JCooney.NET

After talking about doing this a great deal, I finally spent a couple of evenings porting the Cassini code to my smartphone. Here is a screen-shot of it serving up a directory listing in the emulator, in pocket IE.

I think I spent more time just “finding my way around” in SmartPhone development than actually porting the cassini code, but it has been a fun experience. I will post the code on GotDotNet when I get around to it. On the topic of GotDotNet I noticed that the download count for my 5 samples has gone over the 10K mark. I was somewhat disappointed to see that some of my samples have been marked down to 3 stars (from 4 - 5). I wish people would leave some sort of comment explaining WHY they didn’t like something (so I can explain to them how wrong they are ;-) - who says I can’t take criticism well ). Dominic is back from Redmond. It sounds like he had a great time there. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get him to break all those NDAs and “spill the beans” on what he was working on.

Update:If you need to host webservices on the compact framework you should also have a look at this on the MSDN.

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Thursday evening seems to be “the night for blogging” for me, so here goes:

I saw this cool programming challenge over on Aaron Skonnard’s blog (from day 1 of Code Camp that Pluralsight are running).

 Programming challenge: at the end of the day, we held a contest that required students to write code to chase a technology trail. It was a race. They were to start by sending a specific HTTP message to a specific endpoint (it required a special header so you had to write WebRequest code). The HTTP response contained the name of a private queue on the network that they subsequently had to read a message from. The message contained a WSDL document from which they had to generate a WS proxy class. Invoking the WS proxy returned the address to a .NET remoting endpoint, for which they already had an interface assembly. The .NET Remoting call returned a secret, identifying the winner. It took the winner about 20-25 mins. It required them to use every communication technique that we discussed in detail today. Hard? Easy?

In other news from this week Darren Neimke has joined Readify. I haven’t really blogged about it yet (‘cause I try not to blog about work stuff) but I joined Readify 2 months ago and have been very happy here. Last time Darren and I worked for the same company it didn’t last very long - hopefully this time will be different.

At the end of this month I will be traveling to Japan and Italy (my spiritual home, which consumes about 14 billion espressos annually, and where you can get a decent doppio on the train) and won’t be on-line much. Does anybody have any book suggestions for an extended period off-line? I’m keen to “travel light“ 1-2 books, and no 1000-page monsters. Code-intensive books make me want to code, and that will probably just lead to frustration. Does anybody have any good ideas?

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I went to the local .NET users group here in Canberra (after missing a few too many meetings at my local group) and saw a presentation on mobile development from Smart Client Program Manager Jonathan Wells. Jonathan looked like he was in the twilight-zone, and said that he had given the talk in 8 different cities since Monday (yikes), but his talk was surprisingly lucid. I’ve been keen to write something for my SmartPhone, and have just started working on a Compact Framework project so I’m certainly interested in the topic. »

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I’ve been doing a fair bit of travelling lately. In an effort to “travel light” I’ve cut down on the number and size of technical books I’m carrying with me. This trip I’ve taken only “The Pragmatic Programmer” with me. I find so many technical books don’t seem worth reading once, yet this one I’ve read a number of times. It seems to have the great quality that you can pick it up and find something that is seems to speak to you directly about the things you’re having to deal with RIGHT NOW.

Also I’ve started listening to opera while flying - I always feel a burst of adrenalin when the wheels of the plane hit the ground (something to do with the thought that “if things go wrong this could be the last moment of my life”, probably no different to walking across the street but the danger seems more apparent). Having some prima donna singing her lungs out at that moment only serves to intensify the rush.

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I’ve started using OneNote (an addition to Office2003) to replace the plethora of text files marked “todo”, “notes” and “stuff” that accumulate in various places on my system. I like the free-form content editing, it reminds me a lot of wikis! Then I started thinking “he wouldn’t it be cool if you could use OneNote to publish to your wiki” (it appears I am not alone in wondering this either). Looking into it further I was disappointed that out-of-the-box there was almost no way to interract with OneNote - no automation API, no imbedded scripting language, no plug-in framework, opaque binary file format. »

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The web has a nice way of bringing things around full circle (or my brain notices co-incidences and attaches “meaning” to them). I played around late last week writing some custom attributes. I was interested in doing some method interception, and also maybe subscribing to some events on the decorated class. It seems that writing a custom attribute that actually DOES something by its self (rather than just being a piece of meta-data that can be queried reflectively by some other bit of code) is somewhat hard. If you inherit from ProxyAttribute and are applied to a ContextBoundObject object you can “do stuff” but apart from that it seems like you’re out of luck. Even passing the current instance as a constructor argument to your attribute (so you could hook in to events and the like) doesn’t work either (if anybody knows different please let me know). Somewhat disheartened I fired up IronPython to have a very belated play around with that. IronPython is cool, and I certainly plan to figure out how to add a “python interactive console” to winforms apps. Next thing I did (somewhat out of the blue) was check Jon Lam’s site IUnknown.com. I had been talking to somebody about the IUnknown COM interface a couple of days before and it had reminded me of Jon’s site - what do you think I found there? Some code on method interception written in Python.

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