As strange as many might think it to be, Microsoft has open source initiatives... They just announced yesterday a new Open Source initiative called "FlexWiki". It concerns software for making Wikis... A quick look at the developers for the project (on source forge) and you see the inventor of Wiki, Ward Cunningham (of the Platform Architecture Guidance team at Microsoft).

   This is not the only project by Microsoft at source forge. Some of the earlier releases this year include Windows Installer XML (WiX) ans Windows Template Library (WTL).

9/28/2004 11:08:23 PM UTC     

   Today, I had a call (on IM) from a friend in deep trouble. As usual, it was their fault completely... They did not make any backups for their DataBase !!! and sure enough, they didn't relize what they were doing until disaster happened... Looks like they didn't make it a requirement during a test phase (foolishness!) and didn't make any new requirement when going to production !!!

   Anyway, the DataBase guy claims that all of a sudden the DataBase (on SQL Server 2000) wasn't there anymore. the .mdf and .ldf files where still there... he tried to attach the database, but it wouldn't work (they wheren't properly detached)... So they called on my friend, who had built the solution for them. She didn't have any database recovery skills (neither do I for that matter), and she pinged me. I tried the usual recovery techniques, like starting from an old database and try to recover from the transaction log, but it didn't work (transaction log corrupt). Then we tried the sp_attach_single_file_db with only the mdf file, but it kept asking for the ldf file. I googled a bit, and stumbled on DBCC Rebuild_Log. At that point, our problem was not to have consistant data, but to have any data at all, so we were ready to try desperate moves... However, before doing the trick, we needed the DataBase to be attached (even if it is in a suspect state). So what we did is create a new DB with the same name and file locations, stop the SQL Server, and replaced the mdf of the new empty database with the mdf from the broken database, and restarted SQL Server. The DataBase showed as suspect. then We executed a DBCC Rebuild_Log. Restarted SQL Server, and the DataBase showed up. After checking consistancy and the data, it looked like everything was there...

    Well, I hope they learned the lesson, and that the first thing they would be doing tomorrow morning is creating a Disaster Recovery plan and testing it correctly...

    I am quite happy I could help on a disaster recovery on SQL server... never thought that could ever happen.

9/24/2004 8:28:53 PM UTC     

With Lim Say at the Microsoft Office in the Petronas Towers (tallest building in the world)

Steven is Huge in Japan...

The stairs to the Batu Caves

Entrance of the Batu Caves

Monkay...

Kimberly, Goksin and I Blessed by the priest...

At the Petronas Towers KLCC

With Kimberly at the Menara Kuala Lumpur (one of the highest telecommunications towers)

Eating out on the street in China Town

Petaling Street

At the Chinese lantern Festival (Adam, Goksin, me, and Ee Von)

Brian, Eevon, Richard, Adam, Kimberly, me and Goksin at the Palace of the Golden Horses

9/23/2004 12:17:24 AM UTC     

   Saturday, I was with Richard and Goksin at a techy mall in Kuala Lumpur. We all wanted to get "gigged". I and Goksin wanted a 1Gb SD card, and all three wanted GB USB2 key drives... The mall (which we had visited earlier with quite a few others : the 3 of us and Kimberly, Brian Noyes, Adam Cogan and Stephen Forte). That mall is very surprising... here is the kind of adds you see there :

   When was the last time you saw such a big Disk Drive add in the mall ?

   Off course, there where quite a few other intersting curiosities, like these (current exchange rate is RM3.75 for US$1) :

   The highlight Saturday was getting Gigged (correct spelling would be GBed). I don't think I need to comment this picture :

All I need to say is that we left KL GBless !!!

9/22/2004 12:29:55 PM UTC     

   My return trip from KL was very harsh, to say the least. After a nice diner Saturday night at a Japanese restaurant in Petaling Jaya with Goksin, Richard, Eevon and Angeline, I leave the Palace of the Golden Horses around 11:30. I get to the airport at midnight, and head to the Emirates. Once I get there, I see there is quite a bit of disorder. I show my ticket, and the man on the counter says my reservation was canceled, and that he can only put me on stand by, but there are so many people on stand by that there no chance I can get in. I ask to speak to their manager, and I find that there is a big number of people out there complaining. I try to figure out what is happeneing, but they simply would not respond until the plane leaves... Then, I find out that there was a huge overbooking on the flight, and that only people that reserved their seats got into the plane, and that they wouldn't let go of the funny idea that me or my travel agent have canceled my reservation, so, it is my fault and there is nothing to do about it. I was on my own. I tried to find out when is the next flight I could take, and te answer was pretty much that they can only do stand by for the next few days!!!

   I used to be a big fan of the Emirates, but now, all I can say is : Never Again!

