Mind from R. Wandering Has Moved!

I blog at http://et.cairene.net

2005-11-15T10:35:00.000-08:00

I no longer blog here, but blog at et.cairene.net (feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering).

Please update your feed!

2005-09-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

Dan noticed that he was no longer getting posts from my blog and that he had originally subscribed to the wrong feed (i.e., the Atom feed from Blogger) instead of my Feedburner feed: this one.

Those of you who originally subscribed to the Atom feed probably won't get this post! Otherwise, please update the feed to the following:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MindFromRWandering

I apologize for any confusion this might have caused.

Cheers!

Changing CLR Version with ILMerge

2005-09-19T21:19:00.000-07:00

This post has been moved to my new blog.

More from the PDC05 Day -3+

2005-09-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

The third day of the PDC were of particular fun. It was so much fun, and it has taken me until Sunday to get around to writing about it!

Our booth was full of prospective customers, partners, and several Microsoft people.

In terms of customers, there were people from all sorts of companies both big and small. We heard from many IT people in need of improved performance and distributing existing processes. Many of the customer prospects said one of the following:
I didn’t know you could do grid computing with Windows.
Wow, you can do that with .NET (or C#, or . . . ).
We look forward to following up with these prospects and getting more satisfied customers.

We also talked to several exhibitors who could take advantage of our product to enhance the performance of their product. Look for the “Digipede Inside” logo coming soon to a product near you!

I had a good talk with Eric Lantz from the Microsoft HPC group on many things related to their coming offering and their beta that was just released. He cleared up any confusion (at least for me) about where CCE fits into the release schedule. The good news is that both CCE and CCS are scheduled for release in the first half of 2006. Kyril and Bob Muglia demonstrated CCS during the third keynote. As CCE is merely a limited version of the Windows Server 2003 64bit OS, it hardly got a mention. I think this makes sense for the PDC crowd, however, I think that the HPC customers will be quite happy with CCE for its competitive price.

I had several conversations with people in the Visual Studio and other groups. Not only did I get some technical issues resolved, but some good ideas for how to further enhance our product and its integration with different Microsoft products. And even better, now I have met many of the Program Managers that will help me if/when we have any difficulties. I will be blogging more about this as I dive into these integration points.

All in all, PDC05 was a great conference for us. Sometimes when exhibiting at a conference, it can be hard to know if it will be full of actual customer prospects, or just an opportunity to interact with other potential partners. Of course, the answer to this is different for each customer. One company in a nearby booth had very little traffic. For us, though, it turned out to be the best of both worlds.

Universal Studios Party

2005-09-15T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Universal Studios party was a lot of fun. I have not been there since the 70s. Jaws and the Six Million Dollar Man were the exciting things to see then. Now, I think the highlights are The Mummy Returns ride and the Jurassic Park ride.

They are not kidding when they say you get wet on Jurassic Park. The guys I went with weren’t too keen on getting wet, but I went straight for the front of the boat. The attendant told us the front-left was the worst on the boat. That is where I sat. I could tell what was coming because once I sat down (before the ride left) my pants were already quite wet. Anyway, it was a blast.

We brought a prospective customer with us to the party. He only recently began coding for the Microsoft OS. at one point, out of the blue, he said “Man, I have to tell you, that Visual Studio absolutely rocks!” He was talking about Visual Studio 2003.

Thanks to Microsoft for a great party and a great PDC05!

PDC05 Day 2

2005-09-14T18:05:00.000-07:00

The keynotes today at PDC05 were interesting. I'm excited about the Windows Workflow Foundation. Any chance that it will be released for XP? There was a lot more on Office 12 today. The server-side stuff looks great. These kinds of tools will transform the file-server from a ubiquitous catchall of data for all users into special purpose storage for IT staff.

