Sam Gentile: Sam::Groove

Sun, 17 Nov 2002 16:20:19 GMT

My good friend John Burkhardt has some good push-back on Joel's latest well-done essay: The Law of Leaky Abstractions. "While I agree with a lot of it, I'm not sure I buy the idea that because an abstraction might have a performance penalty in some cases, its a leaky abstraction. And there certainly are some that seem well cemented by now. For example, how much .asm have you written in the past 5 years? And I don't know anyone who can hand code floating point Pentium assembler better than the compiler. We tried to be sure, but couldn't do any better.. And I hear VS C++ is about to get even better."

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:28:31 GMT

My work lately led me quite naturally to the seminal book, Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications. I read most of the book yesterday in one sitting (yikes!) and although I found much of it tough going, I want to share one key insight I got. I have always had a lot of trouble understanding the Smalltalk argument as put forth on places like Wiki when I used to be there and indeed the real advantage of late binding languages. I always viewed the safety of static type checking as a given. Well, in Chapter 6 on Generic Programming, in the area of Overloading and Parametric versus Subtype Polymorphism, is the example that lays it bare before my eyes and makes me see it.

Consider writing a function for squaring a number. In pseudo-code, it looks like:

sqr(x)

return x * x

In a dynamically typed language, such as Smalltalk, this pseudo-code code can be typed in almost "as- is":

sqr: x
^x * x

However, if we want to implement it in a statically typed language; we have to declare the type of x and the return type, for example in C++:

int sqr(int x)

{ return x * x; }

This only works for int types; it is more "special" than the pseudo-code or Smalltak, which understands the message "*", or for any type including the operation "*." In C++, you could have a whole series of squaring functions for different types, but you would eventually come to the solution: a function template:

template <class T>

T sqr(T x)

{ return x * x;}

Of course, the compiler will automatically generate a concrete function for each parameter type. The interesting thing to note that the sqr() template will work, not only for number types, but for any type providing the operation "*", just as the Smalltalk implementation of sqr(). However, there a difference between these implementations and here's my revelation: The sqr() template is statically type-checked and no run-time errors of the type "operation * are not found" are possible, whereas the Smalltalk version is dynamically type-checked and a runtime error is possible (no suprise there; thats been my main objection to dynamic languages in general). But, on the other hand, the Smalltalk version if more flexible of x is not fixed at compile-time and objects of different types can be passed to sqr:. Wow, thats pretty more powerful and certainly leads to the rapid Refactoring that they have always talked about. This example is also a good one of just taking the proble semantics and "just typing it in."

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 23:32:44 GMT

John Giudice has started a weblog. John is another Product Manager here at Groove. He is in charge of the Groove Developer Kit and its various tools and utilities. John says:

Over the coming days I will try and share ideas on what is involved with creating collaborative applications and making them succesful

[Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

Cool! I worked with John a lot on the Toolkit. One of the very cool things that I always loved about John is he is one of the very few Product Managers I have ever seen anywhere that gets as dirty in the code as he does. He codes at home too. Cool!

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:33:07 GMT

new look. A fresh new look for Groove's homepage [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

And a new message-)

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 14:30:16 GMT

Writing Secure Code

This book provided a few new insights, but nothing earth-shattering. It's a good read for newer programmers, but [good] seasoned programmers will have already run into a lot of the described issues and learned from their mistakes. [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

I agree that its quite basic. However, judging from the amount of buffer overruns that are seen in everyday C/C++ code, and the fact that Buffer Overrun checks had to be put into Everett C++, I don't at all agree that many programmers are writing C/C++ write code that doesn't have these problems (or even aware). Heck, to some extent Java and C#/.NET exist for large reasons because of the failure of C/C++ programmers to write good safe code.

