Dag König

How many files are common to have on a laptop?

I did a virus scanning today on my laptop. It took about one and a half hour to complete. To my surprise I notice that my hard drive approximately contained 400,000 files. Wow!

I have a feeling that I soon have to reinstall the computer. But I hate doing that.

 

TANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as a free lunch

Could this be true? I don't think so. I believe that some things are free. I even consider that the best things in life are free. Meditate on it, look around you. In the meantime you could read the definition of the term.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Despite the claims of rabid science fiction fans, this bit of folk wisdom has been with us since the late 1940s. And the term free lunch is even older.

The term free lunch first appeared in print on 23 November 1854, in Wide West published in San Francisco. It is a reference to the practice of saloons giving free meals to attract clientele. Of course the savings is illusory as the price of the drinks subsidizes the food.

The exact phrase, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, is also first used in the city by the bay in the 1 June 1949 edition of the San Francisco News (although this is claimed to be a reprint of a 1938 editorial so it may be even older, but the original has not been found).

The science fiction fans come into the picture in 1966 with the publication of Robert Heinlein's novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He did much to popularize the phrase, but as we have seen did not coin it. Some claim that he coined the acronym TANSTAAFL. But alas for those science fiction fans, even this is not true. Tanstaafl is found as far back as October 1949, only a few months after the earliest appearance of the phrase.

I found it here.

Build a SMS application with Compact Framework

This is a quick start article that will show how to build a SMS application in your SmartPhone with help of Compact Framework and OpenCFNET.

What you need
You need besides Visual Studio 2003 and a SmartPhone, to install the SDK for SmartPhone and the components from OpenCFNET. But don't worry, both are free of charge.

Start
Create a new Visual Studio project. If you choose to build an OpenCFNET application, some references are added automatically. (I think that this is the big difference between an ordinary SmartPhone project and these kinds of projects.)

Choose to build a windows application and the platform should be SmartPhone. When you have done this a new project will be created and it's time to start build our fancy application.

But before we start building our user interface we must add an additional reference to our project. We need support for SMS. Choose Add Reference and browse through the list until you find OpenNETCF.Phone. Choose this component and click on "Select" and thereafter "OK" to add it.

Now, let's build the user interface. It is not so advanced. Put two labels and two textboxes on the form. Change the name of the first label to "Phone number" and the second to "Message". (You could enter a phone number in the first textbox if you don't want to enter it later when you run the program.) Change the name of the textboxes to textBoxPhone and textBoxMessage. The last control to add is a menu control. Add it and make one menu item with the name "Send".

Now is the time to do some programming. Double click on the menu item that you have created earlier. The code for the click event for the menu item will automatically be created for you.

This is the only code you need. In my example I use C#, but it's a no-brainer to convert it to Visual Basic.
The first command will create a new SMS object. The second row makes a SMS address containing the phone number that the user has entered in the first textbox. Be aware that the second parameter tells the method that the number should be entered as an international number. The third command does the job sending the message that is entered in the second textbox. After this we just close the SMS object and show a message that confirms the action.

Run the application
This application will not run in the emulator because we have to send SMS. This is not supported in the emulator. To run the application in the phone you have to change the device from an emulator to the "Smartphone Device". After you have done that and connected your Smartphone you press F5 to run the application. The program will now compile and be deployed to your phone. 

Computer breakdown makes my weekend busy

This computers breakdown made my weekend. We were almost finished with the first version of Chronos when we got a hard disc crash on one of our computers. (Well we had one backup, but we don't have the time to fix the computer.) Now, I have to do the last things on my computer instead.

Eat your own dog food

Do you ever wonder why not Microsoft Office is written in .NET? Is it so that they think that "real programmers" don’t use .NET? Here is a list of groups and products within Microsoft that use .NET. It’s interesting to read.

Here's my response. While the .NET Framework hasn't been around for a long period of time (shiping in February 2002), there is quite a lot of work being done by different teams to use the .NET Framework across Microsoft's product line. Below is a quick list of just some of the ways we're using managed code in products that ship today and how we plan to use managed code in the future.

Dan Fernandez's Blog

Presentation of SOA with SmartPhone

All my "free" time right now do I spend preparing the presentation that I will have next week. This weekend I have finished the more boring parts. Right now I'm coding the web service. That's more fun.

The presentation will include things like:
- How to implement a service oriented architecture.
- How to design according to the principle "contract first".
- Schema libraries. How to use Xsd in the real world.
- Distinguish between user interface and user processes.
- How to build a multi user interface and multi operating system application.
- SmartPhone - "Hello World".
- What could you do with Compact Framework and SmartPhone.

This presentation is free. Please go to the Sweden .NET User Group home page if you want to register.

The presentation will be held in Stockholm, at 17.00, on the first of December.

How do you see that a retired person is from Scandinavia?

Cyprus is a real paradise for retired people. Older people from other parts of the world, mostly Europe, are staying on this island the whole winter. It's simple to discern which of them that is from the northern part of Europe.

It's rather simple. You can't see it on their bright skin. It's the British that you detect with that attribute. No, you see this instead by counting how many walking sticks they use. In our countries they use two, not one. They use skiing poles. This is very popular in Scandinavia. I don't know if this "sport" has yet conquered the rest of the world? We call it "stavgång", in English Nordic Walking.

Maybe it's some kind of subconscious thing for us that live in countries that have snow in the winter. We want to ski and with the sticks we could fulfill this everywhere and anytime.

How to make the move to SOA in an organization

Tomas Erl have written a very interesting article about the transition to service oriented architecture in an organization. The article gives a set of best practices to assist in this shift.

One of the biggest issues, according to him, is the lack of understanding what SOA really is. That is also my experience. One of the first things to do, when making this shift, is to educate the organization and not only the developers. And do it several times, over and over again. Be very clear with the definitions of layers and such, so that the whole organization speaks the same language. Without this, it will be hard to discuss the implementation of this architecture.

One other thing is to understand that SOA is not only web services. It's so much more. The web service part is mainly only the implementation technology, probably the best one right now.

The last thing that comes to my mind when reading this article is that the organization could require new roles when implementing SOA. The first role that I think of is the xsd or schema librarian. It is a dba for xml. It's a person that is responsible for creating schemas for all information in the company and how they relate to each other.

Read the whole article here.

Cyprus - Only cats allowed

Last week my wife and I had a vacation trip to Cyprus. A week solely for just the two of us. I had no computer and no computer books with me. We had on big thunder storm, but the rest was pleasant. Not so hot but mostly sunny. The sun went down at four and after that it was dark. That's was a bit of surprise for us.

The island is invaded by cats. We saw awfully many of them, but only two dogs. I wonder how the dogs felt. Was it a paradise or a hell for them? How does it sound on the island when it's mating-season?

Reading books on your Smart Phone

I have always been a fan of reading books on hand-held computers. I have done it since I owned my first Palm. I have to admit that probably more in love with the technique than with the books I read. In Sweden, and I also hope, in other countries, you can borrow an electronic book from the library. The only restriction is that you must have a library ticket.

I found that my favorite program for reading, MobiPocket, has a reader for Smart Phone. That's nice. I have been using it for a while now and it works great. The only negative thing is reading books drain my battery. It has to do with the long use of backlight when reading.

It has several nice functions that I enjoy. You cold rotate the text in all four directions. You could also choose in which size the text should be displayed.

Where to find books?
If you don't have the library where you could borrow them, you have to find them elsewhere. MobiPocket has a shop, but a colleague to me recommended FictionWize. This is a big on-line store for electronic books.