I spoke with Jesse Kaplan today from the CLR team. We talked about different ways to selectively launch a process using a specific runtime. He also confirmed a strategy for supporting a second level of registration-free COM. We are already doing registration-free COM, but there are some ways that I want to make it more flexible for our customers. The best thing is, that if I have any trouble getting this to work I will know who to talk to! I recently blogged about putting together an article on COM APIs for .NET Libraries. One of my motivations for doing this is to provide end-to-end steps on how to handle getting registration-free COM to work with embedded Win32 resources in a real release environment. I'll have to get back to that soon.

My thanks to Jesse.

I appreciate the effort that Microsoft is putting into creating an open community for developers (and ISVs). Talking directly to people who have the answers certainly saves all of us a lot of time. This is a great thing about these events: for we can always locate the person we need online or through our Microsoft partner representatives, it is a whole different thing to walk into the middle of a group of 20 experts on a specific topic.

Jim Gray from Microsoft Research came by our booth today. This was my first time meeting him. Our CEO, John, has met him (and met with him) several other times. It is nice to see that he is taking an interest in what we are doing. We will be seeing him again in October up at a Microsoft gathering for academic and scientific computing.

And now, I'm looking forward to the party tonight at Universal Studios.

The LINQ Project

2005-09-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention the LINQ project yesterday.  Integrating query into the language is such an incredible productivity enhancement.  Of all of the new technologies I have seen at this PDC, this is the one that resonates the most with me as a developer.  The ability to create strongly typed data representations and queries integrated into the compiler for ensuring language semantics is huge.  I think of all the code that we have written in .NET for which we have to translate data in and out of SQL; all of the queries that we have written that cannot be effectively validated until runtime; and the numbers of places in our code where changes must be kept in sync.  With LINQ, the initial development time will be greatly reduced, but almost more important, the future maintenance cost will also greatly reduced.

I got into a discussion with Dan about the posting by Paul Mooney   about the Google/Microsoft judgment was bigger news then the Bill Gates keynote (as indicated by the relative placement of these news items in a newspaper).  This doesn't really surprise me (everyone wants to know if Ballmer really threw that chair).  Seriously, though, I think that a lot of the technologies that are being unveiled at PDC05 fall into two camps:

1. Vista and Office 12.  I fear that the delays in Vista and perception of Office (see my earlier post) may make these stories not "sexy" to the mainstream press.

2. Really cool technology for developers.  The typical business person has heard this story a million times already.  In fact, above I post that LINQ will allow me to develop better software more quickly and that it will be easier to maintain.  That is an obvious cost benefit to companies of all kinds.  But is saving money with better tools an interesting story?  Hasn't the press written thousands of stories just like this before?  I'm not arguing that it isn't cool or that it isn't revolutionary technology.  I'm just arguing that your typical reader doesn't get it.

Windows CCS. CCE?

2005-09-13T23:53:00.000-07:00

Windows CCS is the Compute Cluster Solution that the Microsoft HPC group is working on. This is a collection of tools and prescriptions for reservation-based clustering on the 64-bit Windows platform. Windows CCE (Compute Cluster Edition) is a version of the Windows Server 64-bit Operating System tailored to clustering.

One of my posts yesterday mentioned Windows CCE (regarding a talk at PDC05). I expected to hear about that in today's talk by Kyril Faenov. So far, though, I have heard no mention of it. There is still time for this tomorrow (there will be a Windows CCS (or CCE?) demo on stage with Bob Muglia at tomorrow's keynote).

Kyril’s talk on CCS today was a good primer for people unfamiliar with MPI and message passing in general. It is interesting to see how many parallels there are between the work we have done at Digipede and the work being done by Kyril’s group. This will ease the integration points between our systems.

I'll post more on this another time – now, sleep is beckoning.

The Expo

2005-09-13T23:43:00.000-07:00

I spent a little bit of time trolling around the Expo today at PDC05. My company, Digipede, has a booth at #123. Come by and say hello.

