Scott Hanselman

Ted Neward of DM and Rotor fame is talking now.  He's coming out, apparently he's "bi"...he digs .NET and Java.  Gasp!  Clever comments so far:

Apparently there are people in the world that don't care for EJB. 
A Web Service is a really hard term to nail down.
Middleware is the slash in Client/Server

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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Don "XML" Demcsak is presenting on SVG.  The talk is a little scattered and tangential, but a decent overview to those unfamiliar with SVG.  (As an aside, I'd point him and others to my tips on presenting.  The zeroth step - IMHO - to a public presentation is Font Size.  Also, Arial or Courier are NOT appropriate fonts for code.  That's what monospaced san-serif fonts like Lucida Console Sans are for.)  Don is talking about using SVG to generate Declarative UIs.  SVG is rockin' sweet, but the fact that the SVG Control from Adobe hasn't been updated in a year+ and still doesn't pass all the SVG conformance tests makes me wonder how useful of a standard it is.  But, sigh, such is standards, eh? 

He also points us to the new SVG player on the block, Corel and their Smart Graphics Studio.  Apparently though it's slighly proprietary.

I consider Patrick Cauldwell (another speaker and a good friend who I worked with on 800.com)  to a be an informed fellow on the subject of SVG generated UIs.  I believe, though, they are moving away from SVG in favor of a NTD approach. Generating UIs with SVG is just dammed irritating and if you're going to download a 3 meg ActiveX control (Adobe's) why not just go with a RICH fully featured phat client.

So, does that mean that SVG will just be relegated to describing icons for Gnome?

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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Don Box is up (early, schedule change) and he's giving a talk that is obstensibly the first chapter to a book he just started. Some notes for myself follow. Don throws a lot of possibly deep concepts out at breakneck speed.  I'll need a few minutes to absorb.

Brian Cox was a visionary. Objects have become the moral equivalent of a Software IC.  There is an IC Plant on your desktop.

[re: WS-*.* specs] The cost of cross-company collaboration is WAY higher than I ever expected...

If it takes too much thought to explain/understand an abstraction, it's too hard...

XML Schema is a relative interpretation of truth.  It's not a Type System (whoa...) To expect those XML Schema constructs to find their way into your programming model, is wrong.  The goal for Schema instead is to validate what is allowed input and outputs to a service.

Object-Orientation: Managted develop and test cycle, abstraction-driven IDEs, Platform Constrained, Compiler technology focused.  Security == private?

Service-Orientation: Unknown integration partner.  All I can do is write constraints on variation.  Primitive tooling, Unknown platform, WS-Technology in controlled descent.  Intense security requirements.

Conclusion

If the amount of abstraction you have to sell me is nil, that's a really good place to be...

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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It has begun, another iteration of XMLDevCon West.  This is my second DevCon, and I have high-signal-to-noise-ratio-hopes.  

Right now Dave Winer is doing his talk, which is the first of the day.  His slide (that's singular) says "Dave Winer: Harvard Law School" rather than Userland.  It's been mostly an Andy Rooney-style talk so far.

Here's a brief synopsis of Dave's Talk...

"...users....users....users don't care about protocols, they just want things to work...I've been developing software for 30+ years...here's how XML-RPC started....here's what I was doing in the Valley in the 80s...You can spot Microsofties even before they go to work for Microsoft....Scoble would talk about Lornhorn in social situations...why should we care about Microsoft's internal logic? <DonBox breaks in>Internal competition can be healthy...</DonBox breaks in> It's artificial, it's an economy...competition within groups at Microsoft isn't a substitude for competition within an economy.  I don't think the Gods (BillG, SteveB, JimA) understand technology and I hate that they control the web...Microsoft owns Word and the Browser, one is free, one is not, Microsoft will never let the Browser compete with Word."

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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Venkat writes that he has a text file (CSV) containing over 50,000 URLs. “I want to run a program that will take this file as input and output a text file which contains only the valid URLs. Basically I need a URL/Link Validator that can perform this job.  I tried to put together a custom C# program to do this, but it takes several minutes just to do a hundred URL. Is there any program/code you are aware that can do this?”

I recommended a Range Retrieval Request, such as those used by GETRIGHT.  GetRight uses a Range Retrieval Request, like this.  You can do this in .NET by just adding the name/values for Range to the Headers collection.  NOTE: The Server CAN (and many will) ignore this request.   If you get partial content, you won’t get an OK 200, you’ll get a 206 and the Content-Length will have the amount of data included. 

However, another fellow, more clever than myself wrote me to say that a HEAD (rather than a GET) should provide enough information - namely the headers - to determine page existance, without the trouble of the HTTP Body Content.  Good stuff!

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.35.2
http://www.vbip.com/winsock/winsock_http_08_01.asp

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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