Orb Networks API

PocketPC Thoughts points out that Orb Networks has released an Add-Ons API. They don’t seem to be promoting it on their site as far as I can tell, but it’s out there. The API itself is documented and there is an example Add-On available for download. You might also want to look at their developer forum. For now it’s a C++ on Windows thing, but the documentation does make reference to Linux and Mac versions in the works.

WSDL for Series 80

I just saw the the Nokia WSDL-to-C++ Wizard fly by my aggregator:

The Nokia WSDL-to-C++ Wizard is a Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 .NET add-in that creates Symbian C++ code for accessing a web service described by a WSDL file. The code generated by the wizard uses the Service Development API of the Nokia Series 80 Second Edition developer platform and the generated code can therefore only be used on S80 2nd edition compatible phones. The preferred way to use the wizard is together with the Nokia Developer’s Suite for Symbian OS 1.1.

This should broaden the horizons for C++ app devs targeting Series 80 2nd edition. I’m a big fan of RESTian web services, especially on a mobile device. I wonder how much work it would take to get one of these SOAP toolkits running on Python for Series 60.

Come on Ride the D-BUS (hey), Ride it (woo woo!)

The February 2005 issue of Linux Journal contains a gem of an article by Robert Love called Get on the D-BUS. I didn’t notice it until I was trawling through the ACM Digital Library while working on a paper for my computer organization class. All tangents aside it’s a great article and anyone who uses Linux on the desktop should check it out, as I think that you’re going to see D-BUS do a lot of heavy lifting over the next few years.

I’d strongly suggest reading the LJ article for a full definition, but to summarize: D-BUS is an interprocess communications system that is (or soon will be) used in both Gnome and KDE environments. It allows apps to send and receive messages to and from each other in a happy object-oriented easy-as-it-should-be way. The Gnome Mono codemonkeys are using it with Beagle, and probably other apps. There’s a D-BUS package and several apps that use it backed in to Hoary. There’s even a Security Enhanced DBUS built in to Security Enhanced Linux.

The APIs and the software are under constant development, but there are already working libraries for C, Glib, and (yes I checked) even python. Here’s example-client.py (edited slightly to fit in my layout):

#!/usr/bin/env python
import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
remote_service = bus.get_service("org.designfu.SampleService")
remote_object = remote_service.get_object("/SomeObject",
     "org.designfu.SampleInterface")
hello_reply_list = remote_object.HelloWorld("Hello!")
hello_reply_tuple = remote_object.GetTuple()
hello_reply_dict = remote_object.GetDict()
print (hello_reply_list)
print str(hello_reply_tuple)
print str(hello_reply_dict)

It looks like D-BUS (or DBUS if you would prefer to abbreviate it that way) is going to be adopted in both the Gnome and KDE camps, which is A Good Thing. I think that it is going to lead to better interaction with applications on the desktop. I imagine a sexy Growl workalike telling me about all kinds of things that I may or may not want to know in a cute and unobtrustive way. As the technology is adopted, I see apps talking to one another and reacting to one another more and more. I see apps and frameworks taking advantage of external web services flowing over DBUS.

Keep an eye on this list of apps that use D-BUS expand quickly.

Win32 Wget

I use wget on my linux boxed on what seems like a daily basis. This morning I got fed up with using browsers to download stuff on a particular Win32 box and went in search of wget binaries for Win32. Google led me to Heiko Herold’s windows wget spot, has a wonderful binary of wget 1.9.1 with SSL support.

I’ve got it installed, in my path, and it’s rocking my world.

As an aside, if you’re looking for a more complete Unixish environment under Windows, you might want to check out Cygwin.

/me is back.

It’s been a long couple of months and I apologize for the hiatus. It’s a long story for another day, but lets put it this way, I’m back! I’ve moved from Radio Userland to WordPress. I promise that I’ll share my (semi-painful and procrastination-ridden) migration process in due time.

