Angus goes back to RSS Bandit from NewsGator

Looks like Angus Logan is moving back to RSS Bandit.

The first aggregator I ever used was NewsGator and up until recently I was a very loyal customer. However – I found that once I reached a certain number of subscriptions the performance started getting unacceptably slow.

This is one of the reasons that pushing RSS down into the the platform (ala Windows Vista and IE 7.0) is a good thing. The information can just trickle in efficiently and higher level applications like Outlook (and goodness knows else) can use that central/shared store to visualise (and even analyse!) that information.

I actually moved to RSS Bandit, mostly because I wanted to support the .NET developer community, but also because I think .NET applications will be best placed to leverage future RSS technologies. Having said that RSS Bandit still takes up about 100MB of RAM with the number of feeds that I have

I may be to dig out the profiler one day and find out why.

Welcome aboard Rocky Heckman!

Rocky Heckman has just joined Readify here in Canberra. Welcome aboard Rocky, its great to grow the Canberra team by one more person! So far we have:

• Darren Neimke
• Grant Holliday
• Rocky Heckman
• and myself!

I first met Rocky a few years ago now when I did some work at the Australian Tax Office. Back then he was right in the middle of some pretty serious .NET development and he’s got rock solid skills. He is also focused on security which you would probably know already if you are subscribed to the aus-dotnet mailing list.

At Readify we’ve also Chris Hewitt who also does quite a bit of work around security, I reckon if you unleashed both of these guys on your code-base they’d find significant vulnerabilities, I’m almost afraid to show them my work!

Its been a crazy year at Readify – we’ve grown quite a bit but I think its been good growth with quality people. Our hiring practices are paying off!

Chris Vidotto is blogging.

Cameron Reilly reports that Chris Vidotto has a new blog! He hasn’t wasted any time putting a few posts up there and he has some interesting news about BizTalk 2006 and is continuing his quest to find some local BizTalk talent to joing Microsoft. Happy hunting Chris!

Funny: Blog Depression

Blog Depression. Via Scoble – as if you weren’t subscribed already.

ICE

This is a really simple idea, my wife told me about it the other day and today I picked up this link off the blogosphere.

The Nullable Types Debate

Daniel quite rightly points out that nullable-types (i.e. Nullable<T>) has been a topic of discussion for the last couple of days. It all started when I asked a question about the support for nullable-types in the data-set designer. Others chimed in about their concern about nullable-types and we were off and racing.

Some people thought that they smell bad – and as experienced developer types we’ve learnt to trust our sense of smell, but pushed past that to really try and draw out how you can avoid their use but also where they can really help out. Obviously nullable types help traverse the SQL and .NET type systems so we spent quite a bit of time talking about nullable values in databases.

Luke Drumm made an excellent point that NULL != a third value. For example, lets say you have a column in a table that accepts a single character – either M or F to define the gender of the subject then you may as well include a value U for unknown – this maps quite well to the .NET type system because the value type System.Char can always have its value populated.

But flexible data-types like string fields in databases are flexible enough to define a concrete “I don’t know value” but some other data-types can’t. Greg Low pointed out a great example with date/time fields and put it in the context of reporting functions where most reporting tools for relational databases are NULL-aware and treat them specially (a good thing), where as if you defined a magic value for the date/time field it would actually be included in any aggregate calculations (I’m paraphrasing and elaborating here Greg so forgive me if I got this wrong).

Some folks still weren’t convinced but then Martin piped up and pointed out that nullable-types might make it easier to bridge the .NET and XML type systems in web-services scenarios. I think that helped put the usefulness into context for some people but I am sure that they will approach nullable types with some reservations (not necessarily a bad thing).

But there were some common themes here. Nullable-types essentially loosen up the .NET type system’s handling of value types and its useful at the cross over between things like SQL server and XML (I am sure there are more).

They are also useful when the particular data-type you are dealing with doesn’t really have a concept of a “unpopulated” value and NULL values are the standard fall-back position.

Anyway – it was a really interesting discussion and it has actually helped me quite a bit with my TechEd preparation – I’ll have some useful ammunition if a question comes up in the nullable-types section of my talk. Thanks guys!

Room for research.

I’ve been working on some relatively interesting code recently which is trying to solve a hard problem. Today I read this post by Eric Jarvi which links to an e-Week article about how Microsoft is leveraging tools and techniques from Microsoft Research to make their products better and it got me thinking about the general state of play for this kind of collaboration in the enterprise developer space.

Many of the applications that we design and build in the enterprise use tried and tested approaches, indeed this is where much of the material and inspiration for our INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH .NET course came from.

But is there room for unique research activities in the enterprise development space? I think that there is but the flow of research-style development is bound to drive most project managers up the wall.

Research begins often with a vague understanding of a problem and its through experimentation and reading (lots of reading) that you come to understand the problem better – at some point you might even be able to define it in one sentence, but don’t count on it.

At some point in the process (hopefully before the allocation of funds runs out) a brainwave will strike and you will build your first demoable prototype. That’ll get everyone excited and prove that its possible to do something, you just need to make sure there aren’t any warts or even a better solution!

Next time you are working on an enterprise project – ask yourself is there anything here that could be done better, or that could give you a competitive advantage? Whats the problem that your users know about but assume you can’t solve? Surprise them!