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 18:52:46 GMT

Microsoft launches corporate IM. Just days after AOL announced its corporate instant messenger solution, Microsoft has announced it will jump in the market and release its own corporate IM system sometime in the first quarter of 2003.... [Lockergnome's Bits and Bytes]

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:06:57 GMT

Microsoft's and collaboration.

Forbes : CEO Network Chat with Microsoft VP Jim Allchin

yves: Will .NET servers bring collaborative work functionalities going forward? What`s MS postion with regard Groove Networks?

JALLCHIN: Basic file serving is moving to project/team serving. STS 2.0, which is part of Windows server, will be a huge step forward for collab. In terms of RTC, we are building an RTC Service which will also run on Windows .NET Server. We are in production (with beta code) at one large customer now. Then there is how Office will evolve to encompass more of this RTC functionality. Groove is a great app. The way to think about it is that we will build a rich RTC platform (meaning APIs!) that others like Groove/Office/others can build on. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 20:45:10 GMT

I have just been given a go-ahead (Visual C++.NET only so I won't talk about the rest) since a lot of this has gone public already. The Everett Visual C++.NET features, I feel, are the biggest changes to VC++ since 5.0 and have made me extremely happy. The features break into 4 main areas:

ANSI/ISO Compliance
Forms Designer for Managed C++
Security Features
Optimizer Improvements particuarly in floating point

The ANSI/ISO compliance is particularly exciting as Visual C++ finally does Partial Template Specialization, Partial Ordering, Member Template Definitions, and pretty much everything in the standard. Public statements have said 98% compliant. I have not been able to throw any Standard C++ at it that it couldn't compile and handle correctly yet. Very heavy users of advanced Standard C++ features, particuarly templates like Loki, Boost and Blitz now compile 100%!

Also, in the unmanaged arena, there have been significant additions for security, paticuarly in the area of buffer overruns. The new /GS flag, when code is recompiled with 71, will catch many buffer overruns. There are also Safe Exceptions which I won't go into here. Also, in the unmanaged area, there have been some outstanding improvements made in the optimizer, particuarly for floating point. The /G7 flag builds code optimized for the P4 and there are major gains. Also the new /arch:[SSE:SSE2] flags let you generate code for the Streaming SIMD and Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 instructions.

Last, but certainly not least, there is now a Form Designer for Managed C++! You will be able to do everything you do with the C# or VB designer. You can visually design forms and work with Managed C++. This obviously opens powerful opportunities to do certain things like Direct/X without Interop penalities and much more. Its very exciting!

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:59:26 GMT

The warmth and depth of this community never ceases to amaze me. I was just talking to Tomas down in Columbia, who has posted a very thoughtful reply to my essay), and Ingo at .NET One, (at the same time!) who are both encouraging me to go out on the circuit and speak on COM Interop. Since they asked, and Radio seems to have lost the pointers, here is the Is COM Interop Fundamentlaly Flawed (Parts 1 and 2) story which Radio has once again lost the links to, from last August. There is actually more detail in my slides on my web site. I will be updating this after talking to Don about it and with new insights but for now, Paresh, who worked heavily with me on this area during that period, has an excellent article on what we found in Connection Points in particular and how to write wrappers to fix some of the mess.

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 08:03:16 GMT

I want to step away from coding, talking about .NET altogether, and talk about abstraction, domain engineering, generic programming, and design paradigms for a bit. In 1999, I read a book by Jim Coplien, “Multi-Paradigm Design for C++”, which forever changed the way I looked at design paradigms. Lately, while reading Andrei Alexandrescu’s “Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied”, combined with doing a lot of “Modern C++”, I had several awakenings those shook up things for me even more.

