Scott Hanselman

"Neo, there is no boolean." - Web Services, Product Releases, Travel and Famous Bloggers.

July 29, 2004 Comment on this post [3] Posted in ASP.NET | Web Services | Ruby
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A bit of a random, but nice day.

  • Rory joined Microsoft as a cartoonist for MSDN.  There's some presenting in the job description as well.  Congrats Rory.
  • The Portland Nerd Dinner was lovely, as usual.
    • Thanks to Jim Blizzard for the free books.  Jim represents everything that is good about Microsoft.
    • Thanks to Chris Sells for being so approachable about all things Longhorn.  Chris also brought a crew along from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.  There were a few people who we having iBook Drum Circles that couldn't make it, but I DID very much enjoy meeting and talking to Sam Ruby
    • Sam Ruby was a kind, soft-spoken and very insightful fellow who told me a number of great insights into ATOM and the making of a new "standard."  Such things, if they are good, seem to take off with a life of their own, don't they?
  • I'm heading to BAY.NET tomorrow (PDX->SFO) to talk about Web Services and darnit if I'm not nervous to meet Simon Fell.  I'm looking forward to talking to him (and the group) about the chaos around null, nil, specified and "just not there."  I predict a blood bath of newbie confusion.  Fully. 
    • Is it null?"
    • "Yes, nil"
    • "But it's there"
    • "No, it's there, but it's marked nil" 
    • "Is it specified?"
    • "It's both specified and it's nil" 
    • "So if it's not there it's nil and not specified"
    • "No if it's not there, it's specified but nil itself is then unspecified."
    • "But is the boolean false then?" 
    • "There is no boolean"
  • Anyway, I shall try my best for the talk to not suck egregiously.
  • Had a big internal release of a magical thingie I've been working on all this time and we're all a titter with excitement.  Inconvenient that I'm travelling the same day, but Patrick Cauldwell has the whole thing on lockdown, so I know we're solid.  (I am disturbed though that his 9-year-old thinks Breakin' was better than Breakin' II: Electric Boogaloo. At least we agree on the tour de force that was Krush Groove.)

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hosted in an Azure App Service
July 30, 2004 11:36
Yes, many a fun hour at WS-I was spent on the subject of nill/null/there/not. really. lots of fun. stimulating.

Had I not been shaking my head at beans, and an odd wsdl.exe 'thing' I might have noticed you'd be in SF and dragged my butt up there. Next time..

Hope it went well..
Ian
July 30, 2004 18:40
Your talk last night rocked. I was kind of hoping for more practical information, but I got some deeper knowledge instead. My Zen moment: I used to hate it when I first started using web services, and would have two asmx services returning the same .NET type from the server, but get two "matrix" types generated for me in the client. Now I know that this is what it is supposed to do. I shouldn't expect wsdl to provide me lossless type information about .NET types. It isn't supposed to. The "matrix" tries to make it look like the type information is there, but it is just a lie. I almost heard someone say, "Welcome to the desert of the real..."

Thanks for the awesome talk. Count me as a Hanselman fan!
August 03, 2004 17:36
Breakin' was better than Electric Boogaloo for one simple reason, it has Jean Claude Van Dam in it. In a break dancing movie :) how cool is that. But beyond that is an even better movie called "Be somebody or be somebody's fool" which stars Mr. T who also break dances :)

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.