Live Chat Programs

Project Distributor: Introduction to our distributed web service model
So Darren and I have put in about a month now on the Project Distributor website. We are starting to reach that critical point where the site is pretty cool, we have plenty of users, we are thinking about running out of the allowable bandwidth for the demo site, and all sorts of other things that tend to happen all at once. Now, there are some problems you can design yourself out of, and others that you really have to throw some money at. Our latest enhancements can be summed up in a short list.

• Buy a domain name and start hosting in two places. Project Distributor.com should be up fairly soon to accompany MarkItUp.ASPXConnection.com
• Have people host their own versions of the application. And that means a big source release is in the future. At this juncture risk fragmentation.
• Design away fragmentation with a series of ingenious features that will make everyone want to use the application at hand.

I’m here to talk about the last two, since Darren already bought some additional hosting for us. The concept will be to release a fairly stable version of the application so that groups can host tools, code snippets and other source/binary releases for their teams to share. The application is very lightweight and easy to set-up, so it won’t require a bunch of hand holding and configuration to get up and running initially. From our standpoint we solve a number of issues at this juncture. The most obvious problem is what we classify the Lutz Roeder use case..NET Reflector is the key type of application we’d love to get hosted because it makes it a bit easier to find, not that Google does a bad job, we’d just like to get a bunch of tools in one place, with some features for feedback, new releases, and some cool client tools for publishing.

Jason : I’m never a huge fan of string based designs, primarily because of their lack of compile time validation, etc… however, lets think about modifying your “Personality” pattern to work in.NET…

If you made the data type of “Personality” be a System.Type object, then you could do a reasonable assignment:

machine.Personality = typeof(ScanSideways);

This presents a could of interesting problems. First, you have a compile time dependancy on the ScanSideways class. Easily fixable by a slight change:

machine.Personality = Type.GetType(”ScanSideways”);

Which you can now parameterize, load from a file, whatever. So far, this is cake. My problem is that we have lots all the type checking. At some point the program will take the type object (even the strongly typed version) and do an Activator.CreateInstance call followed by a cast to the correct data type. Boom.

Personally, I wish there was a way of specifying the constraints of a particular type, some form of validation rules that could be applied (hey, wait! you mentioned that earlier in your post <G>). For example I could say:

public class Machine {
    [BaseType(typeof(Personality))]
    Type Personality { get; set; }
}

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Clay Shirky recently published a post on Corante, entitled ”Against Well-designed Reputation Systems (An Argument for Community Patent)”  that I’ve been meaning to respond to, for awhile. His thesis, which I agree with wholeheartedly if I understand it correctly, can be summed up as ‘Don’t do it. Don’t even think about doing it.’

Clay, rather than respond to your post with a post, I will instead respond with a working implementation of an alternative approach to social evaluation (same ends…different means). Due out in alpha in the next few weeks, I believe that Claimspace  demonstrates my agreement with your observations and reservations about the risks inherent in developing a traditional ranking and reputation system. Claimspace  speaks louder than words. It may even prove useful as a social evaluation platform for community patents.

A favorite passage from Clay’s post :

“The obvious conclusion to draw is that, when contemplating the a new service with these characteristics, the need for some user-harnessed reputation or ranking system can be regarded as a foregone conclusion, and that these systems should be carefully planned so that tragedy of the commons problems can be avoided from launch. I believe that this conclusion is wrong, and that where it is acted on, its effects are likely to be at least harmful, if not fatal, to the service adopting them.

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Do you know where your data is? If you’ve been involved with software at any point in the past two decades, chances are it’s in a database. It would seem silly to put data, especially frequently changing data, into code.

How about those business rules? Business rule engines haven’t been around as long as databases, but times are a-changin’. Imagine a world where the folks that come up with the rules can enter them, test them and even deploy them without having the development team so much as lift a finger. Costs are signifigantly lowered, deadlines are met, everyone gets bonuses and is promoted to figurehead VP positions.

Interested? Please stop by and check out our webcast next week:

Rules for Enterprise Agility: Webcast, March 15th, 11am CT
IT architects, application developers, business analysts and process owners will learn about best practices for rules-oriented architecture and application development, and how business rule engines can provide substantial benefits in consistent decision making, increased revenue and decreased operating costs.

Custom Software Development for Real-Estate, Hosting providers, Workflow and Business Management Systems.

