T Bryce Yehl: Bryce's Dot Net Channel

Moving

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 20:15:07 GMT

I'm finally taking the plunge and switching to "MT". I'm not going to bother importing this weblog, at least not initially. Too much work for too little benefit. My archives can stay here indefinitely.

My new home page and weblog. Feeds are available in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 flavors. I'm not going to set up RSS redirects. I don't like Userland's solution because any aggregator that doesn't understand the format will barf on it. HTTP 301 redirects are better supported, but I don't feel like reconfiguring Apache to allow .htaccess files.

For the couple of people that subscribe to my category feeds, I'll get around to re-creating those eventually. Stay subscribed to the current feeds and wait for an update.

MySQL vs. Cardfile

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 20:14:05 GMT

I wasn't going to bash MySQL for offering fewer RDBMS features than say, Microsoft Access, but...

Slashdot comment in response to Novell to ship MySQL with Netware 6:

In related news, Microsoft announced that Cardfile would be bundled in their next version of Windows.

ASP.NET vs. LAMP

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 19:31:22 GMT

Ken Rawlings is lamenting the cost of deploying ASP.NET database applications compared to LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python).

I say it's all about the TCO. Licensing is a minor cost compared to development, maintenance, and on-going support. For an unfunded project, look to re-use licenses until funding can be justified. Also, don't ignore the fact that many free software packages will run on Windows. PostgreSQL is almost plug-n-play under Cygwin, can be run as a service, and has an ODBC driver.

Diving into ASP.NET

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 20:42:31 GMT

I am finally getting around to looking at ASP.NET. Not sure what has taken me so long... if there is any label that can be accurately applied to me, it's ASP/VBScript Geek. My highest joy in life used to be figuring out how to do things in pure VBScript when everyone else was resorting to COM objects in VB or C.

Getting everything installed on my beater box wasn't too difficult, just had to fix some long-standing permissions problems that prevented Visual Studio from communicating with it. 'Hello World' was easy enough...

Now I need to come up with a useful learning project.

FTP from .NET

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 04:28:53 GMT

Getting ready to work on my desktop Blogger API router for Zaurus "Blogwalking"... Here are some pure .NET FTP samples that I found:

FTP Client in .NET "is a simple FTP protocol client component class written in C# using .NET sockets. It implements core functionality of the FTP protocol, so you can connect, change working directory, download and upload files. Masks will be added later."
FTP Pluggable Protocol "demonstrates a pluggable protocol handler for the ftp:// protocol."

Porting to .NET Compact Framework Beta 2

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 21:06:06 GMT

The porting of "Pocket Blog" to the .NET CF is back underway. The "bugs" in my XML-RPC routines and test wrapper have magically disappeared under Beta 2, now they just need to be cleaned up so that I can move on to the next piece.

I had been debating VB vs C#, but I've decided to stick with what I know for now. The advantage to C# is that it should give me a head start in porting to the Zaurus once "Mono" is ready, but realistically that's probably a year away. No point in wasting effort on that now.

When "PB" is finished, or stalled again, I've got another project in mind to kick off my C# learning experience. I'll write about that in another post...

Help decide Mono's future

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 00:39:40 GMT

Miguel is running a survey to help decide how he should allocate development resources for "Mono". My vote goes for Embedded / Zaurus / Qt stuff...

New .NET CF?

Thu, 19 Sep 2002 17:30:11 GMT

I Haven't double checked yet, but I heard that the Everett beta contains the same version of the .NET CF as the last .NET CF beta release. [Simon Fell]

I just finished the install, plenty of new .NET CF stuff. Everett has an NDA attached, so I'm not sure how much I can write about...

Everett Arrived

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 15:38:23 GMT

The Everett beta arrived on Monday, probably the first time that Airborne Express has delivered something to me on time. Have to work up the motivation to install it, re-visit my stalled .NET CF projects, figure out what now works and what still doesn't...

Blah.

Everett is coming...

Sat, 14 Sep 2002 17:20:29 GMT

Got an email from Microsoft yesterday saying that my "Microsoft Visual Studio .NET codename Everett beta kit" has shipped. They even gave me a tracking number.

Woo-hoo!

Wed, 11 Sep 2002 21:18:25 GMT

.NET, Mono, and the Zaurus

For a couple of weeks I have been wanting to post a mini-rant declaring that Trolltech and Sharp need to support "Mono". It turns out that there is a Qt# project to create Qt bindings for .NET under any of the CLRs (Microsoft's, Mono, and Portable .NET). Last month they released Qt# 0.4, and it sounds pretty good.

