I'm now again at BASTA! 2006, Mainz - Germany. Had alreda some interesting discussions here with some of the speakers, also the SOA architecture day yesterday was very interesting. Lesson learned: SOA is not really new, and it is not a technology. Just a idea to live.

Most interesting session today was about advanced debugging, by Ingo Rammer. He introduced some tools I never heard of and pointed out how to catch the most often issues debugging is used for, such as memory leaks in Windows Forms applications, or how to debug a CLR windows service. We had look inside WinDbg - what a cryptic tool, just remembered my time using the vi/unix years ago...

Most impressive was the keynote by Jason Zanders the "father of .NET Framework 3.0" today: about .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista. Live programming on Vista (RC) in Python using CLR 3.0, WPF and speech support (build in in CLR 3.0). Just one issue: the presentation machine with the slides just stopped working and required a (live) reboot. Lesson to learn: don't use beta software to just show slides

Yesterday in the Germany 8:00pm TV News at ARD: "Dell have to recall 4.1 million notebook computer batteries." Again.

My DELL laptop battery was near by but not in the listed part number range: https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/ (you have to ignore the certificate error displayed in IE7 to read the page). But it should be worth checkin'

Because of a server outage on a too many resources used failure the site is down. This includes the forum, the online help and the main site pages. We are sorry about and currently analyzing the reasons. I will post here, if the site is up again...:

Update (July, 21th 2006): we are up again, and it seems to run stable again so far.

The last weeks were very busy for Dare Obasanjo and me (same for Phil) at work, so we had really no time to make real progress in coding RSS Bandit. But recently we restarted: fixed a bunch of bugs (see http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?YetImplementedFeatures) and started integration of Lucene.NET. Now looking for a good explanation how to and when to use language specific Lucene Analyzers: for query string analyzation - clear. But how about the general initial indexing? An analyzer is attached to an IndexWriter: so we will get one Index per language?

Yes: they bit me. Now I found a undocumented feature about dasBlog: just add <DaysCommentsAllowed>60</DaysCommentsAllowed> to your site.config and it will only allow to post comments on entries not older than 60 days. Then I also disabled trackback and pingback, cleaned all my tracking entries and spam comments...

Note to myself: must read http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/svn-book.html if I got more than 15 minutes (coding-)free time.

As I yet posted this is a little tool to help with common tasks to maintain resource files. Recently I started to use the famous StringResourceTool MS used within the Enterprise Library and it is way cool! Worth to have a look if you start a new project from scratch.
But stop! You can now migrate existing project(s) to use the the StringResourceTool by the little help of the DiffPatchResources tool! Just download and copy it to a folder you configured to be found if you start a windows command line (%PATH% variable). Then use the new option -s to create the .strings file out of your existing main .resx file and save all the hand writings...

Update: to get the StringResourceTool run in VSIDE 8.0, add these settings to your registry by help of a .reg file with content:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Generators\{FAE04EC1-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}\StringResourceTool]
"CLSID"="{1D47CA76-5AF1-4152-8106-08140FF9886E}"
"GeneratesDesignTimeSource"=dword:00000001
@="Microsoft Data Warehouse String Resource Generator"

My user sample related to the Enterprise Library is now up and available for download. It extends the logging by providing a sink that is able to log to a syslog daemon (some of you may know that from UNIX systems). It works  according to the definitions in RFC 3164 (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3164.html) writing log entries to UDP port 514. Not yet optimized for speed and no EntLib Configuration Console support, but a starting point. Binaries, a short documentation and source can you find here.

Congratulation to Marco Buechel (the son of our CEO): he was the second with only a diff. of only 0.05 secs to the winner in Kitzbuehl (the legendary Streif race)!  Very nice, keep it on!

This week I had a hard day to track down a remoting issue we had with our product. We have a application service running (Windows Service or Console Window for tests) under CLR 1.1 and a ASP.NET 2.0 application want to call the service. After figuring out an issue with a third party software component I got another exception: "Serialization Error: Unknown member TextInfo". I'm talking about remoting serialization of function parameters and return values, not using/calling any formatter like SOAP. Diving into the problem analysis I found our software never uses such a member and so I examined a involved CLR class that member is part of using reflector: the CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider class used indirectly by an own collection inherited from NameObjectCollectionBase. I know MS worked hard to get the old style collections compatible to the new implementations using Generics and new approaches and so it is with that base collection. It is mentioned at the .NET 2.0 obsolete type/member list the collection is using a new preferred constructor with the IEqualityComparer parameter and they wrap up the old style HashCodeProvider and Comparer with a internal class named CompatibleComparer.

Knowing all that now I had to find a way to get around the serialization exception. It happens the moment the CLR 1.1 running at the app service try to deserialize the CLR 2.0 serialized collection. I started to create some experimental own HashCodeProvider classes and one that worked recently had the original (don't change the semantic!) CaseInsensitiveHashCodeProvider hold as a non-serialized member and just serialized the CultureInfo.Name to be able to re-create it on creation/deserialization implementing ISerializable and IDeserializationCallback to set the private members ("_hashProvider" and "_comparer" using reflection - they can only be set via the costructor!) of NameObjectCollectionBase. We had to replace the Comparer also, because after it serialized/deserialized our migratable HashCodeProvider successfully we got another wired exception we had to workaround by a homebrewed Comparer class implemented similar to our HashCodeProvider class.

Now it works fine. What we learned? Also MS don't keep in mind to consider also internal classes to provide backward compatible serialization formats. They used only the code attribute "Serializable" and don't implement ISerializable to explicitly get compatible serialization. I expect to get more issues like this... :-(

Update: It looks like the new cool feature named VTS (version tolerant serialization) will not work for Net.Remoting, isn't it?

Who is somewhat involved in the feeds/rss/rdf/atom world like me may have noticed the interesting discussion at the Microsoft Team RSS blog. There is now a consens by major players about using this common icon  to visualize webfeeds. Two or three days ago Matt opens a site named http://www.feedicons.com/ to get it broadcasted and so I did by this post

As soon Dare Obasanjo gets the bugfix installer ready of my favorite NewsReader you will notice we use it the same way as it will be used within IE7 - to indicate autodiscovered feeds while you browse. OK, that's an old feature, but you know we refreshed all our used icons and so it was just the right time for the right think thing.