Check out the JetBrains booth. I didn't get a chance to talk to them today. Apparently, they came out here all away from Czechoslovakia. My whole team uses their product Resharper. It does refactoring for C#. Refactoring is cool. But what I really like about the product is its searching capabilities. It allows you to enumerate / list exact references to classes, types, members, etc. No more "Find in Files" to try to determine how a particular item is used. I was amazed at how much this boosted my productivity. It helps in refactoring, obviously, but also in code audits (where was this defined?), debugging (where is this field being set?), and just straight coding.

MSDN Universal subscribers: don't forget, always bring your ID card to these events. They always have something special to give out to subscribers. Or maybe it is just to Universal subscribers. Anyway, go talk to them. I got a cool rollup keyboard (that I think we'll go nicely with my new JASJAR).

I was interviewed today by Doc Holladay at isvchalktalk.com. They told me I did a good job. But I think they get paid to tell me that. They are all really nice and I think they have the giveaways (those blinky spiky balls) that will be the biggest hit with my kids. I have rarely been interviewed in that way (i.e., in one take with no editing). I certainly enjoyed it, but went away feeling I could have been crisper. Next time!

Comments on the keynote day 1

2005-09-13T14:05:00.000-07:00

Bill Gates gave the keynote today at PDC05. I like hearing him talk about the software industry – here's a guy who truly loves software, calling it is the biggest agent for change in the world. Addressing the question of whether the best days of software development are behind us, he rightly says that this is one of the most exciting times in the future looks very interesting. The development of the Internet and the boom and bust cycle that we all witnessed was certainly an exciting time (mostly the boom). But the advent of truly connected devices and systems makes this an interesting time regardless of the platform on which you are developing. And the Microsoft platform is getting more interesting all the time.

I loved the Bill Gates / Napoleon Dynamite video. IMHO, the very best part is the dance bit at the end.

I was impressed with Office 12 (and I understand there's more to come tomorrow). I did not expect to be. I suspected that the world didn't need a new Office. For example, I think that the improvements in Office 2003, while significant, and did not make for a compelling upgrade from Office XP for a significant set of users. With Office 12, though, it is immediately apparent how they have made great strides in helping users get their work done faster. Of course, there are all sorts of other interesting features for sharing, workflow, etc. but I can see how your average user will look at Office 12 and say, "I've gotta have that."

The Vista demos looked very good. I have played around with some of this already, so it didn't feel particularly new, but it sure is cool. It will certainly do a much better job of helping users work with the data on their machines. And I don't mean in a Google Desktop kind of way, but with an extensible file edge view should model that allows for slicing and dies in your files in arbitrary, useful ways.

Radisson / LA Metro

2005-09-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

It turns out we aren’t in one of the conference hotels. No shuttle service for us, but it did give us the chance to ride the LA metro. Pretty much door to door from the Wilshire Radisson to PDC05. I wish we were carrying a camera, because it was kind of cool to get off of the Metro and see the south hall of the LA Convention Center with the big Microsoft PDC sign.

The other bonus of the Radisson is the free upgrade to the Ambassador suite. While we will be scrambling for the shuttle to the Universal Studios party tomorrow night, at least there is a nice room to come back to.

Sweet suite.

Update to VPN/SSH @ PDC05

2005-09-12T19:25:00.000-07:00

I posted that we were having trouble with our VPN and SSH clients.  I was right – in principle, there is no problem using these services at PDC05.

Unfortunately, our VPN doesn’t support NATT so we won’t be getting our email while were here.  And one of our remote SSH boxes won’t reply to us if we run SSH2, but SSH1 works OK.  Not ideal, but it will have to do.

I hope.  Otherwise we’re going to make a grid out of four laptops.  That might be cool anyway.

Thanks to Chris Craig in network support for helping us diagnose the problem.

Ode to cool names

2005-09-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

After my last post on some of the cool Microsoft technologies at PDC05, I started thinking about acronyms and product names, and product positioning. Specifically, I started to miss some of the old Microsoft code names.

