Sam Gentile: Sams .NET Stuff

Mon, 18 Nov 2002 02:06:13 GMT

The event I've been waiting all weekend to announce: Everett is out!

Visual Studio .NET 2003 Final Beta is here:

For MSDN members only:

download:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/resources/subdwnld.asp

site:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/vstudio03/

Fri, 15 Nov 2002 02:42:18 GMT

I just "found" another of my "lost" Radio stories from last July 1 - Introduction to .NET Com Interop. This is real basic and I have written much deeper stuff since then but it might be of use to people starting out.

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 23:28:35 GMT

WinForms Auto-Scaling. That cool auto-scaling that WinForms does when moving between system font settings baffled me 'til I sat down to really understand it. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 23:28:17 GMT

WinForms Data Validation. A little essay on the WinForms Validating event. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 16:35:41 GMT

C# and Java: The Smart Distinctions. Article by Dominik Gruntz from Journal of Object Technology (Nov-Dec 2002 Issue), this article shows some of the subtle difference between C# and Java. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 16:35:15 GMT

Distributed Programming Runtime Systems: Inside Rotor
Gary Nutt. University of Colorado

"This is a hands-on book that focuses on the internals of a CLI implementation on a UNIX platform"

Cool! This morning Google led me to this book. There are several chapters online too. I only had time to glance at them this morning, but looks like good stuff. Check out chapter 3 for a nice overview of the VES.

[Managed Space]

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 19:08:42 GMT

Jason has moved his Blog

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 16:25:03 GMT

Everett just made my day.... Sam Gentile on the new version of Visual Studio.NET: "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!" [Sam Gentile's Weblog] Damn straight it's exciting. Reading this paragraph just made my day. [StrangeCoding]

An important affirmation of the core strengths of C++: "Games are going to be written mostly in C++ for the next umpteen-thousand years. Even if MS comes through with their promise to make managed DirectX run at 98% performance, you won't be seeing C# games on the shelves. You're probably never gonna see any form of CLR running on a console." and now the new features of Managed C++ WinForms: "So I'm back to square one, working with the built-in Dialog Editor that has barely changed in the last 4 versions of Visual Studio -- and that means internal tools create frustration from having a poor UI. But now... a Managed C++ Form designer...

rock."

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 15:07:48 GMT

New C# features: whitepaper now available. The whitepaper (a Word file) is now available. And the Demo Files link, previously dead, now works. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 19:32:14 GMT

I've been trying to stay on top of the hype, rumours, and news being released about the 'next' version of Windows. Just when I think I am getting a handle on it all, this type of news announcement is made: Microsoft to skip Longhorn Server Release [Andrew Law's .NET Radio Weblog]

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 16:14:44 GMT

Leaky Abstractions.

Joel has written a great piece on software development abstractions and complexity.

Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we've created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn't have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it's not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.

[The .NET Guy]

Tue, 12 Nov 2002 04:23:25 GMT

Radio blogger #115946

I'm finally taking a foray into Radio after my friend Peter Drayton told me about it. Lots of my friends are using RSS aggregators these days and I decided to get with the program. Radio seems like a good fit if for no other reason than the jaunty Saguaro logo - plenty of those around my place ;)

[Jason Whittington's Radio Weblog] Update: New Home

Jason's here! Welcome.

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 19:50:26 GMT

DM'er Jason Whittington has written a hillarious song on the whole PetShop saga. It so rules-). I can just picture Band on the Runtime doing it now. Sing along....

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 17:26:54 GMT

I've found another .NET Blogger! -) He even has as his masthead "Another .NET Developer :)" Cool, cool, cool. Welcome Husein and RSS-subscribed!

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.

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 15:38:39 GMT

Dotfuscator in VS.Net Everett.

From Brian: As of today, I am finally allowed to talk publically about what I have been working on for the past six months. Here is the press release and an early article. In all fairness, I had really very little to do with this. Most of my contributions were related to getting Dotfuscator translated into all of the languages that Visual Studio ships in. We turned over our first feature complete version three weeks after I was hired, so most of my stuff won't be seen until a future version. Congratulations to everyone at PreEmptive Solutions for a job well done.[Brian Graf's Weblog]

Well, I couldn't say anything either until now (It seems like all the pieces of Everett are going public one by one!). Congrats Brian.

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...}

Wed, 06 Nov 2002 00:38:12 GMT

From the Rotor List:

On behalf of the entire Rotor team, I am pleased to announce the 1.0 release of Rotor. This release is available at the usual place http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli.

The 1.0 release builds and runs on Windows XP, the FreeBSD operating system, and Mac OS X 10.2. In addition, the release contains many bug fixes, more documentation, new samples and additional test suites.

