The BBSM (Building Broadband Service Manager) is a Windows 2000 box that acts as a
gateway to the internet for customer access. It handles that login page when
you connect to the open WiFi network. It is the most convoluted piece of [insert
noun here]. The guy who signs my paycheck had asked me a few weeks back to redesign
said login page in keeping with corporate designs. It was also requested that
it be mobile browser friendly. Classic ASP, running JScript (yes, JScript),
in IIS 5 on Windows 2000 behind ISA Server 2000. The new layout was done in
about an hour, and it looks pretty good. It has been 3 weeks and I still can't
get the freakin mobile code working.
In a moment of insanity (clarity?) I got the bright idea to install .NET on the box
and rewrite all the pages from scratch. Rewriting took a couple hours, and the
mobile support works. Go to set it up on the box (which must be done via USB
key, via Ops guy, via physically walking to box in DataCentre {which I don't have
access to}) and come to find permission errors for the ASPNET account doing COM stuff.
Needless to say I hate COM Interop with a passion. I even sunk to the level
of giving the ASPNET account full admin privileges. Turns out Windows 2000 does
not like COM Interop either.
"It looks nice if you use a laptop" was my statement to the boss.
His response was "everyone is using PDA's and their iPhones. Maybe
10 customers use laptops."
Moral of the story: If the original code was written in the same year you turned 11,
run. Quickly.
A few weeks ago, six or so, I was offered a position as a Software Developer for the Woodbine
Entertainment Group. The position looked appealing so I accepted the job
offer. I am in a probationary period for the next four months and a bit.
Anything I say can be grounds for firing me. Never liked that part about non-contract
jobs. Ah well.
Woodbine is an interesting company. I knew very little about it until I got
word of the job. Seems I was the only one in Canada who didn’t know the company.
My grandmother, who moved to California 50 years ago, knew about the company.
Even used to bet there – well, the Woodbine Race Track, before it moved. It
has an interesting history.
It is migrating to be a Microsoft shop, from a more Novell focused infrastructure.
We are working towards standardizing on .NET for our custom applications.
The one thing that caught my eye with Woodbine is that the company is the technology
leader for Horse Racing. Not just in Canada, but throughout the world.
Our services can let you place a
bet live, on a track in Australia, and see results immediately. Can you
imagine the infrastructure required for such a feat? It’s sweet! The business-people
behind this are really keen on letting technology do it’s thing, so we can make money.
Lots of money. See our Annual
Reports on that. Check back for latest numbers.
Now, some of you may have noticed that our Corporate Portal is written in what looks
to be Classic ASP. For all intensive purposes, it is. Archive.org shows
the portal went live in 2001, and had a major rebuild in 2003. Since then incremental
changes have taken place, most of which have been built using ASP.NET. We are
working on the new portal. All I can say at the moment is: it’s going to be
awesome. So awesome that a new word will need to created to contain all of its
awesomeness. HorsePlayer Interactive is
pretty amazing, but I’d like to think this new site will be just that much more awesomer.
Yes, I said awesomer.
As for the nature of this site, it won’t change. I’ll still post my thoughts
and experiences. I might need to change stories a little to protect the innocent,
but it’s all in good fun. I may be forced to post details of how horse racing
actually works, because I’m still not sure I get all the facets of it. In time.
More to follow.
The
Windows Live team announced a
few months ago that their Live ID service will be a new provider for the OpenID system.
The Live team was quoted:
Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital
identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community
Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.
You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID
Web site.
I saw the potential in OpenID a while ago, long before I heard about Microsoft’s intentions.
The only problem was that I didn’t really find a good way to implement such a system
on my website. Not only that, I didn’t really have a purpose for doing such
a thing. The only reason anyone would need to log into the site would be to
administer it. And seeing as I’m the only person who could log in, there was
never a need.