Indigo is now WCF.
Avalon is now WPF.
Longhorn is now Vista.

It feels so generic, so corporate, and so stodgy. While never having talked to anyone in Microsoft branding / naming, it seems like this is intentional. Microsoft is making a terrific push into the breadth of the enterprise. No longer is Office the solution to every problem and C++/VB the only tool. Microsoft is serious about serving this market beyond the OS/Office and, I think, the products names reflect this.

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t have an easy job on their hands – I don’t mean to imply that they do.

But, I miss the old names. At the very least, I wish Longhorn had kept its name. Or had taken the name of Indigo. Now that is a cool name.

Tech @ PDC05

2005-09-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

Microsoft is presenting on and / or announcing a lot of new technologies at PDC05 that are interesting for us:

Windows Communications Framework (was Indigo) The more integrated the communications services are with Windows and the more transports-independent they are, the better. I look forward to giving our customers more options on how our components communicate (regarding protocols, transport, and security) to best fit their specific operating environment. Of course, a lot has already been written on WCF. I look forward to hearing more about future directions.

Windows Workflow Framework and Windows Workflow Services (was Windows Orchestration Engine): while we plan the enhancements in the workflow capabilities of the Digipede Network, integrating with existing systems is always a requirement. A no-brainer for us was/is to build a BizTalk adapter. WWS looks interesting (as it looks to replace the existing BizTalk Orchestration services) – it will allow us to integrate with BizTalk 2006 as well as Office 12. This means that Microsoft has just reduced the number of integration points we need while increasing the flexibility of the entire solution. Very cool.

Windows Server Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) This product is going to make a big splash in the growing 64-bit clustering market. The work that that team is doing to improve the platform for distributed computing is all good. As Dan said in a recent post, this is a critical move. I look forward to Kyril’s talk and to catching up with him on their plans.

And more. I’ll blog on that later . . .

Cabbing to the PDC

2005-09-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the cab on the way to the LA convention center for PDC05. Dan is there now having some issues with network connectivity from our booth (#123). SSH and VPN ports blocked? Can’t be – I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

A few weeks ago, I was at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with my family. I found out that my 4-year old has a stronger stomach than I do.

And I’ve just realized I cannot blog while in the back of an LA taxi.

Tweaking my blog

2005-09-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

I just changed the look of my blog so I can post code (and still have it be readable). I'm still tweaking with it, though.

Is there some kind of award for having the worst looking blog? If so, then I can safely claim to be in the running (with all apologies to the author of the template -- it did look better before.

Removing a hanging assembly reference

2005-09-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know if many people have run into this problem: a .NET assembly referencing another assembly in its manifest, though the referenced assembly isn't used at all.

I don't believe this is possible under normal conditions, but it is possible with an application that post-processes the assembly. Specifically, this can happen when using Dotfuscator 3.0. When obfuscating .NET 1.1 assemblies, it supports custom obfuscation attributes defined in a .NET library that they ship. Depending on the way you configure Dotfuscator, these attributes can be stripped from your obfuscated assembly. This is reasonable as the attributes have already served their purpose. There is a confirmed bug (that I'm sure they'll fix soon) that leaves a reference in the manifest though all the attributes have been removed.

In most cases this doesn't effect the use of your assembly. The CLR won't try to load the referenced assembly (as there are no actual references to any types in that assembly). The one problem that I have found, though, is if your assembly is a library that others (e.g., your customers) will reference in their own projects. The assembly still functions properly, but undesirable warnings will be emitted by the compiler. And of course, this only applies if you are not shipping the unreferenced assembly.