For years now, it seems to me, we have had many design “gurus” repeating a mantra “Object Oriented Design good, all other techniques bad”, to the extent that for many developers and designers, that is the only paradigm that they use and even know. Abstraction is one of the key tools for managing the ever-increasing complexity of modern software. As Coplien says, “The common answer to what is abstraction usually has something to do with objects, thereby reflecting the large body of literature and tools that have emerged over the past decade to support object-oriented techniques.” Even more so, frameworks, languages and abstractions like .NET’s BCL and most of Java is only OO based (yes, I had been thinking about this for 2 weeks now, before Microsoft’s vapor announcement of future generic programming features in .NET). Java is touted, rightly or wrongly, as completely OO such that everything must be in a class. NET’s BCL is mostly only OO. Both of these, for the most part, wrap your abstraction and your way of thinking in object-oriented ways. Yes, there are exceptions (no pun intended!), but for the most part, most of the world thinks in objects. Well, that’s goodness, right? After all, it models the real world and builds abstractions much better, right? Well, yes and no. There’s no denying the vast benefits of OO but the key message in these books, and particularly Coplien’s book, is that Object Oriented Design is just one subset of the solution domain and not always appropriate for the problem at hand. {READ MORE...}

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 13:19:16 GMT

Groove case study.

Groove and Glaxo case study : Surmounting Corporate Boundaries

The ability to share information so quickly produced an "immediate benefit" and noticeable productivity boost from teams using Groove. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 16:31:32 GMT

Here we go... As we near the initial release of Groove Web Services, we've started speaking more openly [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

Obviously, this has a big bearing on our Groove Experiments stuff.

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 16:30:35 GMT

Steve Gillmor's column also references Groove Web Services heavily. He mentions the contribution Peter Drayton made to the design of the API. No doubt, the value of enlisting Peter's help has been immeasurable. Thank you Peter! [Matt Pope's Radio Weblog]

The single best recomendation I have ever made...

Sun, 03 Nov 2002 21:42:41 GMT

Groove Web Services. ... [Jon Udell: InfoWorld]

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 22:00:04 GMT

Groove Web Services.

Infoworld analysis from Jon Udell : Extending Groove

For some major customers, the ability to expose Groove functionality outside the transceiver is a key requirement. Broader awareness of shared-space activities is another. Groove's shared spaces are, by design, invisible to the uninvited. The enterprise support in version 2.0 empowers corporate IT to enumerate shared spaces, and see the managed identities and tools within them. But meetings and discussions that are not necessarily private, and so ought to be serendipitously discoverable, are still not easy to find. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 21:59:57 GMT

IM goes corporate. CIO Magazine : Instant Messaging goes corporate [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 22:33:05 GMT

Slashdot has links to the not-yet-released Microsoft decision. Here's the directory on the US Courts website. [Scripting News]

Yes! Sanity reigns in the world re the Microsoft decision. "In brief: Kollar-Kotelly accepts the settlement that the Federal Gov't and some states wanted, but she wants a minor change to it; and she has decided the case which was pursued by the other states as well, mostly ordering Microsoft to refrain from certain behaviors with regard to the user-visible desktop. Overall: a massive win for Microsoft, who can restrict the release of its APIs to major commercial companies only. " The official opinion is here

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 17:26:42 GMT

Are there any Groove tools that would let me keep track of what I did hour by hour in a day? Example: for contracting

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:46:01 GMT

Microsoft's Weblog Software. Magazine:Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It's browser-accessible from... [Hugh's ramblings] "Heh! (I'm not sure this isn't just a lucky coincidence - I'm working on the product and haven't had that discussion with other people here; it only very recently occurred to me how good a weblogging tool we're building)"

Heh, that didn't escape all of us-) Also concides with our directions in Groove Experiments...There is a synergy there for sure.

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 13:25:23 GMT

Life without Groove: I'm working on a big project. Its very intense right now. I'm back and forth from the office to my house, working constantly. (Yeah, I know its unhealthy - but we have to ship!) I've migrated my development environment to this laptop, but in so doing I had to temporarily disable my Groove account. This turned out to be a bad idea. I hadn't realized how much I depend on Groove now. It has become fundemental in the way I get work done.