   By then, it was about 3:30 am, I had no Hotel reservation, and there was no way to book a new ticket, or even to make a Hotel reservation (there was no information counter or Hotel reservation booth open at that hour of the night)... I tried to find some form of Internet Connectivity, and was told that I can find it at Burger King. I went there, and was told it was broken...

   The night was very long, trying to find a way to occupy myself until morning comes. Then, around 7 am, I finally find a malaysia airlines ticketing counter open, and I ask for a ticket to Casablance. The answer was that they only sell malaysia airlines tickets, and they do not serve Casablanca. I asked where I could find an open ticketing counter for any other airline, and they said there were none at the airport, and the airline offices in the city are closed on Sunday... So I took a ticket for London (the only European destination that had a morning flight, and I called home to arrange for a London to Casablanca ticket). Since Morocco credit cards are not usable outside of Morocco, My Friend and fellow RD Goksin, who was at the airport by then to take his 9am Istambul flight used his credit card to pay for the ticket. after the customs and police, Richard had arrived to take his flight to Hong Kong, and we sat and had cofee together, then we all wished each others nice trips. By the time I was boarding the plane, I had not yet received confirmation for my onward ticket to Casablanca, and since I did not have a UK visa, was not let into the plane. So I had to go through a very embarrassing situation with the airport authority, and they took copies of all my documents, than I had to go back through immigration, then to the ticketing counter again, and I had to change my London Ticket for a Paris one (I do have a 3 years Schengen visa) which was scheduled at 11:20pm !!!

   So after I finished playing Tom Hanks in "The Terminal" for almost 24 hours, I finally could head home through Paris. The 7 hours overlay in Paris seemed like a short coffee break... 

9/22/2004 9:38:14 AM UTC     

    TechEd Kuala Lumpur is great this year. Yesterday, I presented two sessions, one on the contract First approach to Web Services, and one on mobility. I will be posting my demos here as soon as I get back to Casablanca and package them. I will be doing my "Secure Coding Techniques" session tomorrow.

9/15/2004 5:41:24 AM UTC     

    It sounds like I will be crabby on my posts this week. Although I am not seeing axis or IBM Web Services for the first time, I cannot stop myself from being horribly surprised by the programming model. I will not compain about all the times the environment (Web Sphere Studio 5.1 or test integration server crashes for unknown reasons). I simply cannot understand how they expect a developper to be working with tons of generated code, which has even a few bugs... like this line :

mc.setProperty(com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.MessageContext.PARAM_MAXOCCURS_NOT1, _set2)

   It gets generated in the SOAPBindingStub when working with unbounded arrays as return type, but it seems that MessageContext has no such field...

   Not too long ago, I was looking at some interop problems one of my customers had, and we found ourselves forced to deal with a huge amount of generated client side generated source code to be able to pass a username and password for authentication (the version of the tools we were using simply dropped authentication by username and password when they added support for oasis...)

My main problem is not why there are a few bugs (even if they are at a very basic level and should definitely not be there if anyone is going to be using the tools in the real world), but that the bugs are in generated code, which will be regenerated when one makes changes to the source of the bean the service is built from. This means that the bug will have to be fixed manually zillions of times during the development process !!! and I have not even started to talk about maintaining the service after it is deployed... and it is not something that happens on 1 generated file, but a big number (serialization/deserialization classes, binding stub, proxy, service interface, helper classes, meta data, and other bizarre things) 

   XML Web Services are built on protocols and interoperability specifications, and the mapping between an object model and a service model should be built as a framework that encapsulates the generic way of mapping the two worlds, or on a new programming model totally built for services (message contract, service contract, channels, ports...etc.).

   That is the way Microsoft is dealing with the problem, and I think they are right in doing so. the asmx model offers an extensible easy way to map the object world to the message world, and takes care of mapping the whole thing into xsd and wsdl. This model is still OO, but it works for the OO developer. with Visual Studio 2005, and later with Indigo, the service programming model gets its implementation as a framework.

   Between the two programming models, my choice is definitely made.

9/7/2004 1:16:55 AM UTC     

    As much as I have noticed, for once, a great show of sympathy and support from almost everyone in the Arab and muslim worlds for the french hostages in Iraq, I see in the message they are projecting some confused and ambiguous position. They seem to say it is wrong because "France is our Friend, and the issue is about its internal affairs".

   I am really sorry, but I can't view the world in that way. It is not about a government being "our" friend or enemy, but about innocent human being being held hostage... What difference does it make if they are French, Americans, Israelis, Australians, Spanish, or my next door neighbor ? I believe that we have seen in the last few years many more atrocious terror actions, and those same people have not taken positions as strong as they are doing this week. I hope it is a change of stand, but they should make clear it is not just becquse the 2 journalists are French. Every sensible and sensitive human being should be vocal about refusing terror in all its forms. I have great sympathy for the Palestinian people and their just cause, but I believe they have done so many terrorist acts in the last few years that I can not justify by any rational reasoning. There is absolutely nothing that can justify killing people taking a bus, sitting in a cafe, shopping at a market, or dancing in a night club. There is also nothing to justify killing people in their homes, terrorist acts the israeli government has commited many times, the american government has commited in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places.