As an interim solution, they (i.e., Preemptive support staff) suggest disassembling to il with ildasm, manually editing the il, and then reassembling with ilasm. Of course, this approach doesn't work in an automated release environment. Understandably, they leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Here is what we did. Since all of our release builds are done with nant,
we made use of the built-in ildasm and ilasm tasks. Then we added a custom task that removes the reference from the il. The following code shows an example target assuming that the name of the library is 'MyLibrary.dll':

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<project name="Hanging reference Example" default="rebuild" xmlns="http://nant.sf.net/release/0.85-rc3/nant.xsd">
    <target name="assembleobf">
        <!-- fix the Preemptive.ObfuscationAttributes.dll hanging reference bug -->
        <ildasm rebuild="true" output="MyLibrary.dll.il" rawexceptionhandling="true" quoteallnames="true"
            utf8="true" linenumbers="true" input="MyLibrary.dll" />
        <!-- define a task that takes an IL file as an input, removes the Preemptive.ObfuscationAttributes.dll, and
             writes the file out again -->
        <script language="C#">
            <imports>
                <import namespace="System" />
                <import namespace="System.IO" />
                <import namespace="System.Text" />
            </imports>
            <code>
            <![CDATA[
                [TaskName("removeRef")]
                public class RemoveRefTask : Task {
                    private string _obfuscatedLibrary;
                    [TaskAttribute("obfuscatedLibrary", Required=true)]
                    public string SomeProperty {
                        get { return _obfuscatedLibrary; }
                        set { _obfuscatedLibrary = value; }
                    }
                                                       
                    protected override void ExecuteTask() {
                        StreamReader inFile = new StreamReader(_obfuscatedLibrary + ".il");
                        string inContents = inFile.ReadToEnd();
                        inFile.Close();
                   
                        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(inContents.Length);
                        StringReader stringReader = new StringReader(inContents);
                        string line;
                        while ((line = stringReader.ReadLine()) != null) {
                            if (line != @".assembly extern 'PreEmptive.ObfuscationAttributes'") {
                                sb.Append(line + '\n');
                            } else {
                                for (int i=0; i < 4; i++) {
                                    stringReader.ReadLine();
                                }
                                sb.Append(stringReader.ReadToEnd());
                            }
                        }
                   
                        StreamWriter outFile = new StreamWriter(_obfuscatedLibrary + ".il");
                        outFile.Write(sb.ToString());
                        outFile.Close();
                    }
                }
            ]]>
            </code>
        </script>
        <removeRef obfuscatedLibrary="MyLibrary.dll" />
        <ilasm rebuild="true" output="MyLibrary.dll" resourcefile="MyLibrary.dll.res" target="dll">
            <sources>
                <include name="MyLibrary.dll.il"></include>
            </sources>
        </ilasm>
    </target>
</project>

They'll fix it soon, I'm sure -- but for now this will work just fine.

eWeek writes about the Digipede Framework SDK

2005-09-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

Darryl Taft at eWeek posted an article yesterday on one of the things we'll be showing next week at PDC05:

Digipede to Release SDK for Windows Grids

Have I said that I'm looking forward to the PDC?

Run Plazes while at PDC05

2005-09-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have been checking out Plazes. If you haven't tried it out yet, it is a way to share your location with others where location is defined by the network you are running on.

Kind of cool, but not too useful when sitting at home or in the office. I'm looking forward to trying it out at PDC05 to see how many people (and geeks like me) come up on the Plazes radar.

Maybe I'll "see" you there.

Scoble says we'll be amazed at PDC

2005-09-07T15:02:00.000-07:00

Today on channel 9, Robert Scoble asked for guesses about what will be announced at PDC next week (because no one seems to have a clue). Then he blogs that PDC05 will prove that Microsoft is definitely not "roadkill."

I certainly didn't think Microsoft is roadkill -- but I'm glad I'll be there to find out first-hand.

See Ye old "guess what MSFT is gonna show at the PDC
and Steve says Microsoft is roadkill (and a few other things), respectively.

COM APIs for .NET Libraries

2005-09-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

Recently I added a COM API to the Digipede Framework API – developing a good, maintainable COM API was critical. The “easy” Microsoft .NET COM interop works pretty well, but it defaults too many things for those of us building public libraries.

