Books

Safari Bookshelf

Stuart Radcliffe — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:37:00 GMT

Safari Bookshelf

Subscription on-line bookshelf. Lots of IT related text books that you can search or just read through.

Google Searches Everything

Stuart Radcliffe — Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:35:00 GMT

Google has been busy lately throwing out new innovations left right and centre.

First they announced Google print, which looks like an interesting alternative to Amazon's A9 in that it allows book publishers to publish their books to Google and have the text in the books included in Google searches.

This was closely followed by Google SMS, allowing searches using the SMS text feature of your mobile phone. It is only available in the US at the moment but I am sure this will arrive in Europe soon.

Next up was the launch of Froogle UK. The British version of the on-line shopping pricing comparison search tool.

Last, but not least (in fact, definitely most) comes the announcement of Google Desktop Search. This integrates results culled from its indexing of your local files and emails with the results returned from the web. I am still not sure if this is better than Copernic at the moment. I will keep both installed for the time being and see which one I actually use.

A Season with Verona

Stuart Radcliffe — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 08:35:00 GMT

Very few journalists “get” football and in particular the fan’s relationship to and all-consuming identity with their team. You only have to look at the self serving, hypocritical, sanctimonious pap that is served up by the Scottish press in reporting the game itself or news about the game. The fans hate the journalists. They are perceived as lazy, incompetent and ignorant. They are perceived that way because they are that way.

We go through life not noticing this, or, at least, accepting it. Then some writing comes along that shows what is possible when writing about football. Writing that understands the game and what it means to be a fan. “A Season with Verona” by Tim Parks is just such a piece of writing. Tim has lived in Italy for 20 years and has grown to love Italy, the Italian game and Hellas Verona.

For the season 2000-2001, Tim set out to go to every game, home and away and to write a book about the experience. Setting out to write a book is one thing. Following the club that you love up and down the country in the company of people whose commitment to the club goes slightly beyond the sane is another. In A Season with Verona, Tim finds this out and the experience changes him. At one point he is in a conversation with an older fan that used to go the away games but doesn’t any more:

Pietro shakes his head. ‘If you do the away games, it takes you over. You lose a sense of proportion. It fills your whole life. It’s too strong.’ At once I’m aware that he is describing something I have felt growing in myself, a sense that I am losing control of my thought patterns. My mind is full of chants. I’m constantly whistling the triumphal march of Aida or ‘Guantanamera’. Even at the breakfast table, even in the corridors at the university. And after every away game the bus rumbles on longer and longer in my head.

The Verona fans are castigated by the press and opposing fans as racist and fascist. Most of the fans are indifferent or resent this stereotype but the die-hards have a slightly schizophrenic reaction to this reputation: partly denying and partly taking pride in it. But to some extent, it’s all an act; something they have to do to be a real fan. Something that is part of their identity; an identity that they feel makes them better than the fans of other teams. Whether it’s the privileged fans of Milan and Juventus, the despised southerners or the local hatred of Bergamo and Brescia and Vicenza, there is an assumption that the Verona fans are the best. And the fact that the team are perennial strugglers only ties the bonds tighter.

Reading this book brought many moments of recognition for how the fans actually feel. It’s not a simple thing; there is a huge emotional bond but not all of the emotions are positive. Tim Parks captures this remarkably well. This is a book about identity, about hope, about despair, about euphoria, about hate, about love, about Italy, about buses and all in the name of the beautiful game.

The Next Killer App

Stuart Radcliffe — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 22:19:00 GMT

Where will the next killer app come from? Michael Platt thinks that the next killer app will be based on the web service interfaces provided by the likes of Google, Ebay and Amazon. There certainly seems to be quite a platform developing on these three in particular and there could well be a way to tie this in with services that give you an idea as to what is hot right now like Technorati. Certainly an area worth thinking about.

Microsoft Moving Away from ADPs in Access

Stuart Radcliffe — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 08:01:00 GMT

Kent Tegels quotes Mary Chipman (who wrote the book) in the SSXE newsgroup as saying that Microsoft are now recommending moving away from ADP based solutions. It looks like this may be an experiment that has not been completely successful which leaves those of us who have implemented these solutions with an interesting support problem going forward. Here is the quote:

However, for new application development, ADPs aren't looking so promising, especially if you are thinking in the Yukon timeframe. A couple of problematical issues are complex data types and CLR assemblies. Tackling these head-on in the ADP UI graphical tools in the next version of Access is a daunting challenge, to say the least.

