaticly generate documentation XML documentation stubs for elements in the code" Lots of VB.NET folks have wondered why the C# boys get XML docs and they don't. Now they do. [win_tech_off_topic]
Friday, Oct 4, 2002, 8:59 PM in .NET
.NET Saves Boy Down Well
Here. What's that .NET? You say Jimmy's fallen down a well? [Sam Ruby: radio.weblogs.com/0101679]
Thursday, Oct 3, 2002, 5:51 PM in Tools
NUnit 2.0 Released
Here. From Bernard Vander Beken: From the readme: "This is the second major release of the xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities." "In the next few weeks we will be formulating the next release trying to incorporate as many requests as possible."
Wednesday, Oct 2, 2002, 7:25 PM
The Fallout Begins
Here. Justin Rudd shakes my faith.
Wednesday, Oct 2, 2002, 6:52 PM
Alladyn Unifies Browser DOMs in 2403 Bytes
Here. The Alladyn library unifies the various browser Document Object Models (DOMs) into a single object model, leting you write one set of JScript code for your dynamic sites and have it work across browsers. The library let you program Flash-like sites that don't use Flash. The gallery demos how much you can do. It's hard to tell from the site, but it seems to support IE4+, NS4+, Opera and Mozilla. And it does all this in 2403 bytes! Truly amazing.
Wednesday, Oct 2, 2002, 12:00 AM in The Spout
The Fallout Begins
Two months ago, I noted a fall in morale in the IT industry amongst my friends and colleagues. I wondered whether the best people in the industry who'd been fighting for a sane development process, but living without it because people were handing out cars as signing bonuses, would rather not work in another industry when the cars were no longer available and the fight for what was right didn't seem to make as much difference any more. Yesterday, one of the people that I'd put into the "right up there" category, Justin Rudd, announced his intention to pack it in and go back to school to be a doctor.
This kind of thing shakes my own faith. Should I continue to bust my hump on the latest and greatest technologies or ditch it all and start that novel I've got in the back of my head? I still really love doing the former, but it seems that everyone has to work a lot harder for a lot less these days. Maybe I just need to readjust my thinking, but damn, being smack dab in the middle of an economic boom really does a number on you! I feel like the guy who found a silver mine in the middle of the gold rush. I don't have any trouble feeding my family and it's not fool's gold, but I still pine for those deep, yellow nuggets...