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.