Jeffrey A. Miller: .NET, Web Services, Web Development

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:26:45 GMT

Google Releases Maps API for External Use. bahree writes "Google now has officially released their API's for Google Maps; till now there were a few hacks in place such as my where I work, but now its all supported. You would need to get a key, which is associated with a specific url, you can get that here and also read up on all the fun details here." [Slashdot:]

Microsoft: Where's the feed?

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 15:43:17 GMT

Microsoft has certainly joined the blogosphere in a big way, whether it's the famous Scobleizer or a host of developers (onsite and offsite). Much of the MSDN content is available via RSS. Ironically, however, a visit to the MSDN Blogs page, which lists the most recent blog posts from the MSDN Microsoft clan, fails to turn up the famous XML () or RSS () images. In fact, I have yet to find a master list of RSS feeds on Microsoft's website, although this FAQ about blogging and RSS/Atom points to some helpful feeds and resources. A Google search turns up a page of Microsoft PressPass RSS feeds and a Security Updates page with this feed. I did find a couple of RSS feeds on the Architecture page and a link to a list of architecture-related blogs, but again without a group RSS feed for the list of blogs altogether. You have to visit each blog to find the RSS link. Simon Guest's black-on-blue RSS link is hard to see, demonstrating the disadvantage of diversity in weblog layout. My best guess is that the URLs just map to the blog software of choice for each author (ain't the web grand?). I did unearth a very cool gem while digging through the MSDN blogs, though. Jack Greenfield's blog pointed to a blog by Grady Booch! Talk about cool! I'd only heard legends about the guy, you know, Booch Notation, the "Three Amigos," UML, Rational, etc. He has a blog--how cool is that? And he also has a picture, which I think I will add to my mugroll. Then there's also Martin Fowler's "bliki", or in his words:

A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development

I need to come back to absorb the essence of his bliki approach to publishing. Fortunately, his hybrid approach still offers an RSS feed. And, of course, Martin has a picture too. Bottom line: Microsoft should make it easy to find RSS feeds on their site, including a link on their site map. Update: I found (after much searching) a page which lets you search the Microsoft site blogs. It serves up RSS feeds and OPML for categories of blogs.

Thu, 04 Nov 2004 18:13:52 GMT

Automatic Ad-Rotation in JavaScript. In an earlier article, the author wrote about how use JavaScript to display random advertisements when the page loads. To complement that article, he now focuses on rotating the ads in random order, over a period of time without reloading the page. By Jonathan Fenocchi. 1104 [WebReference News]

DevX: HTML Tidy and .NET

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:44:00 GMT

Fix Up Your HTML with HTML Tidy and .NET. When standards change, your development efforts must often change with them. But change doesn't always have to be painful. If you're trying to upgrade your HTML pages to the latest standards, fix unclosed tags, find and fix deprecated features, and format all your Web pages consistently, HTML Tidy is just what the doctor ordered. By alexhildyard@hotmail.com (Alex Hildyard). [DevX: .NET Feed]

DevX: C# without .NET?

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 14:35:38 GMT

Free Your C# Apps from .NET Platforms. Visual Mainwin offers unprecedented platform flexibility, allowing you to develop applications in C# and deploy and run them on J2EE. Learn how to take advantage of this freedom by building a C# Web service that you can run on platforms besides .NET and IIS. By lmoroney@philotic.com (Laurence Moroney). [DevX: Latest Web Development Content]

RSSify - an example of the cost of novelty "Web Services"

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 14:58:12 GMT

RSSify was pretty cool. It could turn a non-RSSing blog into RSS for consumption by aggregators. But here's the catch--it caught on so much that it was hogging precious bandwidth (see below). Successful grass roots services (not necessarily limited to XML-RPC/SOAP) face the same problem--becoming the victim of their own success.

23-Mar-04 3:00:30 pm Please stop using RSSify. Unfortunately I can no longer bear the bandwidth cost of running this service so I'm turning it off. There's a mirror at http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/rssify/rssify.php. There may be others.

