One of the cool things about working at Microsoft is that there are so many interesting ways to pursue your interests. Recently we have seen people who are very strongly associated with particular technologies move to something totally different – Dan Fernandez Eric Gunnerson (sorry, I was stuck in C#, too) and Keith Ballinger come to mind the most quickly. Dare Obasanjo wrote that he is moving from the xml team to go work on the back end of things related to social software – which has been an interest of his. Opportunity abounds. Don’t think this means that you can just post whatever nonsense comes to mind about XML! I’m sure he’ll continue to keep us all in line 🙂 . Have fun, Dare!!
Monthly Archives: October 2004
Deploying WSE2 Solutions part II
Don’t forget to change the endpoints in your policycache files!
(she says, having learned the hard way, once again…)
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My final thoughts for today on the Application Updater Block
I realize I made a bad design decision for using this method. (previous post)
I did not want the application constantly polling for a new version so I just check once before I start up the app. Unfortunately, the process of checking (not even downloading) takes about 8 seconds (on my fast client machine). So everytime they start the app they have to wait. Which is why you want it to happen in the background. Maybe the polling isn’t so bad after all.
I don’t like the options. I would like to find a happy medium. But for now because I have spent so much time trying to get this worked out (was it even worth it) and my client needs me to move on to other projects, I’m going to have to leave it. So all in all I’m very unhappy that I went this route. I wish I had known enough about the process to realize this problem in advance.
I never really discussed this part of my design with Chris Kinsman when he offered to work out the other issue I was having. I probably should have. He knows this stuff better than almost anyone.
The people who are in-house hitting the web server locally are going to be the big losers with this solution. The people who are using this application over the web (the back end is a web service) will definitely benefit since we couldn’t figure out how to push out updates to them. So I may end up modifying this again to handle local connections differently.
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Tablet PC Hep
You know hep – like totally hip!
I discovered Iggy Kin’s groovy TabletPC weblog through my referrers. And with a tag line “a tablet pc in every hand”.
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Complex deployment
I have a very complicated application to deploy and update. I mentioned a while ago that Chris Kinsman helped me overcome a limitation of the application updater block. After that I had to work pretty hard to get it to work with an insane set of rules and layers of applications. A few things I had to deal with:
1) I did not want to download complete applications (including all dll’s) for every update. THerefore I needed to have a special folder to dump updates into and launch my application from.
2) I have three different related applications to launch and wanted them all to be responsible for downloading the same bits. Therefore, they each had to have knowledge of the latest version downloaded even if that was from a different application
3) My webserver location is dynamic
4) complicated configuration issues abounded
5) I had to do a lot of customization of the updater block to get it to work my way.
When all of that was said and done I still had a huge task ahead of me: creating an MSI that would install this whole crazy mess. I have been working on this all day and am near the end. I just learned how to use the launch conditions to force WSE2 to be installed as well.
It is amazing how entire days get soaked up with things like this. However, now I have a very intimate understanding of the Application Updater Block. I have not looked at ClickOnce, but I sure hope I’ll have as much access to make changes I want as I do with the raw code supplied with the AUB.
I miss weekends.
Posted from BLInk!
Kimberly Tripp – All over the map, literally
If you are subscribed to SQL Server “GuruGoddessHera” Kimberly Tripp, then you have been following her incredible around the world travel schedule. Kimberly has been doing immense training and impacting SQL Server management worldwide. She is an amazing inspiration in her teachings to many people around the world and to those of us who also like to try to help people learn. What this woman could use is a nice long underwater vacation! I hope she gets one soon. I look forward to catching up with her at DevConnections next month, but I think I’ll just invite her to go relax in a hot spring somewhere.
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More Code Camp feedback
Carl Franklin videotaped pieces of code camp and interviewed people about attending. It’s fun to watch and you can see that this event that Thom Robbins’ invented is going to be a model to be adopted around the contry. Yeah Thom. Yeah everyone who helped out with it.
Latest Mobile Ink Jots – lessons learned in the trenches with tablet development
Shawn van Ness has written a very important and informative article for anyone interested in writing tablet applications. He talks about some of the things that we have struggled with the most with our tablet apps – not how to recognize ink or things like that, but dealing with threads, security, resources (remember the sdk is a COM API wrapped in managed code).
Understanding these things in advance, or in the least – being aware of them – will reap a huge payoff when you are digging into tablet app development.
Read this article. It will save you a lot of grief. Or you can just read about the grief instead by clicking on my tablet category.
Posted from BLInk!
Radio Dedication?
So Rich (hubby) called me to say that the local classic rock/Howard Stern station, played some Rolling Stones song today dedicated to Julie Lerman at the Data Farm. He can’t remember what the song was but thought maybe it was “Let it Bleed”.
Fess up.
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Why I’m mostly just sticking with WS-Security in my WSE2 work
Here is a very good reason – note the writers of the comments, too. Plumbers!
(by way of Casey)
Posted from BLInk!