Featured speakers include industry analyst and veteran application development expert Dr. Adrian Bowles, and Larry Buettner, CIO of Wheels, Inc. and a member of ComputerWorld’s 2006 list of Premier 100 IT Leaders.More information: http://www.inrule.com/Event_Info.aspx

Sometimes you got to brag. Tuesday nights on HDNet is News Night. We lead off with Dan Rather Reports
Dan has brought back real news with a full 60 minutes of reporting on news that matters. If you haven’t yet, check out some of his reports that we are streaming online

DRR leads right into HDNet World Report. World Report, which is produced by Dennis OBrien doesn’t get the visibility that Dan Rather Reports gets, but it knocks out great stories from around the globe week after week. Today, HDNet World Report finally started to get some of the recognition it deserved. Today, at the 74th annual National Headliner Awards, sponsored by The Press Club of At

The first was for Documentary or Series of Reports: HDNET, “The Forgotten Front: Terrorism in the Phillipines; beating out CNN with their amazing “CNN Presents: God’s Warriors;” and CNN for their , “Children of the Storm.”
Our 2nd win came for News Magazine Program: HDNet World Report, “Uganda’s Silent War ( a co production with Newshour with Jim Lehrer);” finishing ahead of 2nd and 3rd place finishers, Dateline NBC, “To Catch a Con Man;” JumpStart Productions/NOW on PBS, “Casualties of War”.

You don’t have to be the biggest to beat the best, but you do have to outwork the bigger players. Congrats to everyone at HDNet and the entire World Report team for doing amazing work and making us proud.

This is just th (more…)

I just  ran into Ted Glaza from Ajax Control toolkit and Silverlight Controls fame and he is getting some of the control developers together (3rd parties, Microsoft as well as in house) to talk about building controls for WPF and Silverlight. 

We will have some folks there are are building the current set of controls that ship in the box for Silverlight and WPF from and I hope some folks from Telerik, ComponentOne, and Infragistics. 

Ted tells me we will meet up in a few tables in the center of the dining room here at Mix tomorrow (Friday) at during the lunch break.

Anyone is welcome be there if you can!

Scott gave a whirlwind presentation to a standing room only crowd at the North Dallas Dot Net User Group tonight. A wide range of topics were covered from IDE tips and tricks to ASP.NET tips to MS AJAX to LINQ and DLINQ (I still like to call it DLINQ rather than LINQ to SQL). I’m still not sure how all this got packed into a little over 2 hours.

This was the first meeting that I’ve attended at the new Intuit location. It was quite an upgrade in venue from the previous SMU campus location. Lots of projector screens and flat panels so it was very easy to follow along even if you were in the nose bleed section.

While there’s a ton of cool things going on with AJAX, seeing LINQ in action again reminds me of just how revolutionary LINQ is.

So, thanks for the great presentation Scott and don’t be a stranger to Dallas!

Ted Haeger , aka ReverendTed  of Bungee Labs  (purveyors of the most kill-killski development toolkit for Web 2.0 developers, in the world), just published a thought provoking blog post asking his readers: Can we…?

Trust Microsoft with Claimspace

Ted has personally challenged me to respond and I plan to do so, in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Ted’s post and weigh in with your thoughts and opinions, either here or there.

A few months ago, Alex Barnett excitedly told me about a project he was working on with Pablo Castro , of the Microsoft SQL Server team. Like most things brilliant and game-changing, their invention is shockingly simple. As Alex explained it, project codename “Astoria ” would enable anyone to expose (and query/update) a SQL Server database, in the cloud, via a REST API…yup, simple URLs…over HTTP.

“Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second,” I said, shaking my head and playing for time to catch up and catch on as Alex sat there, his eyes alive with creative energy. “Are you telling me your program allows me to query and potentially update a database in the cloud as easily as I can now query one directly, using my query editor? And my queries will be expressed with something like http://foo/bar/blah… ?” He nodded, “Yes.”

I GET it. I can REST.

Several weeks after our initial meeting, Alex and I sat down with Pablo , Taylor , Dave , and Bob to discuss the possibility of using a snapshot of our beta social bookmarking solution, Microsoft.Community Tagspace , as a sample dataset for the unveiling of Astoria, at Mix07. On Monday, Pablo did just that.

Ooooh, I feel like the cat presenting its prey to its favorite humans on their back porch…

Click Here , for more information about Astoria, examples using a snapshot of the Tagspace store, links to documentation, downloads, videos and, other goodies. Alex rocks.

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It’s hard to decide how afraid to be of something that is
really bad and really rare.

This problem is currently one of the most controversial
issues in the United States.  Ever since September 11,
2001 , we have been wrestling with the question: How afraid of terrorism
should we be?

• We all agree that terrorism is really bad.  What happened
  on 9/11 was awful.
• But it’s also really rare.  I personally have never met a
  Muslim who wanted to hurt me.

How afraid should we be? 

• Some people are very afraid.  They focus more on the
  "really bad" side of the issue.  Many of these folks are willing
  to give up their own civil liberties just to feel safer. 
• Others are not afraid at all.  They focus more on the
  "really rare" side of the issue.  They prefer to spend their
  resources and attention in other areas.

This blog entry is not the place for me to take a stance on
any of these issues.  For now I will simply say that I understand both
perspectives.  This whole situation is simply the most obvious example of my
point, which was:

It’s hard to decide how afraid to be of something that is
really bad and really rare.

Issues like these are like an icy ski slope.  Some people
stand at the top.  Some people stand at the bottom.  Very few people stand
anywhere else.  It’s too slippery.

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