EIT Consulting - Excellence in Technology - Weblog

Developing in .Net

It's been a long time since I wrote anything here - that's because I've been involved in quite a variety of things, one of which is the development of software to support a new business venture. I'll write some more about that later, but what prompted me to get back to updating the weblog is an article I read on the emergence of .Net as the software development platform of choice for an increasing number of developers. The reason that got me writing was that I am using .Net (and specifically C#) as the development platform for this project.

]]> I won't go into a lot of detail about .Net, that's covered in plenty of other places, but I did want to share some observations. Firstly, it's been a while since I did any serious software development and that used to be in Fortran and C. Although I never really made the transition to C++ I did do a little playing in Java just to get the hang of OOP. So, when this project came along, given that it needs to run on Windows systems (because the whole point is to build a distributed monitoring system for Windows servers) it seemed natural to have a look at C#.

Since most of what I have been doing in a software sense in recent years was web-based, the first thing that put me off was the size of the download for the .Net Common Language Runtime. I don't mind the 120Mb+ download for the SDK because only I have to do that, but the 23Mb or so for the runtime seemed a bit large. However, I accepted that the trade-off of greater productivity in development plus the fact that increasingly it will be on all Windows systems anyway was justifiable for the benefits it would bring.

The SDK itself is free from Microsoft and gives you every you actually need to write .Net apps, including the command line C# compiler. Most of us like a little more comfort than that in the form of an IDE - the obvious one to choose is Visual C# or Visual Studio .Net but I chose to have a look at an Open Source IDE called SharpDevelop. I first came across this about a year ago when it was at release 0.99 and when I started this project I was using what they called Fidalgo Beta 1. It worked but it tended to balloon up its memory usage after it had been in use for a while. It's now up to Release Candidate 2 and they seem to have fixed this problem. It doesn't have a debugger yet, which you get with the Microsoft IDE's, but other than that it works pretty well.

The reasons for choosing to use this, apart from natural parsimony, was that I have a general desire to use and support Open Source projects. When you find one which works this well and which has obviously had such a lot of work go into it, it's worth sharing a bit of recognition.

The other interesting thing about .Net now is that is is becoming cross-platform in the guise of the Mono project. This is possible because Microsoft has put the whole specification for .Net and the C# language into the public domain under the ECMA standards process. The Mono project is now supported by Novell and it fits very nicely with their acquisition last year of the Suse Linux operating system. Mono has now reached version 1.0, and while I haven't tried it yet, it offers the possibility that our monitoring system can be extended fairly easily to include non-Windows platforms, something which we are already getting enquiries about. With .Net being cross-platform it starts to look like a more serious competitor to Java as the language of choice for distributed systems development, the theme of the article which triggered this post in the first place.

Anyway, the long and the short of all this is that the software development project is fun and .Net is helping me to get it done a lot faster and better than any other way I could see of doing it.

WiFi on the Pocket PC

Having proved to myself that the OpenZone service works pretty well it was an easy choice, when I had to order a new battery for my laptop, to sneak in an order for a Compact Flash WiFi card for the Axim. I got it from Technomatic, mainly because they were the only people who had Toshiba batteries in stock, and went for the D-Link Air Wireless card (DCF-660W).

It all arrived the next day and the installation couldn't have been much simpler. Plug the card in, install the drivers via the PC and accept the defaults in the setup program. Within minutes I was able to check email, browse the web, chat via MSN Messenger, etc. It all works very well. The only problem I have had is that when I delete a message from my IMAP mail store using the mail client on the PPC, it doesn't really get deleted. It seems to go, but then when you reconnect to the server it's back again - hmmm. Having had a read around it seems that this is a well-known problem which is supposed to be corrected in Windows Mobile 2003 (rather than the 2002 version shipped with my Axim), so guess what was ordered yesterday ?

Another interesting thing I came across today was a weblogging client for the Pocket PC, called Pocket SharpMT. It looks very nice but it needs the .Net compact framework to be installed on the handheld. Since that it built into Windows Mobile 2003 I think I'll wait until I have installed that before I try it out.

