Knowing .NET

Based in the S3 Cloud (of course).

Every book has a unique Wiki based on ISBN.

You annotate via a Kindle-browser-friendly blogging engine.

You can view threads chronologically (normal blog view) or if they incorporate references to Kindle “positions,” they can be threaded by location in the book.

Server-side stuff is easy enough; Kindle-friendly blogging editor/display reasonable; barrier to entry is difficulty getting from Kindle reading to Kindle browser (Home -> Experimental -> Web -> Bookmark). Also, positional permalink should be easy but will be hard (“Remember your position in the Kindle book” H->E->W->B -> Note Editor, add text, enter position in field).

Also, links ought to be two-way (“Read Now” ought to open that page in Kindle), but impossible with current firmware:

Continuations are one of those things (like lambda expressions a few years ago) that people seem to struggle to explain.

Doesn’t this capture the essence?

DoSomeProcessing.asp?BasedOn=SomeParameters&IfItSucceeds=GoToAPlace.asp&IfItFails=GoToADifferentPlace.asp

This photo was taken by Ron Dahlquist yesterday off Maui.

Personally, I got up early to go for a swim in a whale-rich bay this morning and the surf was up and I forgot to shave so my mask kept flooding. It sucked (for sufficiently small values of “sucked”).

OASIS, the international open standards consortium, has formed a new technical committee to extend the Web Services Business Processes Execution Language (WS-BPEL) to support human interactions.

BPEL4People is comprised of WS-BPEL Extension for People and Web Services Human Task. The WS-HumanTask spec explains that:

Human tasks, or briefly tasks enable the integration of human beings in service-oriented applications. This document provides a notation, state diagram and API for human tasks, as well as a coordination protocol that allows interaction with human tasks in a more service-oriented fashion and at the same time controls tasks’ autonomy.

Man, I am so bummed I’m no longer on any standards committees.

Yes, I write a column called “MS and .NET Watch,” but it’s a technology and process column, not a corporate analysis. Concurrent programming models I can follow, who’s in and who’s out in the airy realms of MS Corporate is entirely beyond me. I think though, that today’s reorg boils down to “same old, same old” for things developer-related: S. Somasegar and Scott Guthrie get title bumps but it’s said they will “continue to oversee” their teams (Visual Studio, .NET, and other things developer-related).

I guess the question is “Who’s the new ScottGu?”

The seas are filled with humpbacks, both breeding and nursing. If you go in the water, you can hear them a little if you’re on the surface, but if you can swim down 5′ or so, it can be unbelievable.

Yesterday, we were at Kekaha Kai and a whale swam by about 50 yards away (did I see it underwater? No, I did not. Darn.). They were breaching and slapping tails all over.

Plus, we get surf, but it’s very user-friendly (maybe 2-3′). So tall enough to ride, but small enough to swim through very safely. Kekaha Kai is a hot place to go boogie-boarding and I was actually swimming around inside the waves, watching people take off.

Which was cool until my camera flooded. It was just a cheap submersible disposable from Longs, but still, what a rip. Good thing that whale didn’t swim by!

OK, so if you see this and it’s more than a few hours after the posting time, that’s good news.

I’ve got six years of DasBlog entries in my /content directory. I don’t have time to maintain my blogging infrastructure (it’s hard enough to justify the time I spend just writing the darn thing). For whatever reason, DasBlog and my hosting company just don’t seem to get along … problems with the comments, problems with memory consumption, I dunno…

My only caveats are: I want it to be locally hosted, I want to customize the templates, and I don’t want any limitations against uploading other types of pages via FTP (i.e., static HTML pages or ASP.NET programs or whatever).

If you have an opinion on the pain or ease of switching from DasBlog to WordPress, please leave a comment or send email.

While I talked about being blown away by certain talks at Lang.NET, from a pragmatic standpoint I very much enjoyed the practical talks, such as those given by Harry Pierson and, especially, Martin Maly. Martin is one of the IronPython / DLR developers and hand-wrote a compiler for a language called “ToyScript.” This compiler is now part of the IronPython distribution. Harry wrote an F# PEG parser (is that redundant?) of ToyScript and I wrote an ANTLR-based parser. The hope is to show 3 different approaches to building the compiler front-end, but all using the same backend (“Hand off the AST to the DLR”).

Now, on the way to that, I started yesterday writing a series of examples that do things exactly backward: start with the handoff to the DLR (“GenerateNopFunction()“), add nodes (Using XML to represent the AST), and then say “Oh, and you create that AST using compiler front-end techniques.” The sad thing is that all of this will have to be in my copious spare time, since my language stuff isn’t supported by paying articles (I did the Lang.NET conference on my own dime).

Ok, after despairing of getting the comment issue in dasBlog worked out, I have switched over to Disqus. Let me know if this causes headaches…