The .css that is currently driving the site is Dots by Alex King, which I’m currently tweaking. I’ve still got some random bits that I need to find and url rewrite to fit the new engine, but I’ve done my best to keep the old permalinks. If you find something that’s whacky, please drop me a line at matt at the domain ooiio.com. Thanks!

Windows Mobile 2003: What Comes Next?

Wei-Meng at the O’Reilly Widnows DevCenter has a great roundup of what is new in Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition.  It looks like there are some new display sizes: VGA for the Pocket PC (640×480), QVGA (320×240) for the Smartphone, and a new square 240×240 or 480×480 screen size that could be fun.

Visual Studio 2005 Team System

A lot of bloggers in the .NET sphere are realy excited about Visual Studio 2005 Team System.  The overview of the Team System look quite promising.  I love to see words like “unit testing” make its way in to product pitches.  That really is A Good Thing.  The system looks solid and extensible.

Time will tell if this is a  cool whizbang or a real time saver.

Update: The Early Adopter weblog has links to video of this new feature.

Longhorn: Now Due H1 2006

Windows Network reports that the newly castrated version of Microsoft’s Longhorn is due out H1 2006.  I’m saddened to see some of the cooler new tech like WinFS be delayed until the next major Windows release.  These things happen though.  MS really needs to get a solid distro out the door in a timely manner.  The cool stuff always ends up on the cutting room floor.

Developing For Longhorn

Sam Gentile takes us through building your first app on Longhorn.

Update: At least we will still feel at home with Longhorn BSODs.  Actually, Virtual PC seems to be the one to blame.

Drooling Over Whidbey

These Whidbey screenshots definitely evoke a Pavlovian response.  Previous versions of Visual Studio .NET have been some of the most pleasing to work in.  Hopefully Whidbey will feel even better.

Of course the more powerful client-side apps will be the ones taking advantage of the Longhorn SDK. [Via Scott Hanselman, who has been covering the PDC extremely well, as have all the other bloggers at the PDC]

Longhorn Roundup

Here is a quick roundup of the Longhorn news that I’ve seen whizz past my aggregator this evening:

• Longhorn aggregation
• Feedster PDC Buzz
• MSDN Longhorn Dev Center
• RSS for Longhorn Dev Center
• Clemens Vasters
• PDC: Best keynote … ever
• PDC: Rebooting the blog after the keynote: Indigo in a nutshell: “Indigo is the successor technology and the consolidation of DCOM, COM+, Enterprise Services, Remoting, ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), WSE, and the Microsoft Message Queue. It provides services for building distributed systems all the way from simplistic cross-appdomain message passing and ORPC to cross-platform, cross-organization, vastly distributed, service-oriented architectures providing reliable, secure, transactional, scalable and fast, online or offline, synchronous and asynchronous XML messaging.” Wow.
• Jeremy Allaire
• Avalon and XAML, Royale, Laszlo and MXML. Another wow.
• Scott Hanselman was burning up his blackberry covering the keynotes
• Bill Gates part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. Extensive keynote.
• Jim Alchin part 1, part 2 and 3. No reboots, Avalon, WinFX.
• Don Box, ChrisAn, Jim Alchin. Emacs on Longhorn!
• Don Box and ChrisAn. System.MessageBus.
• Greg Gilley. Fun with XAML.
• Amazon and conclusion. Them web services might just take off.
• Pictures. I want to see screenshots of the new interface.

That’s all I have for now, but I have a feeling that this is just the beginning.

Mono BOF at the PDC

If you are at the PDC, check out the Mono BOF:

The first in a series of undercover Mono BOFs at the PDC will take place tonight at 7pm on the Academy meeting, in room 411. Come join us to plot the evolution.

C# Language Spec 2.0

Sean and Scott are among those who pointed out that the C# language spec version 2.0 is out.