Then a brilliant idea hit me. Let users create accounts to make comment posting
easier. Originally, a user would leave a comment, and I would log in to verify
comments, at which point the comment would actually show up. Sometimes I wouldn’t
log in for a couple days, which meant no comments. So now, if a user wants to
post a comment, all they have to do is log in with their openID, and the comment will
appear.
Implementing OpenID
I used the ExtremeSwank OpenID
Consumer for ASP.NET 2.0. The beauty of this framework is that all I have
to do is drop a control on a webform and OpenID functionality is there. The
control handles all the communications, and when the authenticating site returns it’s
data, you access the data through the control’s properties. To handle the authentication
on my end, I tied the values returned from the control into my already in place Forms
Authentication mechanism:
if (!(OpenIDControl1.UserObject
== null)) { if (Membership.GetUser(OpenIDControl1.UserObject.Identity)
== null) { string email = OpenIDControl1.UserObject
.GetValue(SimpleRegistrationFields.Email); string username
= ""; if (HttpContext.Current.User.Identity
!= null) { username = HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name;
} else { username = OpenIDControl1.UserObject.Identity; }
MembershipCreateStatus membershipStatus; MembershipUser user = Membership.CreateUser(
username, RandomString(12, false), email, "This
is an OpenID Account. You should log in with your OpenID", RandomString(12, false), true, out membershipStatus
); if (membershipStatus != MembershipCreateStatus.Success)
{ lblError.Text
= "Cannot create account for OpenID Account: "
+ membershipStatus.ToString(); } } }
That’s all there is to it.
At first I was a little skeptical at the quality of the Zune Player, as it’s basically
in direct competition with Windows Media Player. In retrospect, that’s probably
what made it what is today. It’s designed to sync the Zune media player, and
it works very well as an alternative to Media Player. There are a couple problems
that I have with it though:
-
It’s a resource hog
-
It requires a good video card to show effects
-
It sorts things in weird ways when meta data is missing
The Zune Player is built on .NET. It has a very big initial memory footprint.
It gets better as it settles into place. My assumption is that it’s using WPF
to make itself look pretty, and that’s where all the effects come from. As a
result some video cards aren’t capable of handling the effects renderings. For
instance, my laptop’s video card just dies when the effects are on. Zune will
turn them off if need be. If the Album Artist meta tag is empty, Zune sticks
“Various Artists” in place thereof. Zune sorts based on Album Artist in the
default view, so when I loaded my library into it, a whole whack of songs where under
Various Artists, which isn’t all that useful. With that being said, all the
(legally) downloaded content had proper meta tags and were sorted perfectly.
However, with all the negatives, comes a few gems. Sorting is a breeze.
Playlists are extremely easy to build. Filtering works. And it’s a really
slick UI.
I’m a little miffed the band image is pixilated, but all the extra info brought with
it makes up completely. Talk about slick.
It also makes decent random playlist decisions. On the UI and UX side of things
it gets the job done. It’s pretty stable. It hasn’t blown up on me yet.
I give it my approval. Check it out: www.microsoft.com/zune.
In my previous post, I started
talking about using Microsoft technologies over PHP and open source technologies.
There were a couple reasons why I chose to make the move. First, from a development
perspective, everything was object oriented. PHP was just getting started with
OOP at the time, and it wasn’t all that friendly. Second, development time was
generally cut in at least half, because of the built in controls of ASP.NET.
Third, the end result was a more rich application experience for the same reason.
The final reason comes down to the data aspect.
Pulling data from a database in PHP wasn’t easy to do. The built in support
was for MySQL, with very little, if next to nothing for SQL Server. In a lot
of cases that isn’t always a bad thing. MySQL is free. You can’t argue
with that. however, MySQL wasn’t what you would call ACID compliant. Defined,
MySQL did not have the characteristics of being Atomic, Consistent, Isolated,
and Durable. Essentially, when data goes missing, there is nothing you can do
about it. SQL Server on the other hand is very ACID compliant. This is
something you want. Period.
