I'll be off to TechEd Europe in Barcelona, Spain in about six hours. After this conference, I'll continue to travel to Norway where I'll spend the following two weeks. I therefore won't have Internet access from July 5 to July 21. This is about the longest period of withdrawal for the last six years - I'm somehow really looking forward to it ;-)

Andy McMullan is the hero of the day who solved my Exchange problem regarding sending the out of office notifications for emails originating from the Internet. It has actually not been due to a bug but instead is a feature.

Oh yes, that's what happens when developers start to do their own sysadmin tasks.

The following steps took care of it:

Argh ... anyone here knows Exchange 5.5 better than I do [which shouldn't be too hard]?

I'm preparing to leave for Barcelona (TechEd) and some weeks of vacation (Norway) and wanted to set up these Out-Of-Office autoreplies for the first time. Bad thing is - it only works when the incoming email has been sent from another user of our Exchange server but not when I receive an email from the internet. 

Anyone has any hints or ideas? Thanks!

RESTful web services use the HTTP protocol to denote if a method is idempotent or safe by using either HTTP POST or GET to communicate with the endpoints.

Thinking about general distributed applications and load balancing, wouldn't it be interesting to denote classes and/or methods as being safe or idempotent as well? In .NET, one could easily introduce the attributes like [Safeness(Safeness.Safe)] and [Safeness(Safeness.Idempotent)] for example.

Tagging methods this way would allow us to build a load balancing layer which could react more dynamically because it's not only working at the protocol level but instead on a level which can actually determine the application's needs more closely. It could for example retry idempotent methods automatically on failure. It could also allow a methodcall to carry a priority flag and if this priority flag is set to critical it could simply dispatch calls to methods tagged as safe to all known servers and take the first response.

When thinking longer about it, I guess I could come up with even more usage scenarios ...

Any comments or further ideas? Does any development platform or programming language actually support these notations right now?

Yesterday, I spent a nice afternoon with Ehud from LtU in Vienna, Austria chatting about Ada, CS, and software development as such.

The thing is: as soon as two people who've spent some time with various software development projects come together, one topic inevitably turns up: funniest (or worst) experiences with other developers and managers. As Ehud teaches CS at Uni, this time one more topic had to turn up: funniest excuses of students. Oh yes ... we had a great time ;-)

I'm either the first or the last one to notice - TPFKAS (The Project Formerly Known As Saturn) has been released some days ago:

New! Free ASP.NET Web Development Tool

The Microsoft ASP.NET Web Matrix Project is now available as a free download. Web Matrix is a community-supported, easy-to-use development tool for building ASP.NET Web applications.   Download and learn about ASP.NET Web Matrix today!

Brian replied after my first welcome: How's this for a coincidence.  I just ordered your book today.  I talked to a couple of people during my VSIP DevLab last week who gave it strong recommendations.  That gave it enough momentum to break out of my pagefile and move into my working set.  I'll be sure to let you know what I think about it :)

Cool - great to hear this! I hope you like it and I hope that it doesn't trigger page faults in your working set. If it does - or if you simply have further Qs on Remoting - just ping me and I'll try to help by increasing my shared working set ;)

A new .NET blogger: Hi Brian! (RSS subscribed)

Peter: My blogroll is hopelessly out of date, but I haven't gotten round to fixing it 'coz I use my channelroll more. The channelroll is what I'm *really reading*, and actions speak louder than words, no? I'm actually considering switching to a new, more streamlined template without a blogroll, only a channelroll... Anyone else have the same experience?

Absolutely. It's the same here. The worse part about my weblog is that I don't display a channelroll yet. However, I guess I'll also drop my blogroll and put in a channelroll instead.

As I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time on the road in the next months, I've been thinking about putting some photos and summaries of my travels online - somehow as an excuse for not blogging too much ;-). Most of these are .NET Remoting related and reports of conferences or workshops which I attended. I'm not actually going to bore you with too many private journeys here.

Let's start with the photos and reports of this month's travels: You can read up on last week's series of talks for Microsoft and on this week's Remoting workshop in Basel, Switzerland. For the public talks, you'll also find links to more photos and downloads of the slides.

Regarding this article which describes design and implementation (C#) of a Web Service to Remoting gateway, Peter said that he's "a tad confused by this article. Remoting already 'works over the internet', so what is the author really demonstrating here?".

