Ingo Rammer's Weblog

Off to London

Boarding the plane in a couple of hours. See you at DevWeek in London!

My talks are on Wednesday (.NET Remoting vs. ASP.NET Web Services, Advanced .NET Remoting and .NET Remoting Internals) and Friday ("A day of .NET Remoting" - don't miss this one!).

Katja and I are really looking forward to this week as it's our first time in London and apart from the mandatory sightseeing tour, we're going to attend a showing of The Phantom Of The Opera which definitely rocks.

Tablets - once more

Robert tries to convince me that using the Tablet is better than paper in any case. I'm sorry, Robert, but I certainly disagree with you. Paper is more lightweight, doesn't need power, has better resolution - and using my Visioneer Strobe Pro, it reaches my harddrive in about ten seconds. (Oh - and by the way, the Strobe really rocks - my Tablet PC doesn't help me with digitizing incoming contracts, letters, invoices & receipts.)

So ... do I like the Tablet at all? Sure I do. Absolutely. 100%. It helps me to see the future. I can imagine a range of applications in the likes of Journal and OneNote. Applications, which take advantage of the platform. I can also see the next generation devices. Devices, which will be more lightweight (let's target 1 lb, ok?) have better battery power (12+ hours) and a higher resolution (about 2000x1600 pixels on a 12" screen would be a good start). Oh - and the device has to recover from hibernation or standby in < 1 second.

Does that sound unrealistic?

I don't think so. I really expect that we will see these kinds of devices in the not so distant future. We simply have to - the current generation doesn't address the very issues I mentioned before.

Still ... I like my Tablet in its current incarnation and actually it's the device I use most of the time. Combining the power of Journal, OneNote and the Strobe, it allows me to carry all my data with me in less than 4 lbs. And I can use it in coach class on the plane. Something that's not possible with my 16" Sony Vaio.

Tablet PC - We're not yet there

After talking with Robert Scoble - and some other TPC owners - last week, I finally decided to join the ranks of Star Trek officials and bought the Compaq TC1000. It's a convertible tablet with the additional benefit that the keyboard can be completely detached - leaving you with a perfect slate-style table. Sorry Robert, but the NEC one isn't sold in Austria as this one came pretty close ;)

Generally, it's a nice device - and especially the "Windows Journal" application absolutely rocks. One can clearly see the future when working with this device.

However, we're not there yet.

I'll spare you a listing of all the great features of the tablet - just look at any of the usual pages. I second most of the great stuff you'll hear there.

But for today, I'll talk a little bit about the drawbacks or areas of improvement I see:

* Boot-up speed. This device is positioned to replace your paper based notebook. But even though it starts pretty fast (taking from 10 to 15 seconds from hibernation), my sheet of paper and my pen boot in about 0.1 seconds. I already had two different meetings where I had to ask the other person to pause a little so that I can start the engines. Very embarrassing indeed.

* Size & weight. It's still too heavy and too thick. My paper notebooks weights about a tenth of the Tablet PC.

* Applications. My paper-based time planner comes with dozens of forms and it allows me to scribble, edit and paint on all "one-sheet-a-day" planning pages. Outlook doesn't and even Franklin's tablet planner forces me to constrain myself to "Add->New Appointment->...". I want to just write on the pages of my time planner - wherever and whenever I like!

* Resolution. Even though digital magazine delivery rocks, I still can't read a full magazine page on the screen without scrolling. I think that we need about 1600x1200 (better even 2000 pixels) resolution on the screens so that they look and feel more like paper.

* Hardware Buttons. I'd like to see at least eight programmable hardware buttons which should be operated by simply pressing them, not by pointing with the special pen. I want to use the tablet for reading and don't want to search for the pen whenever I want to turn the virtual pages.

* Hardware support. The built in wireless LAN adapter doesn't work with Ethereal. That's really bad. At the dot.net conference two weeks ago, the WLAN has been completely jammed by Slammer. Ethereal easily allowed me to trace down the offending machine. I can't do this with my tablet. (Well yes, I can ... I'll just carry an additional WLAN PCMCIA card. But that's not exactly the point of a built-in card, right?)

That said ... don't get me wrong: I really like this device. It's neat-o-factor is close to 100%. It's geeky-gadget-factor is even way higher. The things mentioned above are just a reality-check from a user's perspective: take them as an encouragement or as suggestions when talking with your program manager - especially if you're working in the Office group and thinking about the next version of Outlook ;)

Tablets

 

Caution: Talking with Scoble on the phone can lead to serious outbreaks of Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

Médecins Sans Frontières

I don't normally spread links to any petitions or "send to ten of your friends"-kind of stuff.

However, this time it's different. This is not a hoax or the like and it will take you about 2 minutes to fill out this petition. Médecins Sans Frontièrs (Doctors Without Borders) are still missing one of their doctors - Arjan Erkel - who has been kidnapped half a year ago. You quite likely already heard about this before.

