Scott Hanselman

SeatGuru.com may well change my life! Thank the heavens!

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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Jon is blogging the CTO Forum.  He includes a great summary of Adam Bosworth's talk, but a few concepts/quotes from Bosworth stood out to me.

Public contracts. You can change your operating system, you can change your object model, but don't change your public contract. We know this works. "The proof point is the web."

Message-driven model. We need a programming model for message-driven programming. How does a developer write code in that environment? "It's no problem for systems programmers, but for everybody else, it's a challenge to make it easy for them to write apps that wake up when a message comes in."

The more I think about information architecture, specifically web services public interfaces (currently in the concrete form of WSDL, but mostly in my head) the more I grok the importance and usefulness of immutable public contracts.  Which gets me thinking about the tribulations involved in versioning...I certainly don't want to get the habit of names like SonOfWebServiceEx2.  This has led me to Yasser (don't all things like to Yasser? :) ) and his article that touches on the subject, as well as Scott Seely's article on evolving an interface.  I haven't yet decided if I agree with Matt Powell's belief that XmlElement can make life that much better...he agrees that it doesn't promise to make it easier.

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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Office 2003 XML Shell Extension.
I also noticed that Office 2003 must've installed some shell helper for XML files, because when I saved the file to my desktop, the shell peeked inside the XML file and gave me an XML document icon with the Excel icon overlaid across the upper left corner. I wonder why the file opened in my browser on double-click instead of into Excel...[The .NET Guy]

I noticed this as well. Office seems to achieve this cute bit of functionality by inserting a PI into the XML instance document which the shell extension just scans all .XML files for to determine if the file should be opened with a specific Office application. The PI looks like this:
     <?mso-application progid="InfoPath.Document"?>
[Drew's Blog]

Isn't it interesting that ProgIds continue to be used like this, as a component identifier?  Is the use of a ProgId kosher in a .NET world?

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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Thanks to everyone who attended the Portland Launch for Visual Studio.NET 2003/Windows Server 2003.  I've posted the slides on this site, so here's the link to last weeks Seattle Launch.  You'll find all the code and slides there.

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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Folks who know me know that I've been going to school in the evenings on and off for a decade++.  I'm at Corillian by day (and sometimes at three in the morning!), but by night (T/Th/F 6-10) I'm usually in class.  Many a day I've ran from the airport straight to a lab - actually last week I ran from the launch event to class, with only 5 minutes to spare. 

Being the wonk I am, I usually look to integrate .NET into anything I do.  In my recent Group Dynamics class I gave a presentation about my intercultural experiences presenting .NET topics at TechEd Malaysia.  In my Operating Systems class, I was the only guy to write the Tiny Abstract OS using C#.

Anyway, I'm currently in the final term of Physics and Calculus. While the current topics are Electromagnetic fields, we're expected to turn in a final project of some kind.  Some folks are rolling cars down hills, or riding elevators, or playing with lasers.  However, when I think Physics, I think No-Touch Deployment WinForms, don't you?  I mean, who doesn't.  Our teacher oftens goes online and shows us all classes of Java Applets that demonstrate particle dynamics and various Physics concepts.  I noticed that she had no problem finding all the Java examples she needed, no doubt due to Java's deep entrenchment in academia. 

I decided to write up a little application that would solve a problem we worked on a lot last term.  If you take some amount of water of a certain temperature and some amount of ice at a certain temperature and put them together, some amount (or all of the) of ice melts and the water is left at a final temperature.  My little quickie app calculates all of the energy and heat involves and presents the results in a fairly dynamic way.  It should run in 1.0 and 1.1 and should launch out directly from the browser.  It certainly requires a little extra thought around issues like security.  While my IceMelter isn't as polished and cool as Wahoo! it was fun to write and helped me apply what I know (.NET) to something I don't (Physics). 

You can play with IceMelter if you like.

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.

About   Newsletter

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