Unfortunately, Qtopia support is still on the TODO list.

Trolltech and Sharp ought to donate some resources to this project. The Zaurus SL-5x00 is going to be a dead-end product if better developer support doesn't materialize, and Qtopia# seems like a much better solution than giving away left-over SL-5000Ds.

Probably would help to offer the Mono project some assistance in optimizing for embedded platforms, too.

I would start developing for the Zaurus in a heartbeat if it supported C#.

Wed, 04 Sep 2002 18:49:21 GMT

"PB" Direction

The port of "Pocket Blog" to the .NET Compact Framework is mostly on hold at this point. I find myself working around too many of the CF's bugs and limitations, which is very frustrating. I don't want the CF version of PB to degrade into an ugly mess of difficult-to-maintain work-arounds... I already have that with the eVB version.

When a new Beta is released I will re-examine the problems I am having and decide if it is worth continuing. If not, I'll wait for the full release.

In the mean time I am thinking about how to better integrate "PB" with various weblog software and APIs. The "Blogger API" and "metaWeblog API" are established standards. Pyra has been extending "Blogger", "MT" has several extensions and does not implement the full "metaWeblog API". On the "RU" front, I wonder how PB could work with "liveTopics".

Rather than shoe-horn all of this stuff into PB itself, I'm thinking of switching to a plug-ins architecture. Using the object-oriented capabilities that .NET offers, PB would provide base objects that represent a weblog post and the editor interface. Individual plug-ins would inherit and extend these objects to account for metadata required by a particular API. They would also manage communications with the server. Ideally, plug-ins would allow themselves to be extended by other plug-ins: a plug-in for "MT" would only implement functionality specific to MT, the rest would be inherited from the "metaWeblog API" plug-in.

I like this concept because it allows "PB" to grow incrementally: new APIs will not require a new release of PB and could be supported by others (particularly in areas that don't interest me, like the "liveJournal API").

Tue, 27 Aug 2002 05:02:53 GMT

Steve feels my pain and Simon notes my misplaced hopes. In spite of my grousing, the .NET CF is much better than Embedded Visual Basic. And the .NET CF is a Beta, after all. Most of my issues should be resolved in the RTM, except for the lack of XPath/XQuery, COM Interop, and Serialization.

Mon, 26 Aug 2002 02:14:08 GMT

.NET Compact Framework Hell

Every time I sit down to work on the VB.NET port of "PB", it seems like I spend the entire day to fighting missing, broken, or improperly documented portions of the .NET Compact Framework.

On the first day, I discovered that forms don't resize with the SIP. Spend entire day fighting PInvoke code to detect the SIP's presense, eventually manage to make my forms resize properly. On the second day I decide to ignore all that is UI and focus on lower-level stuff. XML-RPC seems like a good place to start, and porting XML-RPC.NET seems like a better idea than re-using my lame-ass routines (based on XMLRPCCOM). Stripped XML-RPC.NET down to a client-only subset, found the right command-line incantations to make csc.exe build .NET CF apps, only to realize that Serialization isn't in there. Doh.

On the third day, I start porting my lame-ass XML-RPC stuff. Quickly discover that XQuery / XPath isn't in the .NET CF. This stuff is in the MSXML stuff on CE, but there's no COM Interop either (if there were, I could use PocketXML-RPC). Also missing is XMLHTTP. Finished the Object to XML portion of my routines, learned the proper way to convert types when using Option Strict...

Today I worked on the XML to Object and HTTP routines. Learned that the Stream returned by HttpWebResponse.GetResponseStream is completely broken. Try to pass it to a StreamReader, get an exception. Try to retrieve it's length, get an exception. Finally figured out that I could use HttpWebResponse.ContentLength to read the correct number of bytes from the ResponseStream. Oy.

I've got another weird issue remaining, responses from "Radio" seem to get truncated, probably related to CR/LF funkyness (no problems with "Blogger" and "MT"). Not sure just yet if it's the Stream, the conversion from Byte() to String, or what...

Supposedly a new Beta of the .NET CF will be included in the upcoming "Everett" Beta of Visual Studio .NET, and supposedly Microsoft will mail me a copy. It can't come too soon.