Please download it and let us know what you think.

Geoff Shilling

Rotor Project

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 20:33:20 GMT

Just entered chat below and right off start getting messages from all sorts of bloggers-) Ethan Brown, Greg, Matt Griffith, Ingo, Simon, Alexis, Jim

Don's talking about the overall architecture right now and putting in place all the pieces that other middleware stacks have had, and going for adoption...SOAP Preliminaries: SOAP message format described by envelope is pretty straightforward...In general, SOAP fairly silent about what goes on in body, some to say about header...exists so 3rd parties can augment. SOAP has always had this extensibility mechanism. AS SOAP has evolved more rigor has been applied to headers and thats what we rely heavily on in GXA specs... Two roles Ultimate Reciever and Next (predefined).

Drill into WS_ROUTING - gives transport independent way of sending SOAP. HTTP wonderful, until end of time but lot of people want to send over other transports. Tried to abstract away transport details.

Yikes! So many messages from bloggers, can't keep track of talk...WS_ROUTING - Action, Id, relatesTo, To, Source Routing in form of Foward and Reverse Paths...We need Intermediaries for things likes firewalls, proxies, may want to smear message over several locations. Another aspect is hard to build IP Router...Idea rebuilding IP Routing in User Mode...Application aware routing...All of specs are layered on SOAP 1.1 and 1.2 not replacement for. Though probably end of line for SOAP in 1.2, if we don't hold constant, pretty hard to get Interop.

Move on to WS-Coordination, Released as same time as WS-Tx, so didn't get a lot of attention - bizare to me. The real interesting innovation, unknown stuff in WS-Coordination. 3 people of 75 have read it. WS-c igives us lot of functionality that people expected when moved from classic RPC. Look at Corba, COM. Tended to want to build things that lasted more than one msg - COM+ - Contexts. Want to establish temporal, spatial relationship. Take bunch of messages and make sure the context has an id. Spec is org in most peculair way - two most interesting things in 2 appendicies. Context = collection of messages over time that share at least one property - identifier. May share others. When 2 or more WS are doing work together they may want to establish shared context. Basic Header Type - Context Header Block - Contains at least ID and maybe more info. Header blocks have distinct URIs. WS-C pre-defines a Cordination Context. 2nd thing in Appendix - PortRef - contains bare minimum of address.

<CoordinationContext>

    <Identifier>uri</Identifier>

     <CoordinationType>uri</CordinationType>

      <RegistrationService>

            <Address>http://foo.com/mycoordinator.jsp<;/Address>

<PortReference>

    <Address>http://www.microsoft.com/foo.asmx<;/Address>

</PortReference>

WS-Tx really two specs - Part 1 2 Phase Commit and ACID. Part 2 Business Activities. ACID Txs - no one who worked on spec expected it to be used across trust boundaries. Part 1 exists to allow existing Tx apps to be able to do 2PC in a web context. Never intended to go across web sites and firewalls - across org boundaries. Tried to make that clear in the spec. Don't read Part 1 unless building Tx plumbing - codification of work done last 10-20 years in Tx. Part 2 really long-running transactions. Not strong isolation...No expectation of isolation or stability...BA is much simpler to understand - combine with WS-C an app dev could grok...So don''t wory about ACID, BA more interesting...

Reliable Messaging in next couple of months...Lots of plans...

Wow, I have to clean this up and get it in a story tonight...

Tue, 05 Nov 2002 19:21:55 GMT

Project Mono Does SQL / Windows / ASP.NET. Project Mono can now execute SQL statements on MS SQL Server through TDS and has a bit of Windows.Forms code running on both Linux and Windows as well as a good deal of ASP.NET support. Looks like things are coming along at a decent rate.
[sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] COOL!!!!

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 16:43:53 GMT

A New Day. It's great to be back![Brian Graf's Weblog]

Its so good to have my friend Brian back! Good show.

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 14:20:19 GMT

/WSDK Web Service Development Kit dev article. Detailed walkthrough of the WSDK Tech Preview for WS-Security, WS-Routing, and DIME protocols. Provides sample code repackaged for VS .NET, some extensions of sample code for more realistic scenarios, and tips on how to avoid 'InvalidSecurityToken' faults when working with X.509 Certificates. [.netWire Headlines]

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:19:58 GMT

Working with Queued Components. The author shows how Queued Components, a .NET Enterprise Server feature that provides an easy and safe way to implement background processing, can be used to increase the performance and reliability of applications that call XML Web services. [.netWire Headlines]

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:17:50 GMT

Why you should move to C#. The migration to the .NET platform offers many development choices. This top 10 list explains why C# is an important offering and why you should consider moving to C#. [.netWire Headlines] I haev been doing a lot of stuff with C++ lately and don't agree with all of this but here it is anyhow.