Slashdot Reviews Advanced .NET Remoting

TechGuy949 at Slashdot reviews Advanced .NET Remoting.  It looks like he has positive words for Ingo.  Here’s an excerpt from the review:

The second part of the book is not for the faint-hearted. The complexity level ratchets up several notches, and holds nothing back. It delves into advanced topics such as .NET remoting internals, including message sinks, channel sinks, formatters, and transport protocols, and shows you how to customize each part. Ingo’s goal is for you to really understand how the .NET Framework implements remoting. The discussion here often borders on the theoretical, but it always stays grounded in relevant code examples.

Advanced .NET Remoting: it hurts your head, but in a good way.

Windows Server 2003 On The Rise

Netcraft notes an increase in sites hosted on Windows Server 2003:

Comparing the sites which are now hosted on Windows 2003 with their operating system in January 2003 shows over 42% of these to be new sites, 49% (153K) to be upgrades from other Windows platforms (mainly Windows 2000), 5% (16.5K) to be migrations from Linux and 1% from FreeBSD (3K) and 1% from Solaris (2.5K).

While the number of sites running on a Windows platform has decreased slightly this month, it is interesting to watch the migration of Win2k and older systems over to 2003.  I’ve found that overall Windows 2000 is pretty stable if you keep it at a production state.  That means NO THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE goes on there unless there’s a showstopping reason.  Windows Updates aside, a well-tuned Win2k box can stay up and running for quite some time.

I was pleasantly suprised to find that the beta of Windows Server 2003 seemed even more stable than Win2k.  Granted, I just played around with IIS and the other included software and kept it clean otherwise, but I don’t think I had to reboot it for any reason other than swapping out some hardware for the month that I ran it.  Not too shabby at all.

Now it’s time to switch my KVM and head over to my linux box…

Fun Error Message of the Day

Is it just me, or does the second line sound a little British to you?  The error was my fault, but I have a feeling that the Mozilla Firebird team is behind the message.  Thanks for brightning an otherwise crappy moment.

YAR: Yet Another Roundup

• The latest SoBig variant is causing problems.
• [H] pointed to an announcement from VIA about the Eden ESP7000.  It’s a really low power 733MHz chip.
• Sam Gentile has collected his experiences with Rotor under OSX.
• Rafe Colburn  reminds us not to jump to conclusions.
• Aaron Swartz notes that Canadians dig free Wi-Fi, eh?  This is in contrast to much of the Wi-Fi to be found at airports in the US.  “Hey, this guy wants to access the internet.  His plane doesn’t leave for another hour.  I wonder how much he’ll pay?”
• Newsforge: Damn small linux is damn fine.
• CNet: Nokia grabs multiplayer technology from Sega for their N-Gage.
• CNet: OpenBSD is secure by default.
• CNet: IBM’s Power5 chip will have on-chip multithreading (think trademarks like HyperThreading).
• PCLinuxOnline: The “copied code” that SCO is touting appears to be from BSD.  Oops.
• I missed it yesterday, but Apple is shipping G5′s.
• Texting hurts the sales of bad movies, and that’s okay.
• bsd.slashdot.org notes that /bin and /sbin can now be dynamically linked in the CVS version of FreeBSD.
• developers.slashdot.org notes that mod_caml allows you access to the Apache API from Objective Caml.  Silly.

Quake II .NET

Via Clemens Vasters, Vertigo Software has ported Quake II to managed C++:

Now, in July 2003, Vertigo Software, Inc. is releasing Quake II .NET, a port of the C-language based engine to Visual C++ with a .NET managed heads-up display. We did this to illustrate a point: one can easily port a large amount of C code to C++, and then run the whole application as a managed .NET application using the Microsoft Common Language Runtime (CLR) without noticeable performance delays. Once running as a .NET managed application, adding new features is easy and fun.

The radar feature is pretty slick!

Channels Are Back

Sorry for the outage, but I’ve not been using categories for quite some time because of space issues.

My web provider recently gave me more storage, so I’ll be posting to categories again.

Enjoy.

Distributed .NET Newsletter

Ingo’s Distributed .NET Newsletter hit my mailbox this afternoon.  Stuff like this shouldn’t be free, but I’m glad that it is.  Thanks, Ingo!