Exchange Server 2000 rocks. Within a couple of hours, I've been able to
render my weblog posts directly from an Exchange public folder. Rendering is
done live with an ASPX page whereas the page caching mechanism saves the
server from getting overloaded. Here's how it looks like: ExchangeWeblog.gif
(60kb).
Now, it's time to generate an RSS feed and import the posts from Radio (which
fortunately allows the posts to be exported to XML)
In the last days, I've been redesigning and reimplementing the
content-generation architecture of dotnetremoting.cc. The only missing part was
the weblog. I wanted a solution which allows me to easily edit/post from
any location, etc.
Requirements were (in no particular order, all of them were 100%
necessary)
Server-based solution, necessary for posting while on the road when only
access to a web browser is possible
Client-application for easy editing. HTML interfaces just don't cut it for
everyday use.
It's getting tough now: Client and server should be able to synchronize
posts. That is, I might want to write a longer story on my notebook while
offline and at the same time throw a small post directly to the blog
using the server-based HTML interface.
Client and the server have to be able to store unfinished posts
Server should be able to accept posts with a predefined future
publication date.
The client should allow me to easily integrate photos (including automatic
uploading, etc.)
The whole system should allow me to attach extensible metadata to my posts
The whole system has to allow me programmatic access to each and every
post
Client and server should allow easy editing of markup. I want to WYSIWYG
as much as possible
Keep all URLs to exisiting posts for sake of consistency
Comments to weblog posts would be nice
I thought about various possible solutions:
ASPX + Win Forms client.
Purely XML + XSL based solution
Customizing existing tools like MT, Radio, ...
...
However, all of them had their drawbacks and especially the implementation
effort would be massive (I guess that's also the reason why other .NET bloggers
stopped to work on their own solutions to this problem).
Finally though - it struck like lightning:
Microsoft already has a product which supports all of my
requirements with minimal or no customization effort. I even used to use this
product nearly every day for about five years. Stay tuned ...
Starting with January 2003, companies in Austria can file their monthly tax
declarations electronically. When I checked out their site, I suspected that
they would use some arcane, complex EDI format. Guess what, they use XML.One can
simply download the XSD without any pre-registration and they even have a
discussion forum for implementors.
Hey, this isn't Amazon or Google, that's a government.
Amazing.
Ok. I admit it. I'm not a web designer. I'll not try to do it again, I
promise. At least I'll try to.
But I know that more than thousand people a day read this web page and
therefore, I'm hoping that someone out there knows a web designer who
rocks and who's really worth his money.
Let me repeat: I'm looking for a web designer! My business
is currently spread out on a number of different web sites whereas one
is dotnetremoting.cc, one is heavily outdated, one is currently in planning
stage, and the last one just looks plain ugly right now.
I'd like to have them all redesigned and they should sport a similar design
so that one could see that they actually belong together.
So, what I'd like to find is a one-stop-shop for the following things:
Frontpages and content templates for the combination of my business site
and dotnetremoting.cc. Layout should be similar for both sites but still
distinguishable.
Templates for my Weblog ... I guess this one would be similar to the above
one anyway. No need to provide the templates in a special format. HTML is
fine. I do the rest.
A logo for my business (aka for me) and therefore for my new
site. Also all graphics for the new site.
A little bit of cool. I don't want a text-only page but also
nothing too fancy.
Just to clarify. What I don't need is
A proposal for a new USD 100,000.00 web monster. Can't afford this - sorry
folks, I wish I could. Please, only serious price ranges ...
A full web site. I just need some template pages. I'll put the
content in myself.
Any copy of another site with changed name. Please, only original ideas.
Just because microsoft.com looks great doesn't mean that dotnetremoting.cc
would look great in the same design.
Also please don't be too fancy. The sites are mostly content sites.
If you are looking for the right example of "fancy", http://www.gotdotnet.com would be
fine. Maybe a little less fancy. But as said above, I don't want a copy of any
site ... be creative ;-)
No stock photos. I'm not a bigCo, I don't have a carefully crafted
marketing message which needs to be supported by the right photos.
Search engine submissions, hosting, domain registration or other
fancy services.
If you think that you know someone who really rocks as a web designer
and who'd be looking for a small contract gig like this, please point
them towards this page and let them drop
me a note (please also include links to previous work and some
indication on the approximate cost and time needed for such an endeavor).
Greg didn't really like my previous example and says that one could easily pass the SqlTransaction to a method, thereby eliminating the need for implicit distributed transactions:
The benefit, obviously, is not having to use distributed transactions, and the associated overhead that comes with them. In my opinion, the code above is not complicated, and other than the boilerplate code, the "way of thinking" is much the same as it is with using declarative transactions with EnterpriseServices. And to come back to Ingo's point, I think if all of your business methods are designed like this, you can add/remove them at will from the call chain, and everything should still work.
Definitely true - at the first look. But what happens, if you later decide that you need distributed TX, probably because another method wants to integrate the addition of a new customer with a post to a message queue? This wouldn't be possible using the code you've shown. (And I'm not even talking about what happens if some method somewhere deep down the call chains screws up the transaction logic by preliminary committing a TX).
On the other hand, your point regarding the overhead of distributed TX is well understood. Wouldn't it be great if EnterpriseServices would allow for transactions to start as local ones and later be turned into distributed TX "on demand" - as soon as you access a secondary resource manager? In fact, this feature is planned for the future and the only reason I didn't talk about it before was that I thought it was NDA information. I was wrong - it is already in public and can be found at http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/xmlentsvcs/esfaq.aspx#5.2 (next to some other great information about this topic).
In the future, Enterprise Services will support the concept of promotable transactions which will begin as a local transaction and will be promoted to a distributed transaction when required.
Pretty cool, huh? Hearing about this feature was definitely part in triggering my love for this technology.