RSSify is a rather horrible hack that shouldn't be needed any more. Please ask the owner of the site you're reading (http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/) to change to a system that generates RSS natively such as Blogger Pro or Movable Type. Alternatively consider hosting RSSify yourself rather than using my bandwidth. [RSSify for http://handheldlib.blogspot.com/]

Oh, and by the way, note the mention of the Blogger Pro subscription. It's not that expensive for the year. That's why it surprises me so much that Dave Barry's weblog doesn't use the pro version. Come on Dave, if you don't want to fork over the cash, have somebody pay for it. Your readers will thank you.

Windows XP SP2 released

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 22:33:40 GMT

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is out and available for use.

...By the way, I notice there's an RSS feed on [Microsoft's] security page. That's a good one to subscribe to.

This link brought to you by [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger]

Moving this weblog

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 10:25:41 GMT

Howdy folks! Boy that sounds corny. If you're reading this post on radio.weblogs.com/0113822, I am moving this weblog to my own server with a more 'appropriate' domain name-- http://www.xagronaut.com. And I've shortened the name from The xagronaut Chronicle to Xagronaut. I apologize for any possible mistakes I might make during this process. I have seen at least one article with tips on the process, but I'm afraid I haven't followed all of the advice. I appreciate everyone who reads this weblog, and I hope you will migrate all of your links to my new address. Thanks. Still to do:

Redirect RSS feeds

Investigate a conditional redirect from my pages at the Radio UserLand community servers to my new location--should I use some kind of conditional UserTalk script in my template, or maybe some JavaScript based on the window.document.location.domain?

Time for more trackbacks, Theoblogical should fade to white, dotText weblogging, oh, and Hi Sam

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 03:19:02 GMT

Sam Ruby's site seems to be picking up on my posts now that I have enabled the trackback feature in Radio. My reference to the Fade To White trick later in the post will surely ping again. The trackback feature seems to work well enough. I can't say as much for the mail-from-aggregator feature which has stopped working.