...and...

FWIW, the Access team has moved away from recommending ADPs as a front-end to SQLS apps over the last year or so, based on several public talks given by team members at industry conferences. If you are contemplating new development with Access as a FE to a SQLS BE, you'll likely be ahead of the game with an efficiently-designed MDB/linked table solution rather than an ADP.

Microsoft certification product manager Ken Rosen has started a blog

Stuart Radcliffe — Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:13:00 GMT

Microsoft certification product manager Ken Rosen has started a blog. The main feature is a weekly post on new Microsoft learning products.

Eli's SharePoint Resources

Stuart Radcliffe — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:33:00 GMT

Eli Robillard continues to maintain his excellent page of sharepoint resources.

Coding Slave

Stuart Radcliffe — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 17:53:00 GMT

I've just finished reading Coding Slave by Bob Reselman. It has been receiving a lot of publicity around the blog sphere (if that is publicity) after Bob's appearance on .NET Rocks, the coding (and in particular .NET) related weekly internet radio program. The co-host of .NET Rocks, Rory Blyth turned into a huge cheerleader for the book and his enthusiasm rubbed off on me. Having decided to read it, getting hold of it turned out not to be completely straightforward. I had to email Bob directly with my details and he mailed me the book all the way from sunny California. So, an expensive way of acquiring a relatively short book.

It's a thought provoking and interesting read although not, in my opinion, a particularly good novel. As a novel, it's OK but not something that I would have read if it was not about the software industry. There's lots of familiar situations and some (possibly deliberately, based on Rory's Interview with Bob Reselman) stereotypical coder types to keep those in the industry interested. They may well also like the geek sexual fantasy type episodes.

Non-programmers are not going to find much to hold there attention and probably shouldn't bother reading it.

There is more to this book than it simply being a novel. It is also an argument for a particular solution to the problems in the software industry. This side of the book is more interesting than the narrative but, again, probably only to people in the industry.

If the above sounds a little negative then that is unfair. I did enjoy the book and I would recommend it to people in the software industry. It's a fun read, I don't regret buying it and there were many situations in the book which rang true even where I am unfamiliar with that aspect of the industry. But, Penny (my wife) would have been bored.

Book Review - Understanding Web Services Specifications and the WSE

Stuart Radliffe — Sun, 02 May 2004 23:17:00 GMT

Understanding Web Services Specifications and the WSE

- Jeannine Hall Gailey, published by Microsoft Press

In a few days I will be training a course on Web Services. This will be based on the MOC Course 2524 : Developing XML Web Services Using Microsoft ASP.NET. I have trained this course before but have really just skimmed through the final module on Global XML Web Services Architecture. I knew that this had developed into the WSE 1.0 package (after having a change of name initially to WSA) and that this area was in some flux. I wanted to understand this area a bit better so I Amazoned and received.

The book covers the various WS specifications that were supported by Microsoft and IBM at the point when the book went to press. These have changed a bit since the course was developed so this is new and useful information.

The first chapter, as usual, is a bit of an overview and covers the various specifications and how they relate to Interoperability. It is a reasonable short introduction to Web Services in general and the various technologies behind them.

Chapter two looks specifically at Microsoft's Web Service Enhancements and has a good introduction on how to use this. It looks specifically at WSE 2.0 which is available as a technology preview and also mentions WSE 1.0, which was released in December 2002. This is a Microsoft .NET namespace that contains a set of classes for working with the various specifications that WSE supports.

We then go into a series of chapters that look at individual specifications and how they solve particular problems. These chapters open up with a description of the problem space and sometimes a quick summary of the concepts involved. They go on to look at the specifications involved in some detail and give examples of using the specifications in SOAP messages. The chapters then go on to look at how WSE implements the specification and provides some example C# code.

Chapter three looks at WS-Attachments and DIME (Direct Internet Message Encapsulation). This is a mechanism for attaching binary objects to a SOAP message. As described here, it would appear that the WSE implementation of WS-Attachments makes it reasonably straightforward to do what was a tricky task. There are a couple of caveats though. First of all, and most seriously, the security mechanisms that WSE implements are essentially useless for securing attachments. This is obviously a major problem with the way that this specification is implemented in WSE. The second caveat is the lack of support for working WSDL files. So, if you want to publish the specification of your web service that uses WS-Attachments, to a WSