Usefull Tools

• editor: Notepad2 (free)
• screen capture: Screen Hunter 5 (free for business use)
• secure FTP client: Core FTP LE (free for business use)
• refactoring for C++: Refactor! (free for business use)
• cheap Photoshop-like: Paint.NET (free)
• browse .NET assemblies: Reflector (free)
• Web Apps: http://www.dumblittleman.com/2008/12/21-excellent-web-apps-for-college.html

Currently listening to...

• Martin Wolf - FT.com - Welcome to a world of runaway energy demand
• Channel 9 - MFC is back! - Pat Brenner: New Updates to MFC in Visual Studio 2008. This is quite an event. Nothing happened in MFC since Visual Studio 6 in 1998. I'm really surprised since I talked with a Visual Studio developer at TechEd who told me there would be nothing new for unmanaged C++ in Visual Studio 2008.

There's Perception and There's Reality

Joe Wilcox on Apple and Microsoft: http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/operating_systems/the_great_double_standard.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535

The blogosphere will praise Leopard as the next best thing ever and use it as more proof why Vista sucks (It doesn't). Meanwhile, there will be little good said about Microsoft's colossal 2008 fiscal first quarter results. Those people acknowledging the earnings results will blame Microsoft for trying to kill Linux and babies in Africa as reasons for its success. The perception: When Microsoft competes, it cheats. There is a double standard.

Performance Measurement for Financial Systems - Messaging

Performance Measurement for Financial Systems

• Seanet: http://www.seanet-tech.com/products.html
• Wombat: http://www.wombatfs.com/
• Endace: http://www.endace.com/

Messaging Systems

• Martin Fowler: Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions

Got my TechEd DVD

Received the 6DVDs per post. Will never run out of stuff to listen to...

TechEd DVD

The TechEd DVD is on its way!

Dear Tech.Ed 2007 Attendee, This e-mail serves as confirmation that your Tech.Ed 2007 DVD set has been shipped and you should be receiving it within 1-2 weeks (International locations may take longer). The DVD set has been sent via the U.S. Postal Service to the address included with your registration information.

Currently listening to...

• Hanselminutes: Jeff Atwood overclocks the Ultimate PC
• .NET Rocks: Dan Ciruli's Grid Computing Redux

Currently Reading...

• Dr Dobb's: The Pillars of Concurrency
• ft.com: The dream machine: invention of credit derivatives

Currently listening to...

• Polymorphic Podcast: 2007.04.26 Model View * Design Patterns - FAQs and Video Review
• New York Times: Tech Talk for 06/08/2007
• Virtual Tech Ed: TechNet Webcast: "The Network is Slow": Identifying the Cause of Slow Network Communications (Level 200)
• SYS-CON.TV: Open Source Java Framework Spring
• Dot Net Rocks: Introducing Acropolis
• Dot Net Rocks: Mark Pollack on Spring.NET
• Arcast: ARCast.net - Bridging The Gap from C++ to C#
• Hanselminutes: Orcas Overview
• ARCast.net - Getting Agile in Dublin
• Interview with Timothy Ferriss of The Four Hour Workweek

Friday: Atlantis Launch

As a conclusion for TechEd 2007: a space shuttle launch. This was a good week.

Friday: Mark Russinovich explains UAC

Windows Internals is one of my favorite Windows books (in the list of books that I'll never finish). So I was keen on seeing Mark's talk about Vista kernel and UAC. SEC411 - User Account Control Internals and Impact on Malware Friday, June 8 10:45 AM - 12:00 PM, N320 A Speaker(s): Mark Russinovich According to Mark, "UAC's goal is not to annoy you". The purpose of UAC is to encourage users to run with standard user's privileges whenever possible:

• in Vista some actions that used to require admin privileges now don't (for instance looking at the system clock or changing the time zone can now be done by standard users.)
• admins behave most of the time as standard users and become admins only when clicking Yes in the elevation dialog.
• ISVs will be encouraged to avoid coding actions that require admin privs.

He explained what virtualization was (nothing to do with VMWare by the way) and how to figure out if an app runs with virtualization enabled or not. Virtualization is a backward compatibility mechanism that automatically redirects a legacy app trying to write to a system folder when running as standard user. I have a feeling this will confuse programmers for years to come or at least until all legacy apps disappear...

Thursday: Next Generation Cryptography (NGC)

Another brilliant talk:

DEV307 - New Cryptography: Algorithms, APIs, and Architecture Thursday, June 7 9:45 AM - 11:00 AM, S220 E Speaker(s): Rafal Lukawiecki

Rafal enumerated past and current cryptography algorithms, giving an opinionated (but very funny) overview of mechanisms available to date. He completed his presentation with the description of the Microsoft implementation of NSA Suite-B in Vista: the NGC API. He gave a Win32 demo of how to encrypt with the NGC API. It was very dense, packed with information but went down quite well because he managed to keep the audience laughing every 3 minutes.

According to Rafal,

• If you're not using Vista, you should use:
• AES128 - resists to power analysis (cracking a code by measuring energy consumption of the CPU).
• RSA2048 (although slow for key generation)
• Avoid:
• DES. unless it is for Obfuscation.
• Triple DES: sounds better but is not. It is slow.
• IDEA
• RCU and RC5 (Ron Rivest)
• Blowfish, Twofish – ok but not a standard · CAST and GOST.
• Advice for developers:
• Rely on cryptosystems, do not write it yourself.
• Never write a loop that encrypts and encrypts: this can be cracked.
• Do not download libraries.
• Within the Microsoft OS: use CAPI 2.0 (CAPI 1.0 is deprecated). The .NET Framework wraps around CAPI.
• NSA Suite-B is supposed to replace all other algorithms.
• It will be available for military as well as civil use.
• Available in Windows Vista and Server 2008 as part of the NGC API.
• It is an Open API (which means you can plug-in more implementations)
• Works in kernel-mode (better performance).
• 2 Flavours: a B-API where key crypto is done by OS, N-API where crypto is done by a smartcard.

Sessions I've Missed

You can't see everything. I'll wait for the DVD to watch the sessions I've missed:

• DAT315R Be More Productive with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Tools
• DEV346 Microsoft Visual C# Under the Covers: An In-Depth Look at C# 3.0
• DAT318 Applied ADO.NET Entities: How to Leverage the Entity Framework in Your Application
• DEV313 Improving Code Performance with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

Wednesday: Visual Studio Component Round-Up

An overview of the 3rd party tools available for Visual Studio. LNC17 - Microsoft Visual Studio Component Round-Up 1 Wednesday, June 6 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM, N310 A

• DevExpress (reporting)
• ComponentOne (Office 2007-style ribbons and appointment controls)
• DevCentral (deployment)

Nothing I really need... There will be another session tomorrow. DevExpress offers more, especially in the area of refactoring - yesterday I saw Mark Miller demonstrating some of DevExpress' capabilities in the Partner Expo area. Need to check that out... By the way Mark is as funny during demos as he is on Mondays. Talking about Mondays, I saw a live recording of .NET Rocks shortly after the Visual Studio session.

Wednesday: Unit-Testing and Test-Driven Development

Yeaaaahh ! I scanned my office T-Shirt and I won a version of Office Ultimate 2007! Not the standard, the full one! How cool is that? It costs £480 on Amazon.co.uk... Also attended a session about unit-testing and TDD: DEV347 - Unit Testing and Test Driven Development Wednesday, June 6 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, N310 A DEV347_randell.pptx Speaker(s): Brian Randell, Doug Seven This kind of completes the talk Ron Jacob gave about Model View Presenter on Monday - the purpose of MVP is to make it possible to automate GUI unit-testing. Doug and Brian's presentation was energetic with colourful slides and very little text. Efficient demos: Doug did the talking, Brian the typing. In a nutshell, this is what they said:

• Unit-tests are a “living document” that reflects the intended use of the software.
• Advantage of many small unit-tests: allows you to narrow down the scope of failure upon change.
• A unit-test cares about its class only.
• You typically have more lines of UT code than actual code.
• TDD is ATRIP:
• Automatic,
• Thorough,
• Repeatable (doesn’t depend on dynamic data),
• Independent (one class only),
• Professional (well written, commented, easy to maintain).
• VS2008 Professional will include Unit-Testing (This one triggered a round of aplause).
• Test-driven development: Red, Green,Refactor.
  • Red: make it fail. Ensure the test fails with a method that's not yet implemented.
  • Green: make it work. Code the minimum to satisfy the test (even if the code is crap).
  • Refactor: make it better. Improve the code, make it easier to maintain.
• TDD requires discipline (no kidding).

• Pair programming: one writes the unit-tests, the other writes the implementation.

Brian Randell's blog: http://www.mcwtech.com/CS/blogs/brianr/ Doug Seven: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/DougSeven/

Tuesday: Jam Sessions

The conference shuttles were travelling from 8.30pm to 1am between the hotels and the City Walk next to Universal Studios. The jam sessions were taking place at the Groove, booked by Microsoft for the occasion. The Universal Studio City Walk is a funny sort of place. It looks like Aya Napa without the sex and the drunken Brits. Some sort of polished, clean but still over-the-top nightlife area. There is a lot of music in the streets but no broken bottles, no fights, and nobody vomiting. Women don't shout, flock or swear as they do in the UK. People wait in line for drinks at the bar (as for the till at Tesco's) ! Do you believe that? And of course everywhere is non smoking. The live band (Tech Ed attendees) was brilliant. At one point Carl Franklin joined at the guitar. A few videos I took with the mobile phone: Jam Session1.mp4 Jam Session2.mp4 Jam Session3.mp4

Tuesday: TLC about Types of Objects

Attended my first Interactive Theater session. ARC18-TLC - Making Sense Out of all the Types of Objects Tuesday, June 5 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM, Blue Theater 9 Speaker(s): Rockford Lhotka Not too sure about the format. There is too much distracting noise coming from around the booth, you can't hear people when they ask questions... The booths should be closed and sound-proofed so that the thing works... Rockford said a few things that made me click, among which:

"Software re-use is not a goal but a side-effect of refactoring. The consequence of re-use is tight coupling, and you don't want that."

hee hee...

Tuesday: Linq and ASP.NET

Saw one breakout session about Linq and two about ASP.NET.

DEV324 - The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Framework
Tuesday, June 5 8:30 AM - 9:45 AM, N320 A
Speaker(s): Luca Bolognese

Luca delivered a lively talk where he demonstrated the elegance of writing queries in LINQ. From C# you can now write code that looks very similar to a SQL query where the 'FROM table' is an object implementing IEnumerable and the resultset goes into a variable.

It works with SQL Server for the moment and could work with Oracle whenever Oracle releases a provider for it.

If LINQ worked with Oracle, this could be a nice way to code business rules in C# instead of PL/SQL stored procedures (IDE support for PL/SQL is very crude) or nHibernate (I'm afraid of ORM complexity from a debugging perspective).

Luca's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/lucabol/

WEB305 - Building a Complete Web Application Using ASP.NET "Orcas" and Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" (Part 1 of 2)
Tuesday, June 5 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM, S230 E
Speaker(s): Scott Guthrie


Attended both sessions by Scott. What I'll remember:

• Visual Studio 2008 will support multi-targeting. That means when you create a project you can say whether you want to use .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5.
• The HTML designer in Visual Studio is getting serious (same engine as Expression), although not as powerful as Dreamweaver, it's getting there: fast source switching, split design/code views...
• CSS support: you select an HTML element and see what CSS rules apply to it or select a CSS rule and see all HTML elements it applies to. You can also change the CSS properties in one window and immediately see the results in the other window.
• LINQ: when running a link query the VS debugger shows the SQL query that was generated by LINQ. It also shows the data retured by the query. Very cool, lots of clapping in the audience when Scott demonstrated that.
• VS2008 supports Javascript debugging (breakpoints, step by step) as well as intellisense. Again the audience loved it.

Tech Ed Shopping List

My shopping list:

• Get my Office T-shirt scanned (TLC green area)
• Decide whether or not to buy the HP Tx1000z
• Have a look at the demos for each 3rd party .NET controls libraries: VS components round-up. 12pm to 1.45pm N310A on Wednesday.
• Watch a demo of Visual Studio 2008
• Go through the hands-on labs I selected.
• Fill out the evals.

Tools and SDKs I must check out before I die

Before I forget:

• Devexpress (refactoring tools)
• Infragistics
• Telerik (cool controls)
• BT's Web21C SDK: set up calls between phones with very little code.
• Visual Studio Extensibility Toolkit

Monday: Brain Freeze

The batteries on my laptop are about to run out. So are mine. Got up at 6am, saw the keynote (featuring Christopher Lloyd), listened to Ron Jacobs talk about Model View Presenter, did a hands-on lab about Cardspace, listened to Kate Gregory talk about C++/CLI. Kate Gregory's blog: http://www.gregcons.com/kateblog/ Exhausted. The jet lag plus the lack of sleep are taking their toll. Need to sleep. Not sure I'll go to the jam sessions tonight... I wanted to see a TLC about Team System for Small Agile Teams but I turned out on time (as opposed to 30 minutes in advance) and the theater was already packed. So I completed my Cardspace Hands-on Lab instead.

Sunday: Party with Palermo

Just came back from the party hosted by Jeffrey Palermo at the Glo Lounge on International Drive. Good atmosphere and free beer. Jeffrey set up a game where you had to look up people's badge to find a pattern matching yours and win stuff (London's FOWA did a similar kind of thing). Always a good way to get people to move around and talk to each other, although alcohol also played a role. I discussed for a while with Tatsumi from Sweden. Later we talked about Web Apps, Spring, Java and the price of cigarettes with Mark Pollack from Interface21. Mark is giving a session this week about Sprint.NET (ARC402 - Understanding Spring.NET - 7/6/2007 16:30). Got a chance to say hello to Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell. From all the podcasts I listen to, it is definitely theirs I enjoy the most so it was fun to meet them in real life. Also bumped into Michelle Leroux Bustamante who talked several times on .NET rocks. I'm sure I have seen many more people I've either heard on a podcast or read about in a blog but I didn't know their faces... Very enjoyable party! Tomorrow, got to get up early to catch the keynote at 8.30am. I have the feeling this week is going to be a very good week!

Sunday: registration

It's Sunday, only pre-conferences and registrations today. The South Concourse of the Orange County Convention Center is relatively quiet. People come to register, get a badge, a sticker for Thursday's party and a bag full of info. Some sit down on the carpet to chat. There are security agents moving around with Segways...

Landed in Orlando

I landed at Orlando airport at 15.30. It took a while to queue at the immigration, wait for the luggage at the carousel (they call it carousel here), queue for the customs, give back the luggage (?), change terminals, wait again for the luggage at another carousel. I took a Mears shuttle from the airport to the hotel (it's cheaper than the taxis but it takes longer). I shared the minibus with a cheerful and talkative Microsoft employee, Ken Jones, who will be speaking on Monday at Tech Ed. Ken works with Microsoft Press, where he helps technical authors build the business case and content for their books. This is the session he will give on Monday:

LNC01 - How to Get Published: What it Takes to Become a Technical Author on Microsoft Technologies Monday, June 4 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, N220 A Speaker(s): Martin DelRe, Linda Engelman, Ken Jones Microsoft Press publishes a large variety of technical books for IT Professionals, Developers, and the home audience. And we’re always looking for good authors! If you’ve ever thought of turning your subject matter expertise and hard-earned knowledge into a book, this could be a great start! In this panel discussion, learn how to write a proposal, what we look for in deciding whether to publish your book, and how you can help sell your book once it’s on the market.

I'm staying at the Holiday Inn, between Universal Boulevard and International Drive. Big room with safe, large TV, desk and free broadband internet. International Drive has plenty of places to eat and I'll investigate that tonight.

Just finished packing

It's 18C here, 27C in Orlando. I'm flying on Saturday, resting on Sunday. The action starts on Monday.

Godthab

Holiday Forecast at Weather.co.uk:

Mind you, just 6 degrees less than here and better weather...

Tech Ed 2007: list of Hands-On Sessions

You can't select the Hands-On Sessions on the Tech Ed on-line shedule, so I'll make a note of those I'd like to try out here:

• SOA17-HOL - Understanding Microsoft Windows CardSpace in the DinnerNow End-to-End Scenario
• SOA20-HOL - Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Introductory Lab
• SOA21-HOL - WCF Contracts and Bindings
• SOA23-HOL - Microsoft Windows CardSpace Introductory Lab
• SOA24-HOL - Where is your applications identity?
• DEV09-HOL - Building Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Applications Using Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
• DEV10-HOL - Creating a Great Looking Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation Button with Microsoft Expression Blend and Expression Design
• BIN03-HOL - Performing OLAP Analysis with Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005
• DAT03-HOL - Microsoft SQL Server 2005: Service-Oriented Database Architecture

Tech Ed 2007 - Usefull Links

I'm preparing my schedule and gathering some info about Tech Ed...

• Tech Ed 2007 blogs:

http://techedbloggers.net/Default.aspx

http://virtualteched.com/pages/blogs.aspx

• Tips for the newbie (like myself)

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007/newbietips.mspx

http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2007/05/19/TechmiddotEd-for-novices.aspx

• Tech Ed Connect (networking)

http://teched2007.leveragesoftware.com/

• Party with Palermo

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeffrey.palermo/archive/2007/05/04/party-with-palermo-tech-ed-2007-edition-official-announcement.aspx

• Networking and Parties

http://techedbloggers.net/TechEd2007/Extras/Networking_and_Parties.category

http://www.microsoft.com/events/teched2007/attendeeparty.mspx

• The speakers

https://www.msteched.com/public/featuredspeakers.aspx

• Online Sessions

http://www.virtualteched.com/Pages/OnlineSessions/OnlineSessions.aspx

• The speakers I intend to listen to

Kate Gregory

Stephen Forte

Will Stott

Scott Guthrie

Luca Bolognese

Tim Stevens

Amanda Silver

What I listened to this week... #17

• ARCast.net - Training - Architect as Advocate
• Hanselminutes: Squeezing the most out of Continuous Integration - with Jay Flowers
• .NET Rocks: The ORM Smackdown! Very interesting conversation about Object Relational Mapping vs Stored Procedures.
• Hanselminutes Podcast 65 - Martin Fowler and David Heinemeier Hansson

Books I currently flip through #4

• How Microsoft® Windows Vista™ Works
• Practical .NET for Financial Markets
• Extended STL, Volume 1: Collections and Iterators
• C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

What I listened to this week... #16

• .NET Rocks: Brad Abrams Announces Silverlight
• MIX07 Buzzcast #19 - Aaron Marcus - Culture, Design, Business and Technology
• MIX07 Buzzcast #16 - Marc Canter - Digital Identity Panel
• Hanselminutes: Scott Guthrie and Jason Zander on Silverlight
• Hanselminutes: Chris Sells and Scott Look Back (Part 1 of 2)
• Hanselminutes: Chris Sells and Scott Look Forward (Part 2 of 2)
• .NET Rocks: Barkol, Gallo, and Vavilalla on ASP.NET AJAX
• .NET Rocks: Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design

Books I currently flip through #3

• Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
• Windows® Presentation Foundation Unleashed
• Unit Test Frameworks
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
• Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition
• Hibernate: A J2EE™ Developer's Guide
• C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

What I listened to this week... #15

• .NET Rocks: Michele Leroux Bustamante on WCF
• .NET Rocks: Kate Gregory on Managed C++, Vista Security, and more
• .NET Rocks: Jack Greenfield on Software Factories
• ARCast.net - More Service Oriented Infrastructure with Mark Baciak (Part 1)

CeBIT 2007

I spent 2 days at the CeBIT in Hanover, Germany on March 15,16, which was an opportunity to refresh my rusty German. This expo was fun! Big names had huge booths: IBM, Fujitsu Siemens, Microsoft, Samsung, O2, T-Com... If you ever think of going to CeBIT: Book in advance: I reserved my hotel only 10 days before the event and everything was taken. I wanted a room in the city center and I had to go for a hotel located outside Hanover, in a small village called Bilm. Very pleasant hotel but I had to get a taxi every time I wanted to move to town or to the fair. A guy from Alcatel-Lucent I talked to during the flight back to London told me his company had already booked the hotel for next year. Stay for a while: I stayed only for 2 days. This is clearly not enough. That thing is huge, you just can't see everything. Staying the whole week is probably a good idea. Don't go with your girlfriend: the booth babes are just plain hot. Hanover has about 500000 inhabitants with 300000 more during the CeBIT which is the most important time of the year for hotels and taxi drivers.The fair grounds (Messegelaende) cover one square kilometer. It's quite a generic show, with 20 large halls hosting business processes, communications, digital equipments and finance as shown on the plan below.

They show all sorts of things: waterproof tills, Michelin men, and hot chicks. Hall 23 hosted the PC cases and system coolers. Imagine a huge warehouse with just that: cases and fans. The guy below built a CPU cooling system using fridge parts. It's not very good looking but he managed to push a 2.9Ghz to 5Ghz. Because I need to buy myself a small laptop, I had a look at the latest notebooks. 2 models caught my attention: the Lifebook P1610 from Fujitsu Siemens and the Samsung Q1 Ultra. They both support UMTS, WIFI and have a touch screen. The Q1 looks better and uses HSDPA. However I'm not too sure about the side keys (which I tried). Nothing replaces a normal keyboard... The Fujitsu does have a normal keyboard but offers only UMTS, not HSDPA. I was told the Q1 would cost about €1500, the Fujitsu €2000. The Fujitsu is available now, the Q1 Ultra I played with at the Samsung booth was only a prototype: it should be available by the middle of this year. They even had a nostalgy zone. I learned to program with this: an Atari 1040STF. On Friday afternoon the gaming zone was packed with German teenagers, jumping to grab the freebies thrown at them by speakers on stage. EA Games had a big show and was giving away graphic cards. I spent a lot of time at the Microsoft booth, listening to short presentations about WPF/E, .NET 3.0, Sharepoint and IIS7. The T-Com area was huge. I believe I spotted Nicole Simon -the German blogger- at the O2 booth. All pictures I took at Cebit are here. I'm thinking of coming back next year and staying longer.

From CeBIT

It's 17.43 I'm in Hanover, Germany. I've been walking through this huge expo for the past 2 days. My feet hurt. Never seen anything so big. 1 square kilometer, only gadgets. I think I found the laptop I want to buy: will be either Fujitsu Livebook or Samsung Q1. Photos and sounds coming soon. For the moment, all I have is this small pic of three Freenet ladies:

What I listened to this week... #14

• Channel9: Making Windows Vista Reliable: Introduction to Windows Reliability with Mario Garzia
• Channel9: Windows Vista Diagnostics: Moving closer to a self-healing OS
• Microsoft10: Vista and Thirteen23 show you what WPF can do!
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.04.17 Reducing Code in the UI
• Polymorphic Podcast: Unit Testing and Test Driven Development
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.08.22 Architecting for Extensibility - Interview with Miguel Castro (Part 1)
• Polymorphic Podcast: 2006.09.13 Architecting for Extensibility - Interview with Miguel Castro (Part 2)
• Hanselminutes: Hiring and Interviewing Engineers

The Future of Web Apps

Unlike Linux Solutions which is mostly an expo, FOWA is a 2-day conference. While Linux Solutions targets the GNU community, FOWA focuses on Web programmers, which is yet another world of its own (but more exciting I think).

Who spoke? People from AOL, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Adobe, Microsoft, Vodafone, BT... And also people from Web2.0 startups: Netvibes (which blew me away the first time I used it last year), Moo, Digg, Quotations Book, and Last FM.

One amazing thing was the army of real-time bloggers taking notes on their laptops during the conference. All pics they uploaded to Flickr were automatically displayed on the FOWA page provided they were properly tagged. The absence of WIFI caused some frustration.

My favorite talk was the one about OpenId given by Simon Wilisson. The week before FOWA I listened to Scott Hanselman's podcasts about OpenId and Identity in general... It's about time something robust comes along to replace the heaps of user names/passwords we have to maintain -I have about a hundred for the various sites I registered with over the past 5 years. Simon's presentation was brilliant: from a distance he looks like an Elijah Wood with glasses. His talk was fast-paced, funny and clear; he obviously loves his stuff. With OpenId I could potentially reduce my hundred username/passwords to 3 or 4 personnas. Similarly in Cardspace I would have 3 or 4 cards, each one holding a certain amount of information about me. Simon mentioned the intention of Microsoft to get CardSpace to work with OpenId, which basically means: it will happen. I had a play with the CardSpace identity selector in Vista: looks nice and simple. The mp3 of Simon's presentation is on FOWA's website.

I had never heard of Tara Hunt before FOWA. She's a marketer and she focuses on the process of building relationship with communities. If Malcolm Gladwell had written the Tipping Point a bit later, he probably would have mentioned Tara Hunt. She's very pretty and charming and I like her hair-do. That's it, I'm in love with Tara Hunt now.

There was no physical separation between the speakers and the attendees so you could chat with them during the coffee breaks. I briefly talked with Chris Wilson from Microsoft. Chris Wilson has a good life: he's a program manager on Internet Explorer and a PADI instructor. He probably felt a bit isolated in a conference where most attendees were Mac users or Microsoft-bashers.

I had a chat with Thierry Bezier (www.leblogdebezier.com) a French blogger who gave up project management for video journalism. Pretty cool job: he travels around the world -mostly Asia- to interview directors of Web 2.0 start-ups. He was just coming back from South Korea and was getting ready to edit piles of video rushes on his laptop... Being a complete tourist I talked for ten minutes with Tristan Nitot before I realised he was the president of Mozilla Europe.

The booths were set-up in the coffee area: Microsoft was giving away 300 copies of Expression Web which is pretty good considering Expression costs around £250. I'm currently using Dreamweaver for Golios.com but I'm willing to give a serious try to Expression. Adobe was there too, demonstrating Apollo.

What I listened to this week... #13

• .NET Rocks: Steve McConnell Makes Sure We're Code Complete
• Channel 9: Expression - Part Three: Blend
• Channel 9: Scott Field: How secure is Vista, really? - Part I
• Channel 9: Scott Field: How secure is Vista, really? - Part II
• Bloxpert: Leweb3: Interview with Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe
• Channel 9: InfoCard Explained
• Pandora: New Pandora Podcast: Drums and Drumming, Part II
• .NET Rocks: Kim Cameron on Digital Identity

Converting an MFC project to UNICODE

You might need to do this, not because you're planning on creating a Mandarin version of your code, but simply because you want to compile your legacy code under .NET.

The Find and Replace function from VS2005 comes handy.

• Replace hard-coded string "blah" with _T("blah"). Use regular expressions: The best regular expression I found so far is the following:

~((_T.)(\#include ))("[^"\)]*")('[^']*')

although it's still not perfect.

• Replace LPCSTR with LPCTSTR.
• Replace SQLCHAR with SQLTCHAR .
• Replace char with TCHAR (rather than wchar_t which would work only in UNICODE).
• Replace strcpy with _tcscpy.
• Replace strncpy with _tcsncpy.
• Replace atoi with _tstoi.
• Replace strlen with _tcslen.
• Replace sprintf with _stprintf.
• Replace atof with _tstof.
• Replace itoa with _itot.
• Replace strcmp with _tcscmp.

Resources:

• MSDN:Generic Text Mappings
• Code Project: CString Management.

What I listened to this week #12

• dnrTV #53 - Mark Dunn on Streams in .NET
• .NET Rocks: Scott Ambler on Agile
• Jesse Liberty and Alex Horovitz on .NET 3.0
• podcast - Une semaine d'actualité à écouter ou à télécharger
• 2007.01.31 ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts : Interview with Darren Neimke
• Hanselminutes: OpenID
• How to start your own MicroISV
• Hanselminutes: WPF/E
• .NET Rocks! #214 - Billy Hollis on Application Complexity

Getting serious with Vista

I'm installing Vista on my main machine this week-end. Will my striped-RAID 15000rpm SAS drives, 30'' DELL monitor and NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 like Vista?

The answer is yes. I installed Vista with no problem and switched the resolution to 2560*1600 even before running Windows Update. I created a backup using the built-in backup tool and tested the recovery.

Applications I had a problem with:

• Paragon Disk Manager: does not work with Vista.
• Fable, the lost chapters: stops responding (issue with Nvidia driver).
• Skype Recorder: causes Skype to crash every time you start a call.
• Burning CDs from Windows: it takes ages to burn a CD and it the end it doesn't work (I have an LG Dual layer).
• Sony Soundforge Audio Studio 7.0: can't open files via drag and drop any more
• Media Center: takes 10 seconds to switch from/to full screen. The display driver crashes sometimes. Suspect this is due to the beta version of the NVIDIA Vista driver.

No issue with:

• Office 2003
• Sid Meier's Civilization IV
• SoundForge 7.0b
• Skype
• Norton Internet Security 2007: a free update is available for Vista
• Cambridge English Dictionary
• Google Earth

What I listened to this week #12

• Headset Microphones - 158
• Compression Leveling Limiting and Gating - 156
• 01 Net Podcast - Une semaine d'actualité à écouter ou à télécharger
• Best Damn Tech Show, Period 01.29.07
• Microsoft Conversations with Jon Udell: A talk with Marty Collins about blogs, architectural guidance, and technical marketing
• Web 2.0 Podcast: What GoDaddy Knows
• Web 2.0 Podcast: The State of the Internet, Part 3
• Pandora: Electric Guitar Effects
• dnrTV #52 - Paul Sheriff on Providers in .NET

Linux Solutions in Paris

Before I went to Linux Solutions 2007 I knew almost nothing about Linux. I must have installed it 3 times since I started playing with PCs and I never really used it. Always seemed like some sort of weird curiosity to me. I'm sure it's a very good OS but... I don't know. I never found it exciting enough to invest time into it. That's why I went to this expo: to get an idea of what was happening in the penguin world, see fresh demos and broaden my horizons a little bit. The expo grouped a lot of companies offering services around Linux or supporting Linux distributions (Mandriva, RedHat, Suse, Novell, Debian,...). There was a lot of hype around the open source concept and the logiciel libre. The word libre was used a little bit everywhere in every punchline of every booth. It was quite exciting actually. Linux is a world of its own, with its families, its casts, its passions, its dramas, its little stories of treasons and so on (the SCO affair for instance or the recent deal between Novell and Microsoft...). Linux users are similar to Apple users in that they can get really passionate about the OS they use. I watched a demo of Mono at the (huge) Novell booth. The guy proved you could just take a .NET executable compiled under Windows with Visual Studio and run it with no modification under Linux (in this case Suse Linux Enterprise 10 running the Mono runtime). Really cool. I hadn't realised Mono was that powerfull. And it also works with MacOS and Unix. Thanks to Mono, you can now tell your manager: "yes, .NET is multi-platform!" Not that it is usefull in practice: as part of my job I do not need .NET to be multi-platform since all desktops at my client's site are equipped with Windows XP. And in practice if you really want to run a Windows app from Linux or Unix, you use something like Citrix. Anyway... In the big diversified world of Linux you also get the hard-line free software militants: I witnessed a funny scene where a hoard of guys dressed in yellow plastic suits were walking from booth to booth, booing anybody who would appear to compromise the opensource ideal. Listen to the mp3 attached: in this soundbyte they cornered an employee of Novell France who stood firm. They seemed quite angry about an agreement Novell has signed last year with Microsoft. I had no clue what they were all going on about. Somebody from Novell clarified it for me afterwards.

