Channel 9 - Discussions by SMac

Coffeehouse - The Future of Managed Code - Where is it all headed?

SMac — Sat, 15 May 2004 16:24:16 GMT

What I'm more worried about is if they packed enough snacks to last until the end of the journey..

Coffeehouse - TechEd 2004 - Hot spots, cool hangouts

SMac — Wed, 12 May 2004 05:22:33 GMT

I have yet to find the consummate list of great things to do after hours at TechEd.. although a number of good blogs have hinted at certain events..

There's the ITHero fest for Technet subs/MCPs

Harry Pierson has mentioned the Architect Road Rally..

Anyone want to spill the beans on some activities which are already planned for TechEd?

As always there's the TechEd Bloggers site that has some good info so I'll keep checkin'

Tech Off - Why is .Net Framework so large?

SMac — Tue, 11 May 2004 04:58:39 GMT

OT.. but why is Fedora so big? http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/

3CDs and it doesn't even play MP3s?

Tech Off - Need New Proxy... Recommendations?

SMac — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:19:39 GMT

know nothing about the devices you mention, but was wondering what your take was on ISA 2000 (it could be gathered from your message that it's not stable or reliable) and if you've tried the beta of ISA 2004..

Tech Off - C# question - enums and classes declared within a class

SMac — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:13:40 GMT

A farly good explination..

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/javaOO/nested.html

Coffeehouse - TechEd 2004

SMac — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 14:03:56 GMT

Right on!

Tech Off - Whats on your Utility Belt ?

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:55:30 GMT

Darn.. your company must be seriously Anti-Fruit or something.. do you work for Meet-Is-Us or something? What's your company's stance against vegitables.. or kiwi fruit..

Tech Off - Microsoft Object Spaces

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:53:31 GMT

Please explain more the shortcomings of .Net enterprise abilities versus J2EE?

Coffeehouse - Java and .Net Convergence

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:48:43 GMT

There's already a number of ways to have Java(TM) and .Net work together.. the easiest is through web services if you aren't concerned about object lifetime management and the like.. there's also a number of third party applications which blend .Net remoting and Corba and Borland's C# IDE has a number of features which accomplish this..

MS Press book on the subject:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735619220/qid=1082688475/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-0015081-2616621?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Coffeehouse - Alternative File Systems

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:40:04 GMT

WinFS will indeed rest upon NTFS, read more about it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/pillars/WinFS/default.aspx

And will definately be in Longhorn -- reports to the contrary (as those in businessweek) are greatly overestimated..

http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2004/04/13/112822.aspx

Doubt that WinFS has been in dev longer than Win2k as it's XML based which wasn't a standard until June '99 (although you're right, it could have been in development and they just switched to XML or used draft specs)

what do you propose? other than interoperability with less than 1% of the market (currently) what would a new, advanced FS bring to the table?

Coffeehouse - Too Much Monkey Business

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:28:17 GMT

There's a few open source (free) .Net IDE's out there..

http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

Definately sure that there are UK events.. there's a UK section of the MSDN page...

As for online events there are a ton:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/showsandwebcasts/

granted you best have broadband -- but these are updated very often with new content.

Coffeehouse - Hows MS feel about Mono

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:21:30 GMT

Very little people seem to get it.. the CLI itself is an ECMA standard. C# is an ECMA standard. this means you, your grandpappy, or academia can go out and build your own CLI yourself..

here's a clip on what Peter Hallam has to say about it:

Peter Hallam: I think the Mono project is a great validation of our direction with C# and the CLR. It's great to see an independent implementation of C# and the CLR. I look forward to seeing what they produce.

C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (the CLI, a subset of the full Microsoft CLR) have been accepted as international standards by ECMA. Microsoft has also released Rotor, a shared source implementation of C# and the CLI which targets Windows XP, FreeBSD, and more recently Mac OS X 10.2.

Source: http://www.codesta.com/knowledge/technical/csharp_clr/page_05.aspx

Coffeehouse - MSN Messenger, MS Office Spell-Checker?

SMac — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:15:25 GMT

Would be great if it was integrated into MSN Messenger... as it stands there's a couple of plugins you can get which does just this..

http://www.msgplus.net/

Coffeehouse - Java and .Net Convergence

SMac — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 04:12:50 GMT

I'm really happy that both those organizations are aiming to "port" .net to other OS's..

Really clams up the Java people when they do the "well I'm multiplatform bit" and I reply so is .net.. got here or here (just not well yet)..

Disclaimer: Java is good for a heck of alot of things.. some more applicable than .net is, however, alot take the stance that there is only Java when, just like buying a car, you should consider your options...... also I believe .Net, with it's multiple languages really should be considered alot more...

Coffeehouse - PDC 2004?

SMac — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 03:56:24 GMT

Novell.. which now owns Ximian... which sponsors the Mono project... there's your link right there See 'ya at PDC 200x;)

Tech Off - Microsoft Object Spaces

SMac — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 03:46:34 GMT

both J2EE and the Upcoming objectspaces rely primarily on Xml to table mapping.. why aren't Object/relational databases becoming more popular in the light of XML?

would it be smart to implement a similar OO-like DB in a Relational DB using what would amount to a class table (class/schema), an object table (xml data/instance), a relation table (xml+instance) and indexes on xml elements which would be important to index?...