For example, I work closely with another engineer. I'm constantly sending him messages and chatting. Often we're in real-time and we'll have a chat window open and we're debugging stuff and dropping new binaries in the space. We can do so much together so quickly that it becomes natural and the tool is suddenly transparent. I think it got so transparent for me that I took it for granted.

Last night I got a temporary account running and rejoined the space for my project again. The cool thing is that its now GWS enabled so my next post to the space will have to come from a remote SOAP call! The natural flow of communication came back, and all was right in my world.

Groove takes some getting used to. And it takes some effort. Groove is not just technology, but its also centered around people. It takes effort from both fronts. Just because you have some collaboration software doesn't mean you suddenly know how to collaborate online. It takes some practice. But the payoff can be huge. I can't imagine life without Groove...

[John Burkhardt]

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 13:22:56 GMT

Strong Names Considered Dangerous.

Keith Brown poses (yet another) interesting question on DOTNET-CLR this week:

What do you guys plan to do if your private key is compromised?

[John Bristowe's Radio Weblog]

I have been too busy to follow all of the details of this as I saw it but this is a very interesting issue that I will track this weekend.

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 17:41:47 GMT

I would like to urge everyone working on web-services related activities, from REST to GRID, from security to choreography, to consider writing up your experiences and/or views and submit those to the WebServices track of WWW2003. This track will have a combination of peer-reviewed papers and invited talks, and I am sure real-experinces papers will be an important part of this. The deadline for paper submission is November 15, so you have two weeks to write down you thoughts. The track is chaired by Steve Vinoski (Iona) and Paco Curbera (IBM Watson). I am on this program committee and on the pc for the performance and reliability track.

I will propably do a paper exploring whether ws-coordination is indeed a good basis for constructing complex distributed interactions. Details once it is finished.[All Things Distributed]

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 16:26:39 GMT

October Groove bulletin. The October edition of the monthly Groove bulletin is available [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 13:51:25 GMT

Wow! Peter has joined the CLR team at Microsoft. I knew there were some big changes coming in this life but not this. This is awesome. It combines his passions in research with his in the CLR.

Starting November 4, I'm going to be joining Microsoft as a Program Manager in the CLR team, doing my bit to "ensure that the CLR remains the most innovative multi-language runtime in the industry". Specifically, I'll be working with both the internal compiler teams and the external academic research community to help identify, evaluate, prototype & productize future enhancements to the CLR. Formerly described by me as my Dream Job, it is a perfect fit for my interests: it involves a high-ish % of externally-facing work interacting with the research community and speaking/writing about the CLR & Rotor, lets me spend time working at the systems level with the CLR & Rotor, and requires me to stretch my commercial software development muscles again after almost 2 years of shipping mostly prose and slides. Most importantly, the job gives me an opportunity to actually *impact* the platform I've spent the last couple years of my life working on.

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 00:40:57 GMT

Pet Shop 2.0: Java vs. .NET. "My reading of this report is that .NET kicked Java's hinder in every single measure, from through-put and responsiveness to lines of code and lines of configuration required to build and run the app." [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

That seems to be most other .NET bloggers reading of it (as well as others), so you have to start to wonder why some companies and IT shops continue to choose badly in the face of a lot of overwhelming and accumulating evidence. Not only do you get constrained to one language (well C with JNI for legacy) but you get to write more of it, have less features, less flexibility, and oh yah, by the way, its going to run a whole lot slower. It starts to become "Doctor, why does it hurt so much when I bang my head aggainst the wall" and "Well, stop doing that."

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 12:36:02 GMT

Beta release CADViewer.