What I listened to this week #11

• podcast - Une semaine d'actualité à écouter ou à télécharger
• ARCast.net - The Architecture of User Experience with Simon Guest
• Microsoft Conversations - Chris Wilson

What I listened to this week #10

• Best Damn Tech Show, Period 01.22.07
• Compression of the ears - 154
• What's new in Vista
• The Brain of the Future

What I like in Vista

What I like in Vista:

• the UI obviously
• the search (however still not as fast as Google Desktop Search)
• the audio: ability to set per-application volume, on/off status for each audio device, easy to switch between various audio drivers
• the snipping tool
• the backup tool. Definitely easier to use than Windows XP's. If the PC is off when a backup is scheduled, the backup takes place as soon as the PC is switched back on.
• the performance monitor and the reliability chart: the chart goes down as the frequency of crashes increases. See my chart below for the last month.

• Check for solutions window: when you download updates, Vista remembers the previous crashes and checks for solutions for each of them.

• Built-in disk partioning.

• Previous versions of a file are automatically saved (where? when? I don't know, but it's a very usefull feature, more clever than a rubbish bin).
• Offline files. Ability to encrypt offline files.

What I don't like:

• the backup: it does not offer you to back-up files from a specific folder. It only allows file types.

What I listened to this week #9

• New Vista GUI Stuff For Devs
• Best Damn Tech Show, Period. (1/15/07)
• Gary Talks Pop Filters - 152
• Total Recorder - 149
• Compression of the ears - 154
• podcast - Une semaine d'actualité à écouter ou à télécharger
• Hangin’ at Microsoft Studios
• Norman Lewis - Telco is Dead: Long Live the Communications Company
• ZDNet Hebdo Podcast - 15 au 19 janvier 2007
• Herb Sutter - The future of Visual C++, Part I
• Training: The Secret to Perfect Version Control

Porting unmanaged C++ code from VS2003 to VS2005

This should normally not cause too much trouble, after all, it's the same language and the same platform. Only the compiler changes a little. The VS2005 compiler does extra checks, especially in the 64bits and security area.

Warning C4244: 'initializing' : conversion from 'INT_PTR' to 'int', possible loss of data

• Solution: disable Detect 64-bit portability issue in the project options Configuration Properties > C/C++ > General.

Warning C4996: 'sprintf' was declared deprecated

• Solution: use the new and secure sprintf_s.

Reference: Deprecated CRT Functions

Note: don't use the new secure functions if you intend to keep compiling under VS2003. VS2003 projects will break if the new secure CRT functions are used. To disable the warnings, define _CRT_SECURE_NO_WARNINGS.

Warning C4996: 'itoa' was declared deprecated

• Solution: replace itoa with _itoa or _itoa_s ...or use a CString (which is more elegant):

Warning C4996: '_fcvt' was declared deprecated

• Solution: use _fcvt_s or CString.

Warning C4482: nonstandard extension used: enum 'CSecureRst::OperatorTypeEnum' used in qualified name

• Solution: don't write the name of the enum type when specifying the enum.

Trying Out... #1

• Dreamweaver 8: looks very similar to past versions. Site configuration does not want to memorise the ftp username/password of my website. It is possible to select all recently modified files in one go (very usefull as an alternative to re-synchronise your whole site)
• Ubuntu: installed Ubuntu on my old 2.8GHz PC without a single problem. One glitch: can't find a Linux driver for my WG111T WiFi adapter therefore no internet at the moment, not good.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0: major improvement about the past versions: the pic import dialog has many more options.
• Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 - January 2006
• Adobe Illustrator

What I listened to this week #8

• Channel 9: Technology Roundtable #1
• Mark Dunn and Mark Berry on Biztalk 2006
• ARCast.net - The SOA Radical - Lukas Svoboda
• Digital Media Insider Podcast 6: Desktop Music in Japan
• IFW SOA 2007-01-09
• David Platt - Why Software Sucks
• Web 2.0 Podcast: A Debate on Net Neutrality
• actualité - Podcast 01net. du 12 janvier 2007