Once .NET 2.0 was released, a whole new paradigm came into play for data in a web
application. It was easy to access! No more, or at least next to very
little boiler plate coding was necessary for data access now. Talk about a selling
point. Especially when the developer in question is 16 going on 17.
Now that I didn’t need to worry about data access code, I could start working on figuring
out SQL. At the time t-SQL scared the crap out of me. My brain just couldn’t
work around datasets. The idea of working with multiple pieces of data at once
was foreign. I understood single valued iterations. A for loop made sense
to me. SELECTs and JOINs confused me. Mind you, I didn’t start Statistics
in math until the following year. Did SQL help with statistics, or did statistics
help me finally figure out SQL? It’s a chicken and the egg paradox.
So here I am, 17 years old, understanding multiple languages, building dozens of applications,
and attending developer conferences all the while managing my education in High School.
Sweet. I have 3 years until the next release of Visual Studio comes out.
It was here that I figured I should probably start paying more attention in school.
It’s not so much that I wasn’t paying attention, it’s just that I didn’t care enough.
I put in just enough effort to skate through classes with a passing mark. It
was also at this point in time that I made an interesting supposition.
Experts tend to agree that people who are programming geniuses are also good at math
and critical thinking or reasoning. Not one or the other, but both. Now
I’m not saying I’m a programming genius, but I suck at math. It was just never
in the cards. But, according to all those High School exams and the psychological
profiling they gather from them, my Critical Thinking and Reasoning skills are excellent.
Top 10% in Canada according to the exam results. My math skills sit around top
20-30% depending on the type.
Neurologists place this type of thinking in the left hemisphere of the brain.
The left brain is associated with verbal, logical, and analytical thinking. It excels
in naming and categorizing things, symbolic abstraction, speech, reading, writing,
arithmetic. Those who live in the left brain are very linear. Perfect
for a software developer.
The supposition I made had more to do with the Pre-Frontal Cortex of the brain.
It does a lot of work, some of which is planning complex cognitive behaviors.
Behaviors like making a list, calculating numbers, abstracting thoughts, etc.
It plans out the processes our brains use to get things done. This is true for
both sides of the brain. So, suppose you are left brain-oriented. You
are predisposed to be good at development. Now, suppose your Pre-Frontal Cortex
is very well developed, more so than the average person. It could be reasoned
that part of being a programming genius is having a well developed Pre-Frontal Cortex.
So why does this make us want to program? Find out in Part
5.
In my second post I discussed
my run in with ASP, and how PHP was far better. I ended the post talking about
an invitation to a Microsoft event. This was an interesting event. Greg
and I were the only people under 30 there. When that’s a 15 year difference,
things get interesting. Especially when you need your mother to drive you there…
The talk was a comparison between Microsoft based technologies and Linux based technologies.
The presenter was a 10 year veteran of IBM, working on their Linux platform, who then
moved to Microsoft. For the life of me I can’t remember his name.
His goal was simple. Disprove myths around Linux costs versus Windows costs.
It was a very compelling argument. The event was based around the Windows
Compare campaign. It was around this time that Longhorn (Longhorn that turned
into Vista, not Server 2008) was in pre-beta soon to go beta, and after discussing
it with Greg, we decided to probe the presenter for information about Longhorn.
In a situation like that, the presenter either gets mad, or becomes really enthusiastic
about the question. He certainly didn’t get mad.
Throughout the rest of the talk, the presenter made some jokes at mine and Greg’s
expense, which was all in good fun. Based on that, we decided to go one step
further to ask how we can get the latest Longhorn build, at one of the breaks.
the conversation went something like this:
Me: So how do people get copies of the latest build for Longhorn?
Presenter: Currently those enrolled in the MSDN Licensing program can get
the builds.
Me: Ok, how does one join such a licensing program?
Presenter: Generally you buy them.
Me: How much?
Presenter: A couple thousand…
Me: Ok let me rephrase the question. How does a student, such as myself
and my friend Greg here, get a the latest build of Longhorn when we don’t have an
MSDN subscription, nor the money to buy said subscription?