Well, it works

I'm sitting in the Caledonian Hilton Hotel in Edinburgh as I type this and using Zempt to create an offline entry for the weblog. I came here because it has a BT Openzone wireless hotspot and I wanted to try it out. First point is that it doesn't extend to the far end of Chisholms coffee bar but it does work in the open lounge just behind the main reception.

I must admit it took a little longer to get the connection to work than I would have liked but that's my own fault for having played with the settings on my laptop previously. I had the wireless connection set up to get an IP address via DHCP but I had hard coded the DNS server addresses I use when working wirelessly at home and of course that doesn't work on the Openzone service. It took a while on the helpline before we worked out between us that that was the problem but the guy on the help line did know what he was talking about and we got it sorted. Having done that it works just fine. The signal strength is good and the transfer speeds work OK.

So far I have used http access and IMAP to get to my email and the local SMTP server I run on the laptop (Exim) managed to deliver a message - I wouldn't have been at all surprised if they had blocked that. If this post works then the remote posting to Movable Type is obviously OK as well.

Good stuff !

Wireless network service on the road

I've been looking for a while for a WiFi service with a decent number of access points and a pricing model that I could live with. When I first started looking the only game in town was BT Openzone but it suffered from the drawback that you either had to sign up for a monthly contract with included airtime or buy vouchers for a certain amount of connect time. The vouchers sounded OK until I found out that if you buy, say, a one hour voucher, you have to use it all in one day. You can't use 10 minutes one day, half an hour another day and the rest in quick two minute bursts to check email.

I then came across Swisscom Eurospot, who were handing out free 2 hour access cards at an event I went to recently. Unfortunately these free cards and the ones you pay for suffer from the problem about not being able to stop the clock once you start using your time allocation. I spoke to their Regional Sales Manager at the event and he explained that they were aiming at the overnight hotel or full-day conference market, contrasting the price/performance of their offering with the alternative of using a dial-up connection through the hotel switchboard where you have to leave your first-born child as a deposit for the phone bill charges you'll incur.

Well, today I had another look at the Openzone offering, to discover that they now do a Pay As You Go offering, which I think will be just what I want at the moment. You have to register with them before you can use the service but there is no sign-up fee or standing charge, just 20p per minute for all the net access you want. You can pay by credit card or direct debit. They do have plans which let you sign up for some time included at a slightly discounted rate then back to 20p per minute if you exceed this.

As well as the pricing model being better, the coverage has improved and they have set up cross-network roaming with a couple of other service providers, such that there are around 40 access points in both Edinburgh and Glasgow now. These are a mixture of hotels, bars, etc and their "Streetzones", where they have put an access point into what was a public telephone box on the street. Not great if the weather is bad but might be handy for a quick blast online if you need to pick up something important.

Anyway - I've registered and hope to try it out soon. If it works it will probably be justification enough to get a Compact Flash WiFi card for my handheld (Dell Axim X5, which Dell seem to have decided to start selling again after having only the X3 for a while). I'll report back once I have tried it !

Drive-by WiFi

A report on the eWeek web site yesterday said that there are plans for the Highways Agency to install up to 150,000 wireless broadband transceivers alongside the roads across the UK in street lights, traffic lights and other street furniture. The primary purpose is to monitor road and traffic conditions but there is supposed to be capacity to allow delivery of consumer broadband Internet access. There is no indication of likely coverage or pricing yet but it could mean a dramatic increase in the availability of WiFi access in the UK.

More on the Google Gmail service

According to a news item on the BBC site, a number of organisations have been digging in to the small print of the Gmail announcement and have identified privacy concerns over the way the service will operate.

Web-based project management

I came across a note today about the dotproject open source project, a web-based project management system. I've looked at a few of these things before and none of them has quite seemed ready for prime time, including earlier versions of dotproject. However, it has now reached v1.x (v1.02 at the moment) and it looks like it is maturing quite nicely.

The set-up looks very straightforward on a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment. By the look of it you should be up and running with it within less than half an hour if you already have the prerequisites (of which there aren't very many) in place.

Google - not so foolish after all ?