Coffeehouse - Too Much Monkey Business

SMac — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 03:40:11 GMT

I see alot of the OSS proponents pulling the "oh, don't even get me started on .Net" retoric, when truly they have no clue.. It's also amazing how many developers just frankly shun any of the MSDN developer events/launches/road shows/whatever and they're the ones asking you all the questions and saying how hard this whole .net thing is and whatnot..

I'd take open knowlege (via MSDN events) over OSS anyway..

(Oh yeah, did I mention that these events are FREE and you usually GET FREE STUFF?)

Coffeehouse - Can someone explain Managed Code in layman's terms?

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:48:42 GMT

lol -- I never knew there was an actual garbage truck -- I just put it out at night and like magic it's gone the next morning... wow... I guess that solves that mystery..

now you're going to tell me something like santa clause doesn't exist or something..

Coffeehouse - Request for feature

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:41:42 GMT

Oh! yeah duh.. nm

Coffeehouse - Request for feature

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:34:41 GMT

Coffeehouse - Request for feature

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:33:53 GMT

Ah.. URL Rewriting!

http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/867.aspx

Coffeehouse - Request for feature

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:30:14 GMT

Doh.. I wish I could find that great blog on redirecting based on querystring..

What do you suggest happens if there are more than one JParrish? channel9.msdn.com/users/JParrish1?

Coffeehouse - What can we ask from Windows "Longhorn Server" 2006

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:20:46 GMT

Systems of systems are very "hot" right now -- My take -- and someone please correct me if I'm wrong -- is that my understanding is that when talking about architecting enterprise applications in .Net is that it is important to realize that IIS does fulfill the role of an application server. You can expose web services that run on IIS that utilize the .Net framework to perform your business logic.

One of the problem areas in our development in Java/J2EE is the integration of products between different vendors -- we might have an app server from Company S, IDE/Tools from Vendor B, Data tier from Company O, all running on the (corporate mandated) Company M's Operating system... and we run into trouble..

What's nice about .Net is that the the data tier, the middle tier, as well as the presentation tier (both web and winforms based) are all provided by one vendor, Company M, also builds the development environment.. and the server...

What's also really nice is that since that MS saying that they "produce and eat their own dogfood" they are spending their money to come up with good solutions to common problems -- and thankfully they release these as patterns and practices available on the MSDN website.

These patterns and practices provide some very good "blocks" which are used to architect enterprise apps -- all for free... in another world, these types of things usually are provided by (high priced) consultants or in-house development...

Coffeehouse - Channel9 - Hall of fame! -

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:05:53 GMT

Steve411 wrote:

Show your love for channel9 here.!

I'd love to, but I don't know how! (it's an image..)

Coffeehouse - .NET Assembly for beginners?

SMac — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 05:00:57 GMT

Hi! I'm not an IL expert, but I can answer a few of your questions, as well as my opinion of using IL in this way..

I hope the experts of IL respond to this so that we can both learn more about IL..

#1: Going from IL to C# or other higher level language is called disassembly or decompiling. A number of tools are available on various sites, a quick google turned up this site:
http://www.program-transformation.org/Transform/DotNetDecompilers

Note though that you are essentially reverse-engineering generated code, what you get won't be the same, although similar to, as if you coded it in a high-level language yourself. Also, since anyone with one of these tools can reverse engineer any .Net IL assembly -- even copyrighted, commercial software, there is a push to obfusicate, or attempt to make it harder, to reverse-generate code in this manner.

#2: I don't know the answer to this question -- I played around a little bit in VS and under the debug menu was able to attach to an already running .Net process and was able to set breakpoints, however, the source displayed was actual assembly language, not IL.

#3:

#4: I'm not completely sure on this question -- but I'll try it is my understanding that any .Net language gets compiled to pure IL code and thus IL is more or less exactly the same -- hence the full name of IL being "Common Intermediate Language". It thus just depends on the ability of the disassembler to reverse engineer IL into whatever higher-level language which the user would want. The differences in IL I believe are due to minor semantics of each language. Also be aware that other various differences may be due to differing timestamps, filesize, assembly version, and module version GUID... but there also might be additional metadata, I don't know..

#5: My opinion on this one -- the advantage of coding in a high level language -- such as VB.Net, C#, but even C++, C or any other high level language is that the code is easier to view, debug, and maintain. The benefits writing code in IL probably are the same arguments for writing native assembly code in that you can control every variable, every pointer, every method call, every stack push, every stack pop, . The disadvantages are that you're controlling every variable, every pointer.. you get the idea..

As far as needing IL coders, perhaps this would be a valuable skill in creating compilers for other OS's/Platforms.. (such as the mono (http://www.go-mono.org) project is doing) Crafting custom languages, and aid in debugging.. there's probably alot more too..

Note that included in the framework are these namespaces:

System.Reflection.Emit
System.Reflection.Emit.ILGenerator
System.CodeDom

the first allows for generating runtime assemblies and modules, the second emitting IL code at runtime through an extensive object module, and the third contains classes which can be used to generate programmatically source code.

Looks like this got answered much more concisely by someone who knows what they're talking about so I'll quit