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 14:14:48 GMT

Ticket to ride. 9:30pm Sunday @ Gate 89, Terminal 3, San Francisco International. I'm sitting here with a one-way ticket to Seattle. One-way. Wow. Seems slightly unreal... [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]

He's off. I got an email last night too. Good luck Peter. I'm sure you will have a lot of fun as well as making a big impact.

Sat, 02 Nov 2002 12:54:21 GMT

I first got notice of LSW DotNet Reflection-Browser Release 1.0 from the Dotnet-Products mailing list. I asked how if it was was different than Lutz's free and most essential kick-ass tool Reflector (whoo, just noticed new version there 2.7.1.0), Highlights

Smalltalk-like code browsing.
References / Callers / Callees / Implementers
Built in Decompiler + Disassebler C# / Smalltalk / PCode
Documentation View and Substring - Search
Multiple Browser-Wndows / Navigation Hierarchy

The differences I got from the company:

it differs much.

Built in decompiler and disassembler.

totally different code-navigation possibilities ( Callers / Callees / Implementers / Type References / Assembly References / Event Handler, Field & Property references )

Navigation-History, Type-Filters and member Filters.#

It allows to browse code in the Smalltalk way.

Download here

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 19:25:11 GMT

DevConnections. [IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development]

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 19:21:42 GMT

Q317129 - PRB: The Common Language Runtime Does Not Support Type 'internal virtual' Methods

"Status: This behavior is by design."

Apparently not. Eric Gunnerson [DOTNET-CX]:

In 1.1, we've changed the runtime behavior [...] and removed the warning.

[Adrian Bateman (VisionTech)]

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 15:33:59 GMT

I was wondering what happened to Chris (Kinsman)

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 14:18:20 GMT

Eiffel for .NET: An Introduction

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 13:31:15 GMT

When less is more. "My flight to Orlando, FL earlier this week took me through NYC and inspired an epiphany; this entry describes that epiphany.Over the past week or so, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about code generation. Michael Lenaghan, who has been one of my most important mentors since we met in 1995, recently got me thinking about code generation. Chris Sells, who actually created a code generation product, was unable to convince me of the importance of code generation. Why did one of my friends succeed where the other failed?"....

Personally, I'm very excited about the prospects of using code generation in the software that I create. It is a new and extremely powerful tool in my toolbox. Hopefully this article will inspire you to think about adding code generation to your toolbox. But don't just believe me, read this article next.

[IUnknown.com: John Lam's Weblog on Software Development]

Fri, 01 Nov 2002 13:28:54 GMT

A Simple NUnit Set in Visual Studio.NET [StronglyTyped - Richard Caetano's weblog on software development]

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]

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 15:00:03 GMT

Thinking in .NET: "Compare that to Microsoft's model, which is to give someone the job of finding and facilitating the transfer of useful technologies into the infrastructure of the .NET platform." [Brian Jepson's Radio Weblog]

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 13:13:55 GMT

Interesting Benchmark. More ammo for the anti-EJB crowd [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 12:51:36 GMT

MSDN has a new article on using asynchronous business objects with Windows Forms

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 16:25:54 GMT

Microsoft unveils .Net speech platform. Technical preview leaves no doubt about entering a new market [InfoWorld: Top News] This has taken a while. I remember being exposed to Speech.NET almost 2 years ago while in Redmond.

Wed, 30 Oct 2002 13:32:03 GMT

O'Reilly has announced OnDotNet. At first glance it apeared to be a renaming of the .NET Dev Center until I found Shawn's editorial: "The goal of ONDotnet.com is to create a destination for the .NET community by ensuring content that is immediately applicable to working and weekend-warrior developers, while not ignoring the future of .NET and all of its related technologies (e.g. Web Services, GXA, XQuery, etc.)." Having Shawn as the editor is fantastic. Shawn has been in the trenches for years and as the ADO Guy has been dispensing valuable knowledge for years. Congrats!

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 21:00:23 GMT

Jason is working on another book. If it is his CIL Programming and .NET Security books are any indication, it will be another fine addition to the library.

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 20:18:40 GMT

The consistently excellent Dino Exposito has a nice introduction to .NET Remoting. Unfortunately its in VB.NET but he's a great writer and teacher and it looks good.

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 12:18:30 GMT

Part 3 of the very good and useful Introduction to IL has appeared with focus on debugging.

Mon, 28 Oct 2002 03:28:03 GMT

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