There has been a rash of articles in the last few days about the announcement that Google is testing a new email service (Gmail). Google put out a press release about it on April the 1st - most of the news media reported it as a straight news item but most of the 'digerati' were convinced that it was an April Fool joke. The consensus now appears to be that it is for real. Assuming for the moment that it is true, it seems to me that it's email Jim but not as we know it.

]]> According to the information in the link above, Google plans to launch Gmail as a free service with 1Gb (yes, gigabyte, not a typo) of storage and a different way of looking at how people access and use their email. Not too surprisingly, the idea is based on the use of search technology - rather than sorting your email into folders it all stays in one folder and you use a search interface to find the message you want to read.

For me this is a significant change, based on habits accumulated over many years, but I have known people who operate their email in this way. Rather than filing things away in folders they just leave everything in their inbox and either sort by name or date when they want to find something or use the search function in the email client to track it down. With most email clients (like Outlook as used in most corporate environments) this just leads to things getting slower and slower as they weren't designed to operate this way. When they start up they try to read all the message headers in the folder and when you have a few thousand in there it starts to struggle. If your email is stored on a server (like an Exchange server) it gives that a bit of a hammering as well.

Presumably Gmail is designed from the outset to work this way so it should be a bit more efficient and with the Google indexing and searching engine behind it it should be quick. With 1Gb of storage (to most intents and purposes effectively unlimited), as well as not filing anything, presumably you would never delete anything either.

Now, the question is why ? Google is supposed to be readying itself for an IPO, so why would they want to launch a service for which there is no charge but which will cost them a lot to deliver, even although disk space and processor power is cheaper than ever ? Well, as one commentator noted, search is a vital component of most heavy Internet users' toolkit but email still remains the killer application on the Internet.

Google has been phenomenally successful as a result of their idea of using PageRank to order search results. Without going into all the details behind it (which are available in a paper by the founders of Google for anyone who is interested) this uses the democratic nature of the web to rank the pages it finds, on the basis that if lots of sites point to a page it is probably quite important, particularly if those sites themselves are important by the same definition. Thus a link to your site from the BBC web site is worth rather a lot more than one from the Parish Council web site. So far so good, but since the PageRank algorithm is well known, people have been trying for a long time to subvert it to get higher placement. Indeed whole companies exist for this very purpose and Google themselves think that its value is decreasing over time. It is also reported that Microsoft is going after Google in an attempt to unseat it as the leader in search technology. Whatever you think of Microsoft, when they come after your market it is wise to be concerned !

One problem for search engines is that they are not very 'sticky'. People use them because they give the best results but if another one comes along which seems to be better then there is little to prevent people from switching to it and the multiplier effect is such that these changes can happen quite quickly once they get going. Google's own rise to prominence at the expense of AltaVista, Yahoo, etc. is a testament to this. Another problem is that users of search engines are anonymous, so that although Google probably has one of the largest user bases in the world it knows almost nothing about them.

I think that Gmail may in part be driven by a desire to overcome these problems. To sign up for an email account, you need to hand over some information - at the very least they will have a valid email address for you ! How much information people will be willing to hand over will depend on how useful or valuable they perceive the service to be. This helps overcome the lack of information about the users. Also, once people start using an email address it is much more of an inconvenience for them to change it and let all their contacts know about it and update their address lists, etc. So, it is much stickier than search - once captured people are less inclined to leave. For people who are interested and can be bothered, it is very easy to register your own domain name and have an email address that doesn't change as you move service providers but the proportion of people who will do this is very small. So, Google gets some information about you and can make it less likely that you will stop using their services. I don't suspect any particularly devious motive for this - I think it is just reasonable commercial self-interest.

So, will I use it - probably not, but I recognise that I am not typical of the majority of people. Many people use Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. and for these people the Google offering will probably be quite attractive. If they can make the user interface as simple as the one on the search engine (although they just changed that, to less than wild acclaim) it could be an appealing option for a lot of people.

Open Source vs Proprietary Software

I attended a debate last night organised by Scotland IS on the above topic, with the sub title "Is Open Source a Viable Business Alternative ?". It was chaired by Euan Robertson of Spektra and had two speakers, one from IBM and one from Microsoft speaking respectively for and against Open Source as a viable business model. There was a little vote at the end which was declared a diplomatic draw.

