2005 May | Lazycoder

25May/051

MS blogging software and the blogging community

scooblog by josh ledgard : Grrrr, Can’t Participate in Tags from MSDN Blogs

For my two cents, which no one asked for, MSDN hitched their wagon to .Text and CS so now they are stuck with it.

Second, understand that criticism of the software is not criticism of the person. Unless you say something like “The brain dead idiot that designed this piece of crud.”. Then you may have crossed a line.

IMO CS and Telligent is suffering from “not invented here” syndrome and tunnel vision. Rather than looking at competing software to see what features they have and what features are useful, they are just sitting in a room and trying to think up new things. I cringe whenever I read a .Text/CS user complaining about their spam filtering abilities because WordPress and MT have such wonderful plug ins and a genuine community built up around fighting spam and yet the CS/.Text/Blogger bunch aren’t a part of that…yet. I have a plugin system that makes decisions about whether or not to allow a comment or put it into moderation based on the context of how the comment was submitted, the .Text guys are manually updating regexs. Wasted time.

Maybe with the new .Text fork that Phil H. has started, .Text can re-join the blog community? A true plug in framework would be a good start.

Blogger may never join us.

Filed under: Technology 1 Comment

25May/050

Grasshopper – you got your ASP.NET in my Linux

Mainsoft Developer Zone – Home

Grasshopper is a Visual Studio .NET� plug-in, which enables you to use C# or Visual Basic .NET� to develop cross-platform ASP.NET applications that run on Linux� and any platform running Apache Tomcat.

This looks promising.

via – every developer on the net I think.

Filed under: .NET No Comments

25May/050

Web Services – all about messages

There have been a couple of postings in the past few days over at Codebetter.com that have really crystalized something I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Brendan Tompkins : Web Service Thinking – Thoughts on Steve’s thoughts on Sahil’s thoughts…

WebServices – A WHOLE new way of thinking

If you are a typical fat client developer. Go read these now. If you’ve been a web developer for quite some time now, you don’t need to. You might enjoy them, but you don’t need to know that it’s all about the message because you’ve known that all along. That’s what you’ve been doing all along. But instead of passing messages between two distinct domains, you’re passing them between pages or even back into the same page. Either in the Form collection of whatever web framework (PHP, ASP, JSP, CGI) you’re using or in the querystring.

For the past few months I’ve been watching the hype behind SOA build and build and I haven’t “gotten” why it was all necessary. Now I do, I grok web services, because my whole development world (minus when I first started out) has been about messages. It’s just that no one was calling them messages, it was just “what you did to pass information between pages”. ASP.NET tried to abstract some of the messaging with their fancy Viewstate and data binding, but it’s still all there. Lurking just beneath a thin veneer of syntactical sugar. AJAX is putting messaging back at the forefront.

BTW have you ever noticed that most posts about WS and SOA are mostly about telling other people that they don’t really “get it”.

Filed under: Technology No Comments

25May/050

Make Multiple Visual Studio .NET Projects Participate in the Same Web Application

Make Multiple Visual Studio .NET Projects Participate in the Same Web Application:

(Via Weblogs @ ASP.NET.)

This is exactly what we are doing for the next version of a project I’m working on. We’ve broken each disease or large functionality out into a “modules” directory (e.g. /modules/breast, /modules/kidney) and we’re going to put the ASP.NET controls and webforms specific to the cancer into a separate Visual Studio project. That way, participating institutions can unzip the modules they want to run into the /modules directory, change an XML configuration file, and go. At some point I want to make the modules autodiscoverable. But there are some issues with loading assemblies into the AppDomain at will.

Filed under: General No Comments

25May/050

Quicksilver and Tiger

What’s going on with Quicksilver? It went from being speedy under Panther to slow under Tiger. It got uglier when I upgraded too, but I can deal with ugly if it works better than the old version.

If this keeps up, I may have to switch to Spotlight for all of my app searching and launching needs.