I get an email every hour that does not have any links--no body, just a message about "This message contains the latest headlines, courtesy of Radio Userland" (actually not a quote). Well, I tried to tweak it just a tad by adding a couple of extra content substitution tags (or so I thought) I was hoping to have the permalink and site link appear in the email (it doesn't by default). I've been writing a bookmarklet to parse out hyperlinks, text selections, and stylesheet references from a web page. While it has multiple uses, my primary goal is to create a custom "blog this" tool. I know they exist, but I'm reinventing the wheel. And whoever said that reinventing the wheel was bad, should consider the intellectual property wheel before applying that sentiment universally. Yeah, sometimes I reinvent the wheel, but *it's my wheel*. And I'm starting to get to the point, familiarity-wise, where I might actually be able to pull off the bibliography bookmarklet I wrote about before. And it was working great until I tried to get Radio to give me just one or two more links in the emails I was getting. You're supposed to credit the source blog right? But the source blog is not consistently in the default mail-from-aggregator template. Is that too much to ask? It's not as though the format of the email wasn't intended to be customized. There's even a dedicated interface for just that. After I tried the web interface unsuccessfully (because of faulty assumptions that this feature would work like the text file interface where #anything can be referred to later). So I dug into the database, as I'm becoming accustomed to doing lately. I really don't think I changed the code. I might have goofed and accidentally saved something, but I'm almost positive I didn't. I was a little disappointed in digging through the code to find out that the substitutions are hard-coded string replacements. I can't just pick some common substitutions like <%permalink%> on the item or <%link%> or <%url%> on the feed. Guess they just never thought of that. There was some cool code that I did find, though. I was hoping it would save my butt, but no luck. Well, anyway, the cool part was that there was an "init" procedure that would create the default configuration entries if they were not already defined. Which means that if I wanted to restore the intial default settings, I had only to delete the existing values in Radio's outliner database explorer interface. They even reappeared mysteriously just seconds after I whacked them. For a second, I thought Radio was flaking, or Windows had a repaint problem, or I was trying to delete too many items (yeah, 3) at once. Nope. Radio magically detects or polls and discovers that the entries are gone and need to be recreated. Just like it does with the cached upstream server stuff. You delete the entries and it instantly detects that they've disappeared and reads them from the disk if they still exist. Now I'll have to do some research to find out if this is happening to anybody else. [Update: I found another tool called news2mail for Radio Userland that appears to already have the links I need.] So, I wonder if Dale at Theo blog ical will see this post before I leave a comment on his blog. Either way, it sounds like he has a problem similar to the one Sam Ruby solved with the "fade to white" social engineering technique--changing the color of the contents displayed in his deprecated RSS feed. I was puzzled at first when I saw it, but it was definitely effective. Since he has switched, he is advertising his new feed. I'm a little confused, and a little surprised, too, with the next change going on there. I haven't read enough to get [oh wait, now I did] all the background. Now, maybe this is a second blog, and I can understand that. The cool thing is that he's using dotText, a .NET-based weblog tool. I had a tough time getting back to his Radio links because he's done a pretty effective job of redirecting his Radio weblog version to the Movable Type blog, which ironically still has a link to his Radio version which redirects back to Movable Type. Oh, well. I think it's par for the course when trying to manage all this stuff despite tools that are only partially customizable, reasonable, agreeable, etc. Man, this blogging thing is really starting to catch on--so much so that I can barely keep up with the host of blogging tools and news aggregators. Yowza! Well, I had better get my publishing act together before it's a given that everyone can publish without thinking or without writing code, and I'll be considered behind the curve. As usual. Of course, I'm all about customization and integration. That's half the reason that I'm frustrated with Radio, and half the reason I'm impressed by it. It's kind of a love-hate thing. [Note: I would give you a couple more links for the love-hate phrase in the last sentence, but I've already spent 2 and a half hours tweaking this post. Good night.]

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 01:59:17 GMT

Website Organization Strategy. Good tip. [Robert McLaws: BoyWonder.NET]

Ray Ozzie's Early Groove Architecture Stories

Wed, 14 May 2003 03:10:37 GMT

Here's a good story of a critical decision gone right.

Tue, 13 May 2003 20:41:27 GMT

The SOAP/XML-RPC/REST Saga, Chap. 51. (SOURCE:"timb")-A lucid, easy to understand explanation of SOAP, XML-RPC and REST. Bravo, Tim!
<quote>
Today Dave Sifry of the excellent Technorati announced an API for the world. The API, as announced, is about as purely Webby a thing as you can imagine. Dave Winer pushed back, suggesting a more SOAP/XML-RPC kind of approach. This is maybe the single central issue in architecting Web apps right at the moment, so I think it's OK to take a few more whacks at the supine equine. Furthermore, I think the issue is simple enough that anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, ought to be able to understand it. So I've provided an introduction for the non-geeks who read ongoing, all three of them, and looked a little more closely at the Technorati situation.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Publisher shake-up

Fri, 09 May 2003 05:36:25 GMT

Rockford Lhotka's site mentions some shifting in publisher ownership. Much to my surprise Wrox Press has gone belly-up. APress and Wiley have moved in to cast lots for the scraps.

APress has purchased the bulk of the Peer Information (including Wrox Press) titles. Wiley purchased the Wrox Press brand name and 36 titles, and now the liquidation of the assets is complete with APress buying all remaining assets.

Rocky's book, Visual Basic.NET Business Objects is sold out on the major online retailers.

3500 copies of the book were printed by Wrox Press before they went bankrupt. From what I am hearing, these are sold out so Amazon and bn.com no longer have them. It is possible that you may find a copy in a physical book store, but otherwise I am afraid we'll have to wait until the first Apress printing of the book.