]]> The event was pretty well-attended, must have been close on 100 people there, and there were free drinks sponsored by Melville Craig Recruitment. Each of the speakers was given 20 minutes to argue their case then there was a Q&A session.

There wasn't much new news there for people who follow the topic anyway but for my money the Microsoft speaker actually made the better argument in relation to the topic. Unsurprisingly, most of the people knew which way they would vote before they even entered the room, so it wouldn't have made much difference what the speakers said. The religious wars show no sign of abating. Nobody came forth with the classic definition of Open Source or Free Software being "free" as in free speech rather than free beer.

About the most interesting remark of the evening came in response to a very pertinent question about the upgrade treadmill on which Microsoft has put its customers with its Software Assurance licensing scheme. When asked how this benefited the customer, the Microsoft representative was candid enough to say that if he was working in the open source world he would recommend raising a statue in honour of the person who devised Microsoft's License 6.0 scheme as it was about the best thing which had happened to boost the open source movement in a long time. He was also thoroughly frank about the fact that Microsoft believes it creates things of value, that they therefore expect people to pay for them and that he recommended anyone who didn't agree simply not to buy it. Seems fair enough.

Stepping back from the fundamentalist views, as far as business solutions go, the simple truth remains that it matters less what technology you use than how well you use it. You can build great applications on Linux and on Windows, in the same way that you can build dreadful ones on either. There was an outbreak of brotherly love and tree hugging when both sides pledged allegiance to the one true God of Web Services, then everyone repaired to the bar for more of Melville Craig's free drinks.

The Guru Red Manifesto

You've probably heard of the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I came across another thing in a similar vein today, the Guru Red Manifesto. 52 rules for doing business :

Do not IPO
Do not take money from a stranger
...

I don't know that I agree with everything they say but it makes an interesting read.

Check in from the comfort of your desk

I got an email this morning from British Airways telling me that I can check in to a flight from Edinburgh this week from the comfort of my desk. I haven't done it yet because I may end up not taking the flight but it seems like a great idea to me !

]]> I have always liked the self-service check-in machines at the airport for three reasons :

You get to see all the free seats on the plane and pick the one you want
The queues are often shorter
It's easier to get away with bulky or slightly heavy hand luggage than if you check in at the desk !

This sounds even better - You can check in the night before you go and print your boarding pass then just breeze through (with your photo id !) once they scan your barcode at the security search area. Even if I don't get to do it this week I'll certainly want to try it out soon - have to be quick as it's only a 3 month trial until May.

Now that BA fares are quite competitive as well (�58 return including the taxes, in fact mostly the taxes, for this Edinburgh-London ticket) they do seem to be getting their act together.

There's a link to online check-in on the main BA homepage.

Organising web research material

I came across a product called Onfolio last week and am trying it out at the moment. It is intended to help you collate and organise all the material you find on the web. I do a lot of research on the Internet and have always found it a pain to store information for later recall, especially if you want to group things together and be able to search your collection. I did find a thing called iHarvest about 4 years ago but it somehow never quite worked for me and it was subsequently swallowed up by acquisition and doesn't seem to exist in its current form any more.

]]> Ever eager for something for nothing I have tried various free tools for this purpose but none of them have really been up to the job. You can save copies of web pages using Internet Explorer into so-called web archives (.mht files) but it's a bit clumsy and doesn't always work too well. So, now it's Onfolio that's getting a trial.

The company was founded by Jeremy Allaire one of the brothers who founded Allaire Corporation, subsequently acquired by Macromedia, so the software quality should be good.

Even although it's not free, it's only $30 to register, so if it does the job it is worth that much at least. More comments as I use the product.

Starting the weblog

This is the start of the EIT Consulting weblog. The intention is that this will be used to provide information which is of interest to users and implementors of technology in business. There are various categories which will, over time, become useful as a way of filtering the information in the weblog.
The information in the weblog can also be accessed using an RSS reader program. If that means nothing to you, then there will be another entry in future which talks a bit about that.