Jürgen writes... : Programming

Migrated to TFS2008

juergenp — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:23:00 GMT

Since a while I'm of course on VS2008 Betas and RCs and now on RTM, but my Home pseudo-production environment was still on TFS2005. Last night I migrated that to TFS2008 and the whole thing went very smooth. I upgraded the whole thing to Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0, and after some little tweaks the system is running smoothly, close to zero red flags in the event log:-)

I also installed the CTP of Web Access for TFS2008 and also that went very well. I can now again access all my demo projects while I'm travelling or in the office.

I'm now waiting on version 2 of Scrum for Team System, my favourite agile process model for the little stuff I'm doing.

The downside of the whole action is, that I better should have gone to bed earlier, because the cold I'm struggling with took the challenge and stroke back. So for today at least I can't make much use of my new system, I need to take a rest...

SaaS at ARCast

juergenp — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:52:12 GMT

Ron Jacobs compiled a great series of five ARCast episodes with a company doing a SaaS (Software as a Service) application. Have a look!

ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Overview
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Architecture Overview
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Architecture Drilldown on Workflow and Services
ARCast.TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend User Experience
ARCast TV - SaaS @ Work - Remend Database Architecture

WCF Extensibility is simply great

juergenp — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:35:00 GMT

This week was one of the rare opportunities where I was in a situation to write real code for a real customer. I got the permission of my manager to do a Proof-of-Concept to get hands on experience with WCF.

The scenario was a customer who has a TANDEM (aka HP Nonstop) application system written in COBOL running under Pathway, and this should be connected to a Windows platform using .NET 2.0 and WCF. The TANDEM runs an UNIX subsystem (OSS) and on that a Webserver integrating with the NSSOAP V3 Webservice software, that can talk to Pathway servers running under the original TANDEM OS.

I discovered very quickly that NSSOAP V3 stack has some issues with compliance to some of the Webservices standards and that iterop wouldn't be there out of the box. Honestly, that was what I expected, and why I asked to be on that PoC. Just to get a real world interop pain experience:-)

Finally, the WCF extensibility model helped me to solve the issues. What's nice about that is, the application programming wasn't affected at all. Even when the NSSOAP stack emerges towards better compliance in forthcoming versions, only changes to the config files of the WCF applications will be necessary.

I had to extend the WCF stack in two areas. I implemented a custom client message interceptor to transform the message into a XML that was understandable by the TANDEM site. The TANDEM site was sensible to formatting of the XML document, so we had to make sure that WCF emits a document that gets accepted by the XML parser on the TANDEM site. Another problem was, that the TANDEM - although announcing an UTF-8 encoding in the headers and prologues of the SOAP response - delivered characters that were not valid UTF-8 encoded (I guess they use some ISO-8859 variant and just send that over the wire). So I had to implement a custom message encoder that fixed the broken encoding coming from the TANDEM. Finally all that then worked quite stable.

WCF is about implementing WS-* and to be interoperable on the base of standards. But it is good to know that the guys implementing WCF are realistic about interop issues and did built in all that extensibility to allow you to adapt to nearly any scenario you can imagine. This is true design for interop! The WS world will be a better place if all that will be released - and documented properly;-)

If you need details, send me an email.

Smartphone programming

juergenp — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 07:24:00 GMT

I recently got my QTEK 8080 smartphone and I like it, although it is a new experience to wait now also for the phone until it has booted...

As a peronal proof of concept how easy it is to write code for such a phone I ported a tiny game which I wrote for my IPAQ some time ago when this device was new and hot. With VS.NET 2003 this was so smooth..., it took me less than an hour to make it work, just some fine tuning of the UI.

Want to play? It is the game "ConnectFour" (VierGewinnt) , go and get it from here in english or here in german. Be warned: the cab files aren't signed, so you have to trust my site at your own risk.

Web Services and I18N strangeness

juergenp — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 00:38:00 GMT

I'm currently trying the Amazon Web Services (AWS) with .NET and of course I'm browsing the german catalog using the german locale. The strange thing is that strings containing german umlaut characters (like ä,ö,ü ...) arrived in .NET strings as '??'. I traced the protocols and found that AWS correctly states the use of UTF-8 in the Content-Type HTTP Header and the XML processing instruction also states UTF-8. The arrived response contains all umlaut characters correctly, so to me it looks like something is going wrong with the Encoding in the Deserialization step that maps the XML into .NET class members.

I found a solution that works. I'm using WSE-2.0 for the SOAP client and wrote a custom input filter that is very simple. I still believe it shouldn't be that way, although it works for me now.

public class EncodingFilter : SoapInputFilter { public override void ProcessMessage(SoapEnvelope envelope) { envelope.Encoding = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode; } }

Programming Prolog with .NET

juergenp — Wed, 27 Aug 2003 09:16:00 GMT

The guys at Edinburgh university did a great job with P#, an extended Prolog interpreter entirely written in C#. You can easily formulate your predicates and integrate the Prolog program evaluating these predicates into C# or VB. Maybe this is the right thing to build advanced engines for rules based systems. I'll give it a try in one of my next spare time hacks.