To kill the open source you must buy it?

A surprising move from Oracle: is buying Sun.

So, the hardware, Java, Solaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are now part of Oracle.

The less fortunate of these technologies will be MySQL, because it's been a pain in the ass of Oracle for a few years, but not anymore. A shame and a threat for all the sites that depend of MySQL DBMS. This means an urgent shift of DB support or preparing some budget to pay Oracle for the DB.

It seems that the other player that was after Sun was IBM, but they wait too much to decide, and ...well, business are business.

The question is: what is going to happend with sll the open source support that Java, mySQL and other technologies have from the community?

Seems like Microsoft will have some meetings in the next days. And what about Google and Android for example?

As an Oracle user, Yahoo can take some advantage.

A systems simulator

When you define a system, one of the things that happened is that to see it working, generally you must implement it. In the analisys and design phase all is in your head, and many details can be hidden.

That´s why I believe that a tool that can be used in these phases to show the modeled behavior, can be extremely usefull to enhance the quality of the new system.

I found something called an Architecture Description Language (ADL), that seems to serve well to this porpouse.

Two things I like fro it:

1. Its has a formal language basis (a process algebra Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) ).
2. There are some interesting tools like ACME (Carnegie Mellon), that let us to make an implementation of the model and analize its behavior.

Maybe, this can be a new way for software architects and analists, for making software specs.

From ideas to code: a long and windy road

It´s good that companies and individuals have needs that imply software development, but to realice these ideas in cost, time & quality is hard.

During the last few months a question rounds around my head: how to define a new app/system in such a clear and detailed way that developers can translate the specification to code without uncertainty or even how to automate the translation?

I've been studing lots of modeling and designing articles and books, and there's no clear answer to this, so it´s an opportunity area.

I´ve made an specification for a solution under RUP, using UML (just a subset) , and the additional fact is that there is a lot of information that is redundant. Documentation can be broken into information unit but there´s a need for an information system that contain all this work and knowledge.

As usual, to syncronize design artifacts, documentation and code its not trivial.

Round-trip tools sound good, but they are expensive.

But I think the start point is the method. I´ve been reading about Iconix, and at first hand, it sound great, but the mapping described in the book was based in a framework I don´t use.

However, the important concept there is LIMIT.

Iconix limit the UML artifact, and get some good results; even there, its needed a set of rules of how to apply artifacts (not just the UML syntax).

However the object definition remains loose in many projects, so one way to limit this design freedom is to stablish a context, maybe with patterns, and MVC is a good one.

I'm going to experiment with all these, and later I will tell you what happends.

Cheers

Silverlight hidden detail: can´t write to UI while doing asynchronous calls

Let's get some data from a RSS feed. No big deal, because there's a pretty example in the silverlight site quickstarts.

However, I wanted to do my concept prove in VB.Net, and take the data from a List in Sharepoint.

As usual, Sharepoint let's you create your list, then you can add some items, and because I don´t know the trick to get directly the RSS reference, I publish the list contents in a Content query web part, activating the feed.

Ah, of course, you must add a Clientpolicyaccess.xml file on tje root of the site to get access.

But when I translate the code for my new Silverlight app, and ran it: surprise!!!! Nothing happends. So I check the IDE output and there's a message like this:

A first chance exception of type 'System.UnauthorizedAccessException' occurred in System.Windows.dll

So I added a variable to get the content from the feed, and a button to launch the textbox refresh. The content reading was fine; and when the button was clicked the content was assigned fine, so where's the deal?

Thanks to the post from Mark Monster, I discover the trick: use

Dispatcher.BeginInvoque(Adressof YourUIUpdateOps)

inside the thread; you need to create a method called YourUIUpdateOps to define the UI ops that you need.

And all this is needed because you can't perform UI ops in threads used for async communications (beware of WS).

24 hours to get the answer. Such is life.

Virtualization: cheaper development & deployment environments

So, you don´t have a server at home or can´t stay at your client's cold room, and you need to do some tests in a sort of infrastructure. Well, then the only chance to have access to these resources is by using a virtualization software, that allows a single host computer to create and run one or more virtual environments.

The options:

VMware Home
Virtual PC Home
VirtualBox Home
Parallels

If you are using Virtual PC, this links are usefull:
How to Create a MOSS 2007 VPC Image: The Whole 9 Yards
Why I Love My Virtual PCs


If you are using VirtualBox:
Create a Virtual Machine with VirtualBox


To know more about virtualization:
What is virtualization?
Virtualization (wiki)
Virtualization - A Quick Tutorial
Virtualization 101
The Hows and Whys of Server Virtualization

Silverlight. Month 1.

It's been an interesting experience this days with Silverlight. The reasons are many:

- A multiplatform multi-browser technology with MS support.
- It was used to transmit the Olympics over the Internet.
- The community is embracing the new toy, makint examples, articles & video tutorials.

Seems like Flex/Flash are not alone anymore in the Web.

Next steps to climb the lerning curve:

+ Integration with Sharepoint 2007.
+ Produce a showcase to explore the capabilities of the platform and tools.
+ Wait till november to get the release of versión 2.

Time is coming for a Saas project!

Silverlight. Week 1.

Ok. Several things around Silverlight.

Data support is cool, but escenarios are no so well documented. For instance, in my case I need to deploy a SL app that consumes data from a WCF web service, and...catches the username from the user in turn.

In order to catch usernames, you need to add some code to the ASP.Net SL host page, to put this information in a hidden field, to recover it later from Silverlight. And, to have some users, you must add them to the server, and in the IIS stablish the windows authentication access on.

This part is cool. You see your user´s name when load the app, but when you try to get the data, ...PUFFFF. Nothing happends. Why?

Well, a nasty detail appear: WCFs only work with anonymous access, so the app and the web server can´t live in the same site.

By the way, its important to create a deployment environment, cause there are lots of surprises that the dev environment hides from us.