We have been very busy these last couple of days with the Beta-release of our CADViewer for Groove. The CADViewer is the first product based on the Suite75 Shared Viewing Framework and offers real-time shared viewing of DWG/DXF files within a Groove Shared Space. This Framework is designed for a variety of viewers to be used within Groove. Any viewer based on this framework will have functionality like:

Fast and secure standalone or realtime shared file-viewing
Auto discovery of all viewable files within a Groove Shared Space.
Save comments to a Discussion Tool
Save current view to a Pictures Tool
Save current view to a Sketchpad Tool
Print the current view to any printer

In the near future we will release more commercial tools based on this framework to collaborative view and comment the majority 2D/3D CAD file-types and other commonly used non-CAD fileformats. If you're interested in taking the beta for a testdrive, please contact me and if you provide us with your feedback during the betaperiod you will receive one free copy the moment we release the official version :-) [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:28:03 GMT

WIN-DEV - Part 2. [Ingo Rammer's DotNetCentric] with pictures

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 16:20:11 GMT

I've been having really bad cable modem problems the last 3 days and mostly can't upstream. A very big (- The AT&T guys will have to put a Repeater on the pole tomorrow. I also have been real busy with work. I have also been in machine hell the last few days. For work, I needed to install a future version of VS.NET on a future version of some Microsoft OS. I took some excellent advice and installed VMWare to run that OS inside it. Its pretty cool and seems to have come a long way since I last used it. The problem is that I made the "regular" NTFS drive on my system writable from VMWare and then tried to install that VS.NET back on top of the existing one on that drive. Suffice it to say that everything got trashed and I saw literally hundreds of files indicies being rebuilt (- Then I was in this strange state where I couldn't uninstall VS.NET and I couldn't install because it said there was an existing installation! After 6 hours of work with some Microsoft setup guys, suffice it to say that I know much more about msiexec.exe, msiinv.exe and msizap.exe and windowsinstaller than I ever cared to know! -)

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 21:28:28 GMT

Fun time at Win-Dev. [IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development] John tells the story about our late night session, the "coming out" party for CLAW and makes all his slides available. A big thanks to John for the opportunity, the fun, and an intense AOP learning experience.

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 15:12:05 GMT

Mitch Kapor's open source PIM to use wxPython. Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation has emerged into blogspace, where Mitch says he'll chronicle its progress. The first project: a powerful, easy-to-use personal information manager for Linux, Windows, and Mac. Mitch writes: ... [Jon's Radio]

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 20:30:12 GMT

Ashok's Grooveclinic. Ashok Hingorani : We promised some new tools and here they are - plus the emerging look and feel of the first GrooveClinic, in India. we have 20 people now available with a wide range of skills and some serious groove knowledge. Expect to hear more from this team as they get going. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Sat, 19 Oct 2002 18:49:58 GMT

The .NET COM Interop presentation that I did for the .NET User Group of Greater Boston is now available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample source code. Warning! The source code is rough, simple and unpolished sample code to illustrate Interop concepts and is not complete nor intended for production use. Update: The presentation that I did for the New Hampshire .NET Users Group is also available on my web site as a Powerpoint deck and the sample code.

Fri, 18 Oct 2002 06:38:43 GMT

What a night. So I went down to the Wang Auditorium - Boston University Corporate Education Center for our .NET User's Group meeting and got "hijacked" by John Lam and Ingo Rammer stalking the hallways after a day of WinDev. Since I had to give up free pizza to go with them, we all went out to some fantastic barbecue at Smokey Joe's in Nashua. John needed another PC to do nasty CLAW stuff to in prep for his talks tomorrow (today?) so we went back to his hotel room and just spent hours digging into his Runtime Aspect Weaver. I haven't spent much time with this before so I was really amazed at how powerful this stuff is. There is so much potential. I can think of many product uses for this: enforcement of Design by Contract, company standards, logging and tracing, unit test enforcement, and more. Of course, some of the way he implemented this is quite sinister-) and when he weaved onto (into?) System.Windows.Forms.dll, I thought it was the end of my PC-). It still seems to be working. Of course, the three of us shared war stories as well as talking about many things. Ingo has pictures in case my PC does break to blackmail John-)

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 21:27:11 GMT

Mugshots. Nice to see some faces behind the names i've been meeting online these last 10 days in the Groove Experiments space. Kinda reminded me of the Mugshot discussion on the Grooveforums some time ago. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

This is the group of people I spent most of the two days with. It seemed like we had known each other forever. We also went out to dinner on the last night along with Steve Loughran who is one funny Brit-). His talk was even better than last years (and funnier) and it would do developers good to remember we have to deploy these bloody things.