   What is it that is causing so many fights, usually linked to politics? I dream of a world with no borders, no nations, no patriotism, and where ethnicity, culture and religion are enriching factors for everyone... But I know it is just a dream... until so many others share it...

9/2/2004 3:30:28 AM UTC     

    It is 3 am here in casablanca, and I have been working non stop for about 33 hours (except for a couple of hours of sleep in front of my laptop screen). I had a disk crash that made me loose a lot of time during the last 2 weeks, and I had to re-download and re-install WebSphere Studio with the Integration Test Environment (the minimum environment I need to show some interop issues between .Net and Websphere, and how to gurantee interop for my architecture session in TechEd Asia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). So I took it up starting Tuesday around 6am, and here I am still.

   Boy I am happy I do not have to be using eclipse on a daily basis.

9/2/2004 3:12:42 AM UTC     

   Although many might be reporting Microsoft's Friday announcement as bad or mitigated news, I only see in it great news. Here is my tqke qt the issues :

1. It is reassuring to know that what matters most to me as a developer and architect, i.e. Avalon and Indigo, are on track and going to be released in 2006 as previously announced. As for WinFS, and away from the hype, even if I did consider it interesting to deal with the amount of data that we will be faced with whithin the Longhorn timeframe, it is not as important to me as the other two tenets, especially if search is, as promissed, enhanced to a level where it becomes really efficient. here is how I view the three technologies :
• Indigo : if there is something that will change the world of computing and make the vision that Rafal Lukawiecki calls "pervasive integration" happen, it is the "Service Orientation". Off course Microsoft has been leading in the world of Web Services (asmx and WSE), but not until "Indigo" will we have the tools that allow us to start fullfilling that vision. It is the first framework that allows us to thing, design and implements in terms of SOA concepts (Data Contract, Service Contract, abstracting the services from the channels and transports). If there is any technology I am eager to see released as soon as possible, it is Indigo. This technology is really what will make development much better, and allow for the richest feature model through a coherent, mangeable model based on SOA.
• Avalon : Even though the most talked about features of Avalon are not necessarily very important to me, I am very happy they are included in the Longhorn release : media and UI unification, vector based graphics, higher shell integration, unification between thin client and rich client, ...etc. These will make applications look and feel different, but will take time before becoming mainstream, and thus are not as time sensitive.  However, what I would rather see happening as soon as possible, is a model where design is truely separate from code. that will save me and the developers I work with an incredible amount of time.
• WinFS : Although I am probably not the best person to discuss the importance of rows and columns, I see WinFS as being a very interesting way to unify various Data Formats, but I remain convinced that with or without WinFS, our documents will still live in folders for quite some some time, which means that I don't see it as a time sensitive issue. at the same time, and with Yukons support for managed types and XML types, I don't see what would stop our applications that use or can make use of large quantities of document to store those in the database. We are not yet at the phase where developers are doing it and in bad need for a better framework. I even see the delay as beneficial, because it may well trigger more custom developped solutions, and thus real world experience that will guide the final format of WinFS. I will not discuss Object Spaces here, because I truely don't see that technology to be either important or even beneficial, simply because I don't like mapping messages and objects (although I do use such an approach sometimes, I prefer not to have it formalized as if it was a best practice). The only valid reason I can think of that would make WinFS an urgently needed technology is the need for quickly finding information that resides in documents in the huge number and size we probably will have on our hard disks (or for that matter, in remote storage as well) by 2006. That is why I was very relieved to hear that the new search functionality is going to be part of Longhorn.
2. If the annoucement was marked by the decision to keep the schedule, and to cut WinFS, it did confirm a very happy rumor : Avalon and Indigo will be released for XP and 2003. I have explained above why I need and want those technologies, and being able to use them on a broad deployment base is very good news indeed. I hope they will also be generalized to the various Windows mobile products as well.
3. I have seen some criticism about these news marking a move from being "technology oriented" back to the old "product oriented" days. actually, the announcement that the core technologies are being developed independently from product release constraints, then making it into a product release or not based on their own maturity and quality conveys a quite different message. Off course Microsoft makes its money out of products, and even its customers want it to be giving them the latest technologies as they go, according to manageable cycles. I think many customers would have been unhappy to be using the same technology for 7 years. that would have forced another major service pack / second edition, which would have been much less interesting than the new technologies that will be ready in 2006. I believe the message this annoucement conveys is that Microsoft remains a technology company, and that it does deal with market constraints and needs without compromising quality of the features and technologies.

8/31/2004 9:47:50 PM UTC