Sun, 04 Aug 2002 22:36:02 GMT

.NET Compact Framework Resource Site

The .NET CF Resource site has been substantially updated and we now have the discussion group online. If you have a questions about the .NET Compact Framework, information that you would like to share or you just want to see what other people are doing with the .NET Compact Framework, this is the list for you.

[sellsbrothers.com via System.Error.Emit]

IDSS has a DG for .NET CF source samples, and microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework has been a great source of information for me.

XML support under the CF has been driving me nuts for most of today. My first problem was that XMLNode.AppendChild was throwing an ArgumentException. I spent hours re-arranging code, building tests, and bashing my head against the wall... only to discover that my problem was in the documentation. AppendChild won't take child object that was created with a different XMLDocument instance. Doh! That wasn't an issue under the old COM libraries...

New problem is that XPath isn't available with the CF. The documentation is conflicting. The .NET CF Program Manager posted that it's not supported due to "size/performance requirements." Ironic considering that the COM libraries on CE do support XPath -- the performance sucks, but we are talking about a 200MHz PDA. Unfortunately, the CF doesn't support COM Interop either...

Such is the price of coding on the bleeding edge...

Fri, 02 Aug 2002 05:39:09 GMT

XML-RPC.NET on the Compact Framework?

Anyone out there familiar with XML-RPC.NET? I am having some difficulty compiling it against the Compact Framework. My changes and compile errors (primarily removing XML-RPC Server stuff, the CF's System.Web is incomplete). Any help greatly appreciated...

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 19:13:42 GMT

InfoWorld: MS exec claims error on .Net Server date.

Fri, 26 Apr 2002 05:33:17 GMT

First Impressions with the Compact Framework

Hey, it works. Haven't crashed anything so far. The memory usage for a "does almost nothing" executable is much lower than it was with Embedded Visual Basic.

My Winsock.LocalIP problem still exists with System.Net.IPHostEntry, must be a problem with the underlying CE APIs.

Almost none of the APIs exclusive to CE are exposed. This is very disappointing, as Pocket PC for CE.NET isn't going to happen this year. I'm going to have to learn that PInvoke stuff if "PB" is going to get a spell-checker...

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 23:01:29 GMT

Using the .NET CF / SDE Beta with VB.NET

Microsoft is only supporting the .NET CF / SDE Beta 1 with full-blown Visual Studio.NET. If you are using stand-alone VB.NET, the Beta will install without any errors but you will not be able to create any new "Smart Device Application" projects. The wizards never appears. After some head-banging, I figured out how to make it work.

Open <vs_net_path>\Vb7\VBProjects\smartDeviceApp.vsz in a text editor.

Find the line that reads:

Param="SCRIPT_COMMON_RELATIVE_PATH = CSPROJ"

Change it to:

Param="SCRIPT_COMMON_RELATIVE_PATH = VBPROJ"

Update: This solution also works for VS.NET users that do not have C# installed.

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 20:04:16 GMT

Expand .NET beyond Windows: The arguments for moving .NET beyond Windows seem logical, and certainly the success of Java stands as a testimony that it's technically realistic. Unfortunately, it's also not quite that simple. [Sam Ruby]

Am I the only one that grasps the .Net CLR as a hedge against future Windows unprofitability? When that day comes, having .Net on other platforms will save Microsoft's applications business. The beauty of it for Microsoft is that the Open Source community will do most of the work to make Office.net for Linux possible. The transitional costs to the applications groups will be minimal.

Should Windows remain the dominant desktop platform indefinitely, Microsoft has lost nothing. They've done nothing to directly support Linux, which might prematurely erode Windows marketshare, and there is no "Linux Strategy" to back away from.

Either way, Microsoft gets to sell more Visual Studio.net seats.

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:27:44 GMT

InfoWorld: Windows .Net Server now due in mid-2003

I'm thinking that no one really cares. Windows .Net Server has been caught up in the overall .Net hype. Microsoft needs to do a better job of explaining what this OS brings to the table beyond .Net being baked-in. Why should Windows 2000 servers be upgraded?

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:11:06 GMT

Use the Configuration File to Store Settings. This article shows you how to use the .config file to store application settings. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]

Thu, 25 Apr 2002 16:34:18 GMT

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

I've been accepted for the Smart Device Extensions and .Net Compact Framework beta! 40MB downloaded, 55MB to go...

Yeah baby, yeah!