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 16:21:31 GMT

Groove online communities. By participant request, the KM Cluster uses Groove 2.1 for event collaboration, content management, information access and electronic community. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 19:17:40 GMT

Views on Groove. The discussion regarding Groove, initiated by Joel's platforms essay, continues on the his forum. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Like the "discussions" in this "forum" on .NET, the level of discourse and understanding leave a lot to be desired.

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 02:40:06 GMT

I'm taking a deep dive into System.Xml.Serialization today. Meanwhile, it was very cool to meet some folks at the Web Services Dev Con. I did pay special attention to this man's talk. I was there for about two hours and met manny-a-blogger. I especially enjoyed having lunch with Sam, Ingo, Brian, Alexis, and my compatriots Weidong and Adrian. I was there all of about 3 hours, then I had to rush back up to Beverly to continue coding.

Since I returned from vacation I have been on a journey... to finish a project. Matt, when did we start working together on this whole thing? It all started out when we were trying to answer the question: "How can we get Groove running on a handheld device?".

The current SOAP project was conceived around April 2001 and now I can finally see the path clearly from today until our first real ship date. These last few months at Groove have been incredible. Momentum is clearly building around Groove now. We knew it could take a while to catch on, but we also knew that when it did it would have huge potential. Matt, Ray and I believe that Groove Web Services will launch us into a whole new area of integration and hybrid web applications, with Groove itself playing a part of a much bigger picture!

Groove represents a unique and valuable paradigm for sharing computing and information with other people. The Groove Enterprise Integration Server allows agents or Bots to join a Groove shared space. Bots are peers who are always around and can execute code. And soon Groove Web Services will allow access to Groove shared spaces from any device capable of sending and receiving SOAP over http. The use case for most Web Services is completely inverted. Everyone is trying to build huge server farms to allow a web service to handle connection to millions of clients. Groove Web Services is more like your virtual private server that allows you (or your applications) to participate in your Groove shared spaces. It extends your Groove spaces to other computing environments or applications for you. Of course, there is no reason that the "you" couldn't me an agent as well..

Flow. I have my laptop with me now 24/7. Groove is always on. I'm debugging SOAP::Lite calling GWAPS (Groove Web Services Access Point Server - [working title] ) calling Weidong's Groove from my house, invited to chat, reading meeting minutes, synching up all my files from the dining room PC, running tcpTrace and watching it from VNC via VPN. And most of these bits are floating around the air in my house. Must... keep.... coding........

[John Burkhardt]

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:33:46 GMT

I'm falling a bit behind: it's awesome to learn that Sam, Greg and others are diving into some Groove experiments - particularly in the area of web services. Based upon what I've seen thus far, it's going to be really interesting to see what might be possible .. particularly in the area of aggregation and integration. Sam and Greg ... thanks! [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]

Thanks Ray! And a big welcome to Sam Ruby who has joined us!

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 02:29:25 GMT

Sam Gentile gave a presentation on COM and Interop last night

Most of the stuff I already knew, but I did learn a couple of key points about RCW reference counting (yes, it does happen) and when it occurs.