Presenter: *Laughs* Oh. Go talk to Alec over there and tell him I said
to give you a student subscription.
Me: Really? Cool!
Six months later Greg and I some how got MSDN Premium Subscriptions. We had
legal copies of almost every single piece of Microsoft software ever commercially
produced. Visual Studio 2005 was still in beta, so I decided to try it out.
I was less than impressed with Visual Studio 2003, but really liked ASP.NET, so I
wanted to see what 2005 had in store. At the time PHP was still my main language,
but after the beta of 2005, I immediately switched to C#. I had known about
C# for a while, and understood the language fairly well. It was .NET 1.1 that
never took for me. That, and I didn’t have a legal copy of Visual Studio 2003
at the time.
Running a Longhorn beta build, with Visual Studio 2005 beta installed, I started playing
with ASP.NET 2.0, and built some pretty interesting sites. The first was a Wiki
type site, designed for medical knowledge (hey, it takes a lot to kill a passion of
mine). It never saw the light of day on the interweb, but it certainly was a
cool site. Following that were a bunch of test sites that I used to experiment
with the data controls.
It wasn’t until the release of SQL Server 2005 that I started getting interested in
data. Which I will discuss in the my next
post.
I finally got around to building a MetaWeblog API Handler for this site, so I can
use Windows Live Writer. It certainly was an interesting task. I wrote
code for XML, SQL Server, File IO, and Authentication to get this thing working.
It’s kinda mind-boggling how many different pieces were necessary to get the Handler
to function properly.
All-in-all the development was really fun. Most people would give up on the
process once they realize what’s required to debug such an interface. But it
got my chops in shape. It’s not every day you have to use a Network Listener
to debug code. It’s certainly not something I would want to do everyday, but
every so often it’s pretty fun.
While in the preparation process, there were a couple of procedures that I thought
might be tricky to work out. One in particular was automatically uploading images
to my server that were placed in the post. I could have left it to the manual
process, what I started out with, which involved FTP’ing the images to the server,
and then figuring out the URL for them, and manually inserting the img tag.
Or, I could let Live Writer and the Handler do all the work. Ironically, this
procedure took the least amount of code out of all of them:
public string NewMediaObject(string blogId, string userName, string password,
string base64Bits, string name) { string mediaDirectory
= HttpContext.Current.Request.PhysicalApplicationPath + "media/blog/"; if (authUser(userName,
password)) { File.WriteAllBytes(mediaDirectory + name, Convert.FromBase64String(base64Bits));
return Config.SiteURL + "/media/blog/" + name; } else { throw new Exception("Cannot
Authenticate User"); } }
Now its a breeze to write posts. It even adds drop shadows to images:
Live Writer also automatically creates a thumbnail of the image, and links to the
original. It might be a pain in some cases, but it’s easily fixable.
All I need now is more topics that involve pictures. Kitten’s optional. :)
Some days you just have to shake your head and wonder. As it turns out, I'm a
little late to hear about this, but nonetheless, I'm still shaking my head.
It turns out that Windows has gone open source. And (!!) it's not being made by Microsoft
anymore. Well, Windows™ is still made by Microsoft. Windows is now made by a group
under the gise of ReactOS.
ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system
based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims
to follow the Windows® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level
right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares
none of the unix architecture.
So essentially, these people are taking
the Windows architecture (based on XP/2003), and redesigning it from scratch. Or rather,
are re-coding it from scratch, because redesigning would imply making something different.
Sounds vaguely familiar to, oh, something called Vista. Except uglier.
Now, that nagging feeling we are all getting right about now should be visualized
as a pack of rabid lawyers. Isn't this considered copyright infringement? They outright
define the product as a copy.
And what about the end users? Are all programs designed to run on Windows supposed
to be able to run on this ReactOS? Why bother with testing? The XP architecture is
now almost 8 years old by now. That means anything designed to run on Vista, or soon
to be designed to run on Windows 7, wouldn't stand a snowballs chance in hell, running
on ReactOS.