At first I thought so as well, but in fact the real idea behind this article is that it's using an intermediary and switching channels from client to server. Using HTTP the message reaches an intermediary which forwards the call to a message queuing endpoint. I didn't fully check the sample but I guess it doesn't use the WS-Routing headers. Hmmm ... somebody should actually get inspired by this idea and extend it to use WS-Routing semantics. This would rock!

Gordon on CS Education: I sometimes say, only half joking, that the best training for a wannabe programmer is to go work on a construction site.  [...] you'll learn a lot about how to build things. [...]There's nothing magic about computers.  They're just machines.

Well, even though I fully agree with your statements regarding education, I definitely disagree with the sentences quoted above. In my opinion, building anything apart from computer programs if very different from building software. (By the way, there's also recently been a great article on this topic, titled "Beware the Engineering Metaphor" in Communications of the ACM, May 2002, page 27 to 29 by Wei-Lung Wang.)

The problem is that some people tend to see software design and development as an engineer's work even though it really isn't: "Engineering is the work of applying scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends." Real engineers have the clear advantage of a having to work within the boundaries of the laws of nature. When building a bridge or a house, you basically know the formulas to calculate if it's going to be stable or not. When building something out of concrete, you tend to have clear responsibilities: I don't know if the Golden Gate Bridge's architect discussed his ideas with the bricklayers. However, I also don't know if the Bridge's projects owners changed their mind as often as your typical IT project owners do.

In fact, I've been both architect and bricklayer when it comes to software. More often than not, when working with the bricks, I was able to give valuable feedback to the architects. After turning away from the mortar and joining the crew at the drawing board some years later, I still like to hear what's on the programmer's mind when it comes to software design. Nobody working with software has any formulas which allow you to predict an application's scalability, stability or even more interesting, a project's success or failure. We can only learn, approximate, prototype, listen to our peers, count on our experience, and hope for the best.

Anyhow, I think that people who tend to see software design the same way as building a house also make a very decent mistake: they remove flexibilty from their process. When building your house and you decide, after all walls have been put in place, to make one room larger then originally planned, the change will be quite costly. You'll have to tear down the walls and re-create them later. No matter how good your house's architect is - moving the wall will be costly. When you however decide to change an aspect of your software during the process, the cost of this change will probably be minimal. With a good up-front design, this change maybe doesn't even cost you a nickel ...

Somehow, I think that building software is quite different from building a house. And this is great! Software architects and developers aren't only engineers: we are also mathematicians and artists. Mindset does matter. We have to listen to our peers and be open for change. Also the one who doesn't want to learn, listen and prototype maybe is in the wrong business.

I guess you don't see this at an average construction site.

Everytime I'm away from blogging, someone new enters the scene: Welcome Drew! ;-)

EggHeadCafe.com posted a great review of my book. Great to hear that you like it!

[via Scripting News, from Dori Smith] "There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."

I'm back. After having spent the last days in four different cities in Europe with talking about .NET Remoting, I'm finally back home. Short story: it was great! I'll post more details tomorrow. I'll also post the slides and source code examples tomorrow.

Right now I'm catching up with my emails. If you sent one to me during the last seven days and I did not yet reply, please don't curse me yet - I'll reply tomorrow! It's just some dozens emails to go - I'm handling them FIFO ;-)

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Visual Basic .NET developers,

I have two very important announcements to make and I guess that you'll really like them:

... drumroll ...

First and foremost: As of today, all examples for Advanced .NET Remoting are now available in C# and VB.NET. Yes, each and every sample is available in both languages.

You can download the C# samples here (4.21 Mb) and the VB.NET sources here (3.93 Mb). As I wanted to release them immediately, the VB.NET samples should be considered beta right now. In the unlikely event that you run into any problems with them, please send me an email and I'll fix the bug.

But ... sample code could not be the only excuse for my absence or limited participation in weblogs, usenet and mailing lists during the last weeks, right? There ought to be more.

And yes, you're right: Apress and I are proud to announce my upcoming book "Advanced .NET Remoting in VB.NET" which will be published in mid August 2002. Starting with this date, you will be able to choose the book about .NET Remoting in the programming language you're most comfortable with.