May 2007 - Posts
It's been a year since I last posted an article on CodeProject. That article was called Serialization with .NET 2.0 Generics. I enjoyed writing that article and I got a lot of good feedback.
This time the topic is web method calls and progress notification. Web method calls tend to be slow and if there's any significant amount of data to send over the wire it would be nice to report just how much as been sent/received. In the past we have used background threads and some pretty animation. I was unfamiliar with Soap Extensions, but it is a small topic and it was pretty easy to achieve what I wanted. I'm not going to re-write the article here. If you are interested you can read it on CodeProject http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Soap_Extension_Progress.asp
It's been a busy week in the CAB/SCSF corner of the blogoshpere. I guess it all started with Oren's post "What I don't like the Patterns & Practices efforts". I don't know if Oren meant to be provocative, but some of his claims in that post were very much so. The post certainly had a significant effect though. Chris Holmes, an active participant on the SCSF CodePlex forum jumped to the p&p rescue with a little too personal attack on Oren in my opinion and so did Sam Gentile with this post. From there the snow ball just kept on running. Jeremy Miller joined and so did Bill Simser and Udi Dahan. After some back and forth I guess people started to feel that this is becoming a little too personal of an issue rather than a technical discussion and Chris Holmes and Sam Gentile tried to smooth things out a little here and here. Today Glenn Block from p&p wrote this post talking about the complexity of the CAB/SCSF and some of the design goals behind the framework and how p&p team work. If you use or consider to use CAB/SCSF you should definitely read through the conversations of the last week. Just ignore the personal issues and grab as much real content as possible.
All in all I believe it is good to have real discussions on the stuff that keeps us busy and brings us bread and butter. The storm seems to be over for this time and I hope we will be able to follow the conversations of Oren, Sam, Bill, Jeremy and many others who undeniably have a lot of knowledge to offer.
We are using the CAB and SCSF and we have been waiting for
this release for some time. More info on the release can be found
here.
Since Darrel has
written a post on his reactions to this release and they reflect mine almost one to one I'm going to skip writing a long post. Just
read Darrels! But you have to wonder what is going through the minds of the p&p folks during this release. I'm a little puzzled. For weeks the SCSF team has released weekly drops (almost weekly) and requested feedback. Good initiative! So I'm asking myself. Who is most likely to jump on the bandwagon and try out a new release of the SCSF? Not to mention all the prerequisits. GAT, GAX, Entilb 3.0, VS .NET 3.0 extensions... Hmm, maybe developers who already use SCSF? But hey, there's not a single mention on upgrading from the previous version.
So while I'm excited the p&p team has shipped a new version of SCSF, ignoring existing customers seems a little
off the mark to me.
For some time I have seen this weird error that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. When debugging a solution in Visual Studio 2005 I would occasionally get a "Loader Lock was detected. Attempting managed execution inside OS Loader lock. Do not attempt to run managed code inside a DllMain or image initialization function since doing so can cause the application to hang". I sort of ignored the error for a few days since I couldn't connect it to anything I did. Well, it only took 2 minutes on Google to find out that the offender is ITunes 7.1. (see here and here) I am using an IPod Nano to listen to podcasts while commuting to work. As a morning ritual I plug in my new Nano and ITunes starts automatically. I usually let ITunes run in the background for a little while downloading new shows before shutting it down to save precious CPU cycles for VS which is a slow beast. I still don't have a clue what causes this.
Anyone?