What's new in Orcas release of WCF

Christian from Thinktecture prepared a list of new features and improvements that are part of the Orcas release of WCF. My favorite one is Custom username over transport security. The reason is that I've been trying to integrate WCF and PHP in a secure, standards based way and I've learnt that it's not easy because Custom username in WCF 1.0 forces you to use a mix of transport and message security (TransportWithMessageCredential). As we all know support of WS-* specifications in PHP world is far less than perfect and going directly to the transport security might make my life easier. I will write about my PHP/WCF/Java story later on.

O2 broadband - pros and cons

Quite a few people asked my to describe my O2 broadband user experience. Sure. I've been using O2 broadband for a month and I'm happy enough and I can not really complain about it though it's not perfect. Let me provide some data that I gathered using a small app I wrote. The test app was sending every 10 seconds a unique (to avoid caching) query to google and measured the response time.
The first test was running for 24 hours in my house which is located in Dublin 14. As you can see in most cases the response time was below 1 second though there ware a few periods when the response time exceeded 10, 15 or even 20 seconds. Fortunately, as I said there ware only a few of them and they lasted for around a minute.
Click on the picture to see the details.

 
Next I checked how the response time is dependent on the location in Dublin. I got on the Aircoach in Sandyford and went with my laptop to the Dublin Airport. The exact route can be found here. During the trip I applied the same procedure as the one described before. The results are again decent but they could be better.
Click on the picture to see the details.

In general I would recommend O2 broadband to people who:

1. need to be able to connect to the Internet in nearly any spot in Ireland. If 3G is not available it falls back to GPRS.
2. don't need great responsiveness at all times
3. don't download/upload huge amount of data
4. don't need to share their broadband and if they do they can dedicate a PC or laptop for that purpose
5. as myself on the one hand don't appreciate how Eircom acts and try to avoid it but on the other hand need to have access to the Internet that works most of the time.

Hope this helps.

Bunch of Scotts talking about the new Microsoft MVC framework

Scott Hanselman recorded two sessions about the new Microsoft MVC framework.  Both of them look interesting though you need to take into account that they are showing really rough bits. If you just like me don't want to watch them in a browser you can download them directly to your local disk:

1. Scott Gu - MVC
2. Scott Hanselman - MVC + DLR

Microsoft .NET framework goes open source - kind of :)

Scott Guthrie doesn't stop surprising me. Nearly every month he publishes something that makes me think that Microsoft is not that bad at all :). Today topic is the .NET source code. One could say that Reflector provides that functionality since it came out. That's true but Microsoft goes beyond that and they actually integrate debugging symbols + source code with VS.NET 2008. This feature will let you seamlessly step into the .NET framework code while you debug your own application. What is more they provide code with all the comments which from time to time can make huge difference. Of course they don't go mad completely and the licence the code will be released under prevents you from copying it. No hope for a quick catch up for Mono :).

A great .NET architect - Udi Dahan - is waiting for our invitation

I hope Philip or Clare or one of the other guys who run MTUG will be able to invite for free (via INETA) Udi Dahan. I've been reading his blog for over a year and I have to admit that this guy is just brilliant. All he is interested in is architecture that is technology agnostic. It's really something unique these days when so many people rush to use the latest technology because they think it will automagically solve their problems which we all know is not true :).

Short explanation why VS 2008 is going to be of much better quality then VS 2005

Emma Williams is talking about how and why Microsoft has changed the way they develop Visual Studio. My favorite change is feature teams. The feature team is a small team of a few people that are responsible for delivery of a feature. The team comprises of developers, testers and project/product managers. They all work very closely together until they deliver which makes them emotionally bound to their task and that's good. There is nothing worse then a bunch of people who don't care what they work on. If testers wait for developers to be finished and then developers wait for testers to be finished and so on then every person works on its own without any notion of being part of a team. If you hear a few times a day "who cares", "I don't care" or "I don't give a s..." then unfortunately most likely you work in such an environment. BTW she was born in Ireland :).

You can't get rid of memory leaks

There are still people out there who think that by having GC they don't have to bother about memory leaks. Well that's not entirely true. I would even say that's a false statement. Next time someone says something like that I will send him/her to Mike Stall