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:28:09 GMT

Revisiting the Virtual Press Room.

Phil Wainewright

I've just subscribed to Phil Wainewright's archive of press releases at looselycoupled.com. (PR folk take note: I subscribed voluntarily to this feed.) An analyst and writer focused on Web services, Phil has built an application that publicists can use to post their press releases to his website, which in turn flows them out as an RSS feed. ... [Jon's Radio]

Fri, 02 May 2003 04:10:58 GMT

Stop The DataGrid Madness. ASP.NET comes with a lot of server controls out of the box. One of them is the DataGrid server control. It offers some good packaged functionality, but it suffers from a lot of shortcomings. For some reason, many ASP.NET developers feel compelled to introduce hack upon hack to get the DataGrid to handle the features that they want. [The angryCoder Blog]

Tue, 22 Apr 2003 19:43:19 GMT

FoxPro On Linux, Drama Ensues. bltfast32 writes "I don't know how many people have been following this, but this is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Whil Hentzen, prominent FoxPro and ... [Slashdot]

C# XML-RPC client

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 18:05:27 GMT

XmlRpcCS 1.8 [freshmeat.net]

An C# XML-RPC client and server for .NET applications.

Mainframes Never Die?

Wed, 09 Apr 2003 14:18:24 GMT

TechRepublic: CIO Update: Future of the IBM Mainframe Looks Surprisingly Good [Linux Today]

Hmmm...

What I hated about the IBM mainframes was that a lot of the organizations that relied on them were staffed by stuffy, old-school programmers unable or unwilling to see the value in doing anything new with technology. Many times it was obvious that they were hoping to coast on their current skillset in their current job until retirement.

Forget trying to teach an old COBOL jockey about object-oriented techniques. Heck, even event-driven programming was a stretch after eating-drinking-sleeping top-down procedural programming all your life. I know COBOL programmers who insist that too many separate paragraphs leads to excessive performance overhead. You're kidding, right? What about code maintainability? Oh, right, I forgot. You're only interested in job security.

I once made the mistake of complaining about a COBOL program that I had to maintain and modify for Y2K. I said to my manager, "Man, this code ugly, and there's no documentation or comments to help." It turns out that he was the primary author of the code. He said, "Jeff, if I'd have documented all of this stuff, I'd be making $20,000 less than I am."

Don't get me wrong. I understand COBOL. I used it for close to six years between college and three years of dreadful jobs that included it. Now, I don't even include it in my advertised skillset. Yeah, I could still go back and write a PICTURE clause if I had to. Ironically, I wrote a utility in Turbo Pascal and then Quick BASIC 4.5 Professional to generate PICTURE clauses for me.

What I don't like about COBOL is its monolithic style. All variables are global. Encapsulation and modularity are hard to come by. There is no support for parameter passing to in-program functions. Dynamic arrays are a pain. And, if you're data is not fixed-length in every instance, you may as well tear your hair out manipulating variable-length strings. Don't believe me? Just try presenting a "Last Name, First Name" on a report. You'll have to munge it up with the STRING statement DELIMITED BY SPACE (or some similar junk that I've thankfully forgotten). Sure, you can call other programs by way of a LINKAGE SECTION, but please! That's a lot of crap to go through just to introduce some modularity and reusability.

Now, we could argue that some "innovative" (not) companies have revamped COBOL to put a new face on an old language. But I say that it's not really COBOL any more. Micro Focus tried to introduce Object COBOL in the mid 1990s. Now Fujitsu has introduced a .NET compatible compiler. No thanks. I don't feel like arguing about the merits of COBOL. I hope Fujitsu sells a ton of the product. More power to them.

Anyway, as far as the platform itself goes, the IBM mainframe is very robust and well-engineered. A system administrator friend of mine told me that they took an IBM mainframe and carved it up into about 1,000 virtual machines and ran virtual Linux servers on a couple of the VMs. Now that's cool.

