Tuesday, November 29, 2005 - Posts
Because I know I won't be able to find these in the future unless I blog them here!
With so many new technology previews coming out of Microsoft recently it is hard to find to time to investigate and try out these tools.
Microsoft has some
great hosted labs, you can try for free, think Terminal Server/Remote Desktop into a pre-configured lab session complete with a labs manual for you to work through some basic concepts.
There is a
Windows Workflow Foundation lab:
"Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX? namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005.
Learn how to create simple workflows and use them in Windows applications via MSDN’s Windows Workflow Foundation virtual lab. This free, 90-minute, guided hands on lab will teach you how to:
- Create and debug a hello world workflow.
- Receive data into the workflow using parameters.
- Create an expense reporting workflow using IF/Else?, declarative conditions and custom activities.
- Extend the expense workflow with some advanced event-based activities."
Most developers/architects are used to the
four tenets of Service-Orientated design now. There is a great writeup on MSDN in the "
Principles of Service Design: Service Patterns and Anti-Patterns" paper on designing services and helping you stay away from anti-patterns like CRUDy & loosey goosey interfaces to better document and messaging patterns.
Well reading the first Windows Workflow Foundation book it's speaks about four tenets of workflow.
- Tenet 1: Workflows coordinate work performed by people and software.
- Tenet 2: Workflows are long running and stateful.
- Tenet 3: Workflows are based on extensible models.
- Tenet 4: Workflows are transparent and dynamic through their lifecycle.
John Evdemon goes into
each of these with a full explanation.
Whilst on the subject of WWF, Brian Loesgen has a great table
comparing Biztalk and WWF, the basic point being think
Biztalk as workflow across applications and WWF within applications.
Can Google do no wrong?
Rob Howard notes that if Microsoft was moving in the same way Google is currently they would raise alarm bells. Well I'm not getting into all the
Hailstorm/Google conspiracy, but the
list of Google services is getting longer, we'll just have to watch how
http://www.live.com/ &
http://www.start.com/ develop next year.
A few photos of
Google's new office in London over near Victoria, can they replicate the fun workplace here in the UK?
Guessing most people who have installed and played with the Visual Studio Community Technology Previews (CTP) will have already been through the pain of uninstalling and getting the release to manufacture (RTM) bits of Visual Studio 2005 installed.
But in case not, I thought I'd share some of the steps I needed to perform. You really need to uninstall all the beta bits, including WinFX
? bits you might have tried out over the last year or so.
Aaron Stebner has a good writeup on the
offical uninstall instructions and some of the automated tools.
But using these tools didn't completely remove everything for me. Brad Adrams also suffered 'dirty' laptop problems with the pre-release builds and talks through using
MSIZip and MSIInv.
MSIZap is a Windows Installer cleanup utility, available from
support.microsoft.com which can more remove files and registry settings that the standard Add/Remove programs might not get.
I shelled out to the commandline and piped the contents from MSIInv to a text file, msiinv > log.txt. Then used Notepad to find the GUIDs for the pieces of Visual Studio CTP and SQL Server CTP still left. Finally running MSIZap, msizap {package code guid} to remove those pieces.
Whilst on the subject of Visual Studio 2005, could they not have thought at bit more on the splash screen and how the list of installed add-ins/products would look with long descriptions and multiple items. I've still got to use RegMon from SysInternals to figure how why it shows multiple for the SQL Server tools!
It can be difficult to get a good balance between straight knowledge and more probing design questions when interviewing people, especially first round over the phone.
Not to be followed word for word but Scott Hanselman's list is a great start, covering general information and then more drill-down on what senior developers should be able discuss.
Mix those in with some good open discussions and hopefully you'll be able to spot a great candidate.
A little bit old now, but these emails, from Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, offer an interesting look at management communications inside Microsoft.
The memo offers a reflective look at what Microsoft thinks the competitive landscape is like and how users are expecting 'seamless' computing at home and work these days.
As an aside, what are the timescales around people reviewing and excepting the RSS extensions proposed, like
lists and
sharing (SSE)?
I had a couple of email messages forwarded to me which contained Powerpoint presentations, unfortunately
Hotmail stripped these into separate text attachment messages.
This meant the original message and it's attachments were in the same file, with the .ppt encoded as base64 block.
So a little
search later I found this handy pop3 mail tool,
getmail.
It was then a matter of running,
getmail -forceextract msg.txt
to separate the presentation out.
