All posts by Julie

CODE Magazine Security Issue

Community Cheerleading

(update: oh gawd, I’ve done it again – written a post that the Smalltalk devs are pointing at and laughing about how unecessarily difficult .NET is…)

I keep thinking about what a great issue this is. There are articles in here on topics that may seem daunting but are very clearly explained to enable anyone to get a start in these areas.

The introduction to Deborah Kurata’s article on generics is worth the price of admission alone. It is a two sentence explanation of generics that I could easily share with developers at any level.

“Generics allow you to use a variable to represent a desired data type, and thereby create very generic code (hence the name) that works with any data type.You define the data type for the generic variable at run time and the CLR substitutes that data type for the variable everywhere in the code that it is used; basically providing you with strongly typed generic code.”

Michele Leroux Bustamante has an article on WSE2 that is meant for normal people to understand and use.

There are articles on Code Access Security, Replication and Asynchronous programming. All topics that many developers won’t go near because of their complexity. All of these articles aim to enable these same people to use these technologies because there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to.

Code Magazine just gets’ better and better. Great job Markus, Rod et alia!!

Personal Time Clock app for consultants

Tools

I have been using my own little homegrown foxpro 2.6 app for many years to track my time working on client projects. I am now finding too many problems trying to run this 16bit app on my fast computer – and this has made me very inconsistent in keeping good track of my time.

I found a little shareware program that, so far, looks perfect for me. I don’t need anything complex. It’s called Personal Time Clock.  I just enter my clients and projects and then I can start up the clock for one project and when I’m done, enter a memo and then end the time. A little reporting tool prints out the detail report that is similar to what I have been giving my client along with their invoices for many years.

Looks like it’s going to be a great little tool and exactly what I need without a million bells and whistles that I don’t need to get in the way. It can also be used for multiple employees but I haven’t explored those features yet.

I’m sure I’ll be sending them my $25 by the end of the week after I’ve had a chance to use it a bit more.

Werner Vogels to become Director of Systems Research at Amazon.com

Community Cheerleading

Big congratulations to Werner, who has been researching distributed systems at Cornell University for many years. He just announced that he has accepted what sounds like a fascinating job at Amazon.

After 10 exciting years at Cornell I have decided that it is finally time to ‘eat my own dog food’; I will now be able to bring my ideas about building scalable and robust systems into practice in one of the most challenging environments in the industry. At the same time I will be able to work at Amazon on building strong research relations with academia and other research labs.

Vermont.NET gets a plumbing job : Threading & HTTP Handlers

dotNET

Vermont.NET’s next meeting is on Threading in .NET. Ali Aghareza, our local .net internals guru and a blogger is speaking at our Monday Aug 9th meeting. Meeting details at www.vtdotnet.org. Ali is a Sr. Systems Programmer at Green Mountain Power.

Then next month, we will be diving into HTTP Handler’s with a not-so-local plumber, Michele Leroux Bustamante who is coming to Vermont.NET thanks to INETA.