I also had a chance to meet Ingo Rammer and Brian Graf, nice folks - I wish I could have be there at Web Services DevCon with you to learn more about Web Services. [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

Thanks for popping in and contributing to the great discussion afterwards.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 18:04:53 GMT

Reminder: I will be speaking tonight at the .NET User Group of Greater Boston on COM Interop in .NET. I have a suprise "famous" guest who will be making his debut as a Powerpoint Slide Monkey-)). There will be other out of town guests as well. This is the third time I have done this subject in two months and I must say that the presentations have been totally different each time! The poor folks at the Tyngsboro Group had to hear me drone on for 3 hours and 10 minutes and 91 slides! The really good news is that I have totally redone my presentation and streamlined it into a much more powerful and cohesive story. Come on down and see if you agree. Would love to meet even more people.

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 16:01:08 GMT

Ray Ozzie sees potential in Web Services and Groove:

Peter, it's great to hear your thoughts; I couldn't agree more. John just gave me a demo of the latest & greatest, and I'm truly pumped. He demo'ed it to me using a WinForms web services program running against localhost, which kind of blew my mind as we were brainstorming about the kinds of "outboard" cross-telespace utilities that could be whipped up in nothing flat.

[Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 00:47:51 GMT

Power to the Grid.

Computerworld : Power to the Grid

Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures are also converging with the grid model. Although P2P has failed to gain enterprise momentum due to the greater perceived manageability and security of tightly coupled server-oriented systems, some P2P players such as Groove Networks are focusing on collaborative computing and communication (more akin to a data grid). Others, including Sun's JXTA, are trying to create building blocks to solve some of the classic grid problems, like authentication. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 00:37:49 GMT

It's been five years since the co-founders of Groove started their thing. Ray Ozzie recalls the event. Worth reading. Ray also went so far as to publish the original founding document. I also recommend reading this document. [Craig Burton: logs, links, life, and lexicon]

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 00:36:58 GMT

ITxpo: Gartner grades the Web services standards. Analyst firm positive on most specs, although weaknesses remain [InfoWorld: Top News]

"Beginning with SOAP, which received a grade of Strong Positive, the highest mark Perlstein handed out, he said that its strengths include broad vendor support, broad tool support, and is relatively easy to use.On the other hand, SOAP is still a specification, and as such has lots of security holes and scalability issues."

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 13:27:23 GMT

Government Computer News (GCN) Interview with Ray Ozzie [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 13:27:02 GMT

Interesting forum posting about Bandwidth Concerns using Groove [Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog]

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 04:37:58 GMT

A dozen or so of us have been tossing around a lot of great ideas in the Groove Experiments shared space. One of our concerns, of course, is how to seemlessly share our findings publically with a wide public mechanism. Tonight, we decided to re-focus completly in a new direction, one direction. We felt that instead of continuing to be somewhat abstract that it would be better to take one of our ideas, discuss it, form requirements, and start writing code! We have decided to focus on a Groove to Weblog interface. We do realize that there have been two previous partial implementations that we will be looking at: Tim Knipp's Blogger Tool and the Agora Groovelog. One of the members is looking into those two. We realize that this kind of dump from me here now is not optimal. Ideally we would like to have things available in real-time as they happen publically. Maybe this Tool or Solution will go a long way toward that.

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 02:58:24 GMT

Five of us are at this moment, working from five different places in the world in Groove Experiments doing the Requirements and Design of a Groove to Blog tool. Real time. Amazing. Talk about Extreme Programming!

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 16:56:29 GMT

Groove Network status. SB Chatterjee : During the past few days, the Groove networks were slow - there is a barrage of end-user gripes in the Groove Forums. I am finally "synced" up - took awhile, over 48 hours ! I think *one* good way of dealing with this is by having a Groove Infrastructure status page that shows the health of the infrastructure. [Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Mon, 07 Oct 2002 13:30:02 GMT

Winfessor, a development firm for Windows collaboration tools, and Tipic, provider of Windows based Jabber servers, announce the availability of a native .NET SDK. Winfessor’s SDK supports both enterprise and mobile messaging while Tipic’s server provides secure corporate messaging for the enterprise. The combined tools allow developers to create collaborative applications that can be integrated with instant messaging from Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