If your public library needs to support COM, there are several steps you will want to take to make your COM API easier to maintain and to allow your library to behave (or appear) as COM clients expect.

I am thinking of writing an article (or a series of blog entries) on the steps I took designing our COM API. While some material exists out there on this (most of it pure reference), none of it brings it all together, soup to nuts.

My quick outline for the article:

Introduction
Limitations of COM interfaces
Overriding the class interface
Eventing interfaces
Building your Type Library
Embedding your Type Library
Enabling Registration-Free COM
Building a COM API Reference w/NDoc

Every section will include examples.

I guess my only question is: do I blog it or write an article for one of the many .NET related sites? If I write an article, which site should I submit it to?

Designing .NET Class Libraries

2005-09-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about Microsoft and why I choose to develop software for their OS versus some other platform. I won't post all of that discussion here, but one point I made to him was that Microsoft provides excellent resources to their developer community.

I don't think I really need to further make that point here (anyone interested in reading my blog probably buys into this view already); however, it did remind me of a series on API design that I downloaded from MSDN earlier in the year. Designing .NET Class Libraries provides good information for all .NET developers, regardless of whether you are designing public libraries or not.

Designing .NET Class Libraries

It is worth the time investment.

Going to PDC05

2005-09-04T22:10:00.000-07:00

My company, Digipede Technologies, will be promoting our new SDK at PDC05 next week. At the same time we will be announcing and giving away free licenses to the Digipede Network Developer Edition.

I am looking forward to the trip. In my past companies, the clientele was often not technical outside of their particular vertical experience. As software developers are one of the primary targets for the Digipede Network, I'm happy that our customers and prospective customers are highly technical. This makes the customer meetings much more interesting for me and productive on many different levels.

Basically: We'll get to talk to lots of smart people about what we are doing. And that is always fun.

What is R Wandering?

2005-09-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

This blog will track my thoughts on software, process, tools, and technologies. I will also use it as a place to post approaches and solutions to technical problems I come across. I have a bit of a backlog of these that I plan to write up over the next month (e.g., some nant and ccnet stuff, developing COM interfaces and documentation for .NET, some Preemptive posts . . . ).

I have been developing software since high school and basically full time since I was a Junior at Cal. I finished there 15 years ago and have since helped build a couple of companies as the software technology lead. While my primary responsibility is generally planning, designing, and building software product I have also been responsible for or directly involved in every aspect of the business. I've been on company boards, managed human resources, hired and fired, performed technical selling and evangelism, worked through various due-diligence processes, sold a company, and more. Aside from developing software, one of my favorite things to do is to discuss business issues with fellow entrepreneurs.

My company, Digipede Technologies (www.digipede.net), sells the Digipede Network, a Windows-based distributed computing product built upon Microsoft .NET.

I became interested in distributed computing while at Energy Interactive (www.energyinteractive.com). Among other products we had an energy billing solution designed for billing the most complex commercial and industrial customer for energy providers. Billing was a long running process and we needed to come up with a way to shorten the total run time for a billing cycle. When scaling up was no longer an option, we did the next logical thing: we scaled out. To do this, we ended up rolling our own solution using DCOM, but, we felt that there had to be a better way. That is one of the motivations for the Digipede Network –a packaged solution with the tools to make it easy to grid-enable applications.

In terms of development technologies, I've spent most of my time working with Microsoft tools and technologies. I first started with Windows 2.0 and have, of course, worked on all of the Microsoft platforms since. I have worked with C++, VB, MFC, COM/DCOM, ATL, everything from ODBC to ADO.NET, Java, MSMQ, SQL Server, C#, ASP.NET, and more. Now, I am fully a .NET and WinFx developer.

In addition to my work I also manage a couple of FreeBSD servers for hosting email and Web sites.

And none of that explicitly defines R Wandering.