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