GoogleBoxing

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 17:59:48 GMT

Display the result of a Google query on your blog in a special box by using the Google API. You can integrate Radio UserLand and Frontier by using Google Glue. The Google API is a web service.

From my journal

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:50:00 GMT

OK, don't take this post as whining, but, after all, it is my blog, and I can come off as whining if I want. Between working two jobs and other home duties, keeping up an active weblog is difficult. If I have something profound or brilliant to say, I usually wait until Wednesday, so Dean might just pick it up for his Thursday technoCache over at blogs4God.

I haven't been posting quite as much as I would like. I have, however, been journaling. I currently use TreePad to maintain several spaces that keep my equivalent of the Franklin Covey Daily Record of Events. I often journal things that might make good blog entries. In fact, I often tag entries with some kind of designator to describe the type of post/entry. One of these tags is [Blog]. This means "I don't have the time to blog this right now, but I'm including it in my journal for blogging later."

OK, so here are some of my [Blog] entries from March:

BoyInk - I enjoyed the content I found during my brief visit--especially the article, "Church Websites - What We Don't Know." He also had a telling encounter about customer service via email. (Couldn't find a permalink, but the date was February 22, 2003).

blogs4God describes the process for "cache of the Day."

I don't remember why I visited wibsite.com, but there are plenty of great one-line zingers on the blog there.

I have a big mouth. I'm constantly reminded of that. Foot sandwich is a regular part of my diet. Here's a post at blogs4God that gives some good advice for those with similar problems.

While searching for help on how to manage multiple versions of the .NET framework, I stumbled on this article with a good explanation of the version probing process and this blog with some very useful .NET stuff.

Dean on table-less design.

More to come later, as I dump my journaled blog entries.

What's the deal?

Thu, 06 Feb 2003 01:37:33 GMT

So why is Microsoft so opposed to nesting like-named elements? For instance a folder element containing more folder elements? Their operating system has been based on that concept for over 20 years. Sure, internally, the FAT doesn't necessarily break it down hierarchically other than to point to other folders by using some kind of reference that determines the relationship, but what's the difference?

This is frustrating. Microsoft Visual Studio displays the message, "Although the XML document is well formed, it contains structure that Data View cannot display. The same table (navpoint) cannot be the child in two nested relations. See, they conceeded that my XML data is well-formed. What their basically saying is, "Since we insist on fitting hiearchical data into a relational metaphor, you are not allowed to use GUI editing on your XML data." Sounds like a limitation in their perspective and thinking. They chose to force the relational model. They chose not to provide a means to edit data in a grid format despite its "irregularity."

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 02:09:36 GMT

"Open Spectrum FAQ" [Daypop Top 40]

Recipe for Greatness

Sun, 05 Jan 2003 18:03:11 GMT

The disruptive Web. If you're creating a Web service that you hope will have a disruptive impact, the lessons are clear. Support HTTP GET-style URLs. Design them carefully, matching de facto standards where they exist. Keep the URLs short, so people can easily understand, modify, and trade them. Establish a blog reputation. Use the blog network to promote the service and enable users of the service to self-organize. It all adds up to a recipe for recombinant growth. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio]

Here is a provocative recipe. I wonder what we can cook up. I wonder what he means by "self-organize." I certainly do a lot of organization on my own, and I'm always looking for ways to improve.

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 01:07:55 GMT

Note to self: Visit this site later. SOAPBuilders is a community involved in some effort to advance SOAP implementations and interoperability.

Web-based ASP.NET Enterprise Manager for MSDE and SQL Server 2000

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 03:30:26 GMT

I found an interesting open source project that fills a hole in the Microsoft strategy for MSDE. It's a third-party open source web application that enables much of the same functionality that comes with SQL Server Enterprise Manager. It is available in C# and VB.NET on the ASP.NET Enterprise Manager page at SourceForge.