They put up a petition which will be sent to Mr. President Putin and Mr. Magomedov (Chairman of the State Council of Dagestan) and which urges them to do all within their powers to help the efforts in achieving a safe release of this doctor.

Sign the petition to support an act of peace of people who are living in interesting times.

Kent has landed

Kent has landed in blogland. Welcome!

God's own constants

Scott wonders whether God stored the universe's constants "as a readonly field in a static constructor or a singleton pattern, or assuming parallel universes, a factory pattern?"

He also presents a sample which unfortunately sports two serious bugs:

a) God doesn't use Hungarian notation for variables. He's a great supporter of the theory that choosing a reasonable name for a variable combined with an OO languages with strict type checking and extensible metadata render Hungarian notation pretty obsolete.

b) God also faced the problem that most constants aren't finite. Therefore he decided not to store them in any field. Instead he created methods which returned the results as a stream and combined these with some factory methods returning delegates to the helper functions thus creating a pretty pluggable architecture.

After implementing a prototype, he saw that streaming of infinitely long numbers doesn't work pretty well in a SOAP 1.1 based distributed environment incorporating multiple Universes. As an interim solution he therefore limited Reality to a single instance. Somehow he has been assigned to a different project in the meantime so we still live in a single Reality.

He seriously promises that the application is nevertheless scalable to multiple instances - if he only gets to fix the bug in the calculation of the answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Don't panic.

I'm flattered

Within one day, more than 600 developers signed up for my Distributed .NET Newsletter. I'm flattered to see that so many people allow me to send my humble opinions on these topics directly to their inboxes.

Special thanks fly out to all fellow webloggers who helped to spread the word:

• Brad Wilson: Ingo's doing a Remoting newsletter. Do I have to say it? Go! Subscribe! Now!
• Brian Graf: I can't wait for the first issue. I'm subscribed, are you?
• Brian Hjøllund: If you're into .NET, and would like the lowdown on remoting, then you should consider signing up for Ingo Rammers's newsletter on .NET distributed application design and development. 
• Brad More: I'm in, and you should be too.  Ingo's weblog was the first I read regularly, before I even knew what an aggregator was ...
• Christian Weyer: You probably won't get any better information about how to design, implement, deploy and maintain distributed enterprise applications of any scale.
• Darren Neimke: I imagine that this will be an invaluable resource ...
• Early and Adopter: Subscribed...
• Erik Noble
• Frogware
• John Bristowe: From Mr. Remoting himself ...
• Marsh Drew: Ingo knows his stuff, so this is certainly one newsletter I plan to subscribe to and recommend the same for anyone else that does work with these technologies.
• Matt Croydon: *signed up*
• Scott Hanselman: When Ingo speaks about Remoting, I listen - you should too.
• Steven Vore: Glancing at some of the cool stuff that Ingo does every day is enough to stay inspired.

Thanks guys.

Distributed .NET Newsletter

Early next week, I'll send out the first issue of my free "Distributed .NET Newsletter".

This bi-weekly newsletter contains real world tips and tricks about .NET Remoting, Web Services and EnterpriseServices, and design guidance for distributed applications. You'll also find the occasional pointers to other free resources like white papers, patterns&practices documents or other great samples on the web.

You can subscribe to the newsletter in HTML or plaintext format at http://www.ingorammer.com/contact/Newsletter.aspx.

To all weblog writers, newsletter publishers and usergroup members: It would be really great if you could help me spread the word! This newsletter contains real world advice, is completely free and I promise to never give any email addresses to any third party. Ever. I hate spam as much as you do.

Phil got me

Phil got me: Not to be another "me too" on Ingo's redesign, but what's up with this ;)

<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">

Good point. Ok, let me tell you how this site has been created and show you a little bit of its magic.

• I created a layout prototype in Photoshop. It looked exactly the same way the website looks now.
• Cranked open FrontPage to "translate" my image to HTML until it really looks the same way as my initial Photoshop drawing.
• Split the page up in header, content, footer areas and put the first and latter into some magic ASCXs.
• Done.

So, what's the cool part about this site? It's the magic behind the scenes. For example, whenever you access an HTML page (like this) the complete header, menus, etc. are generated dynamically by an http handler I inject into the request pipeline. This handler takes the content out of the "real" HTML file's <BODY>, detects the current context by looking at the path, generates the correct menu structure based on this content, and renders the complete thing in a templated way.

 

But that's not all it can do. If the .html file doesn't exist, the handler looks for a .XML file in the same location (for example the real source for this one is actually that one). It will then detect the namespace used in the XML, and render it using for example this XSLT. So, why did I do this? Because I can later on also use this XSLT to render PDF output instead of HTML.

 

Well. There's one more thing: URLs are immutable. I used a bunch of http handlers and magic rewriting rules to forward to the current location of the pages. This way, Dave's link from last year which pointed here is still valid, even though I changed blog tools twice and even switched domains.

 

Rocks?