I would love to see how a .NET application runs on it.
Do you remember the
SubSonic
project? The Entity Framework is kind of like that. You can create an extensible
and customizable data model from any type of source. It takes the boiler plate coding
away from developing Data Access Layers.
Entity is designed to seperate how data is stored and how data is used. It's called
an Object-Relational Mapping framework. You point the framework at the source, tell
it what kind of business objects you want, and poof: you have an object model. Entity
is also designed to play nicely with LINQ. You can use it as a data source when querying
with LINQ. In my
previous post,
the query used NorthwindModEntities as a data source. It is an Entity object.
|
Courtesy of Wikipedia |
The Architecture, as defined in the picture:
-
Data source specific providers, which abstracts the ADO.NET interfaces to connect
to the database when programming against the conceptual schema.
-
Map provider, a database-specific provider that translates the Entity SQL command
tree into a query in the native SQL flavor of the database. It includes the Store
specific bridge, which is the component that is responsible for translating the
generic command tree into a store-specific command tree.
-
EDM parser and view mapping, which takes the SDL specification of the data
model and how it maps onto the underlying relational model and enables programming
against the conceptual model. From the relational schema, it creates views of the
data corresponding to the conceptual model. It aggregates information from multiple
tables in order to aggregate them into an entity, and splits an update to an entity
into multiple updates to whichever table contributed to that entity.
-
Query and update pipeline, processes queries, filters and update-requests to
convert them into canonical command trees which are then converted into store-specific
queries by the map provider.
-
Metadata services, which handle all metadata related to entities, relationships
and mappings.
-
Transactions, to integrate with transactional capabilities of the underlying
store. If the underlying store does not support transactions, support for it needs
to be implemented at this layer.
-
Conceptual layer API, the runtime that exposes the programming model for coding
against the conceptual schema. It follows the ADO.NET pattern of using Connection
objects to refer to the map provider, using Command objects to send the query, and
returning EntityResultSets or EntitySets containing the result.
-
Disconnected components, which locally caches datasets and entity sets for
using the ADO.NET Entity Framework in an occasionally connected environment.
-
Embedded database: ADO.NET Entity Framework includes a lightweight embedded
database for client-side caching and querying of relational data.
-
Design tools, such as Mapping Designer are also included with ADO.NET Entity
Framework which simplifies the job on mapping a conceptual schema to the relational
schema and specifying which properties of an entity type correspond to which table
in the database.
-
Programming layers, which exposes the EDM as programming constructs which can
be consumed by programming languages.
-
Object services, automatically generate code for CLR classes that expose the
same properties as an entity, thus enabling instantiation of entities as .NET objects.
-
Web services, which expose entities as web services.
-
High level services, such as reporting services which work on entities rather
than relational data.
No, Zelda is not back. LINQ stands for
Language Integrated Query.
It's a set of query operators that can be called in any .NET language to query, project,
and filter data from any type of data source. Types include arrays, databases, IEnumerables,
Lists, etc, including third party Data Sources. It's pretty neat.
Essentially LINQ pulls the data into data objects, which can then be used as you would
use a Business Object. The data object is predefined by a LINQ Provider. Out of the
box you have
LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to Objects for providers. Once
you define the data object based on provider you can start querying data:
Within the
foreach loop the 'Customers' class is a data class that was defined
based on a LINQ to SQL Provider. In this case, the database was Northwind.
Syntactically LINQ is very much like the SQL language, mainly because they both work
on the same principle. Query (possible) large amounts of data and act on it appropriately.
SQL is designed to work with large datasets. Most other languages work iteratively.
So SQL was a good language choice to mimic.
However, there is a small problem that I see with LINQ. If I'm doing all the querying
at the DAL layer instead of using things like Stored Procedures within the database,
and I need to modify a query for performance concerns, that means the DAL has to be
recompiled and redistributed to each application out in the field. That could be 10,000
different instances. Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the query within a Stored
Procedure? Just a thought...