SOAP 1.2 now a W3 Recommendation

Posted 8:54 AM
Attention all web service plumbers! SOAP 1.2 has achieved recommendation status. The W3 web services page includes links to a 1.2 Primer and other useful links.

Scoble, Blogging, and Gratuitous Ozzy-Bashing

Posted 7:51 AM

Scoble says that he's often asked by other MS employees for blogging advice.

If you need to ask, "Should I have a blog?” the answer is probably no. It's like writing, being in a band, painting, or any other creative activity. Some bands suck, some blogs suck. That’s irrelevant. You blog because you do, not because someone expects you to. Sometimes I have some code I want to share, somedays I talk about hand-grenades, somedays I whine about XML schema. My own daughter says my blog is boring - so you get what you get. Creative activities done because of expectations give us abominations like Ozzy touring the country when he should be eating tapioca in a sanitarium.

Don't synchronize on Type instances

Posted 8:51 PM

[From Dr. GUI, via Joe Bork]:

A great column on why you shouldn't lock(typeof(MyClass)), no matter what you read in the docs. The basic issue is that it's too coarse, too slow, and too fragile. After about three years of .NET development, I'm finding that nowadays I rarely lock(this) or lock(typeof(Something)).

Conference Blogging by Werner

Posted 8:43 PM
Werner is posting great notes from Middleware 2003 in Rio. Really great notes, too, with links to presenter homepages, and really useful reviews. If you're thinking about blogging a conference, read Werner's notes to see how it's done - really top notch.

Tablet or Laptop?

Posted 8:06 PM

Tablet, Laptop, Tablet, Laptop, Tablet, Laptop, Tablet, a week in Venice, Tablet, Laptop, Tablet, a street luge, Tablet, a custom set of racing leathers, Tablet, a week sailing off Catalina, Tablet, a week sailing in ... huh? Focus! Okay:

Hmm. So what am I? Plumber, speaker, geek, author, plumber, presenter, author, plumber, enjoyerOfBrightShinyObjects, plumber... I guess I'm mainly a plumber.

Suddenly, an epiphany: Early adopting software is easy. I like early-adopting software. But every time I'm an early adopter on hardware, it sucks. And the suckage costs me a lot of money and time. I have recently owned:

• 2 really big Pocket PC devices that could only realistically be called Pocket PC devices by people with enormous (and heavily re-enforced) pockets.
• 1 Alpha workstation that I threw away because it wasn't suitable as a doorstop after Alpha NT was orphaned by Compaq.
• 1 extremely sucky GPRS cell phone that is very attractive but nearly completely unusable for speech communication.
• 3 1+ gHz Slot 1 P3's with VIA-chipset motherboards that never really worked correctly.
• 2 dual-head video adapters that would only work with a narrow range of other devices.

So this time, as I'm confronted with a choice between I'm taking the road more travelled. I'm getting a Dell or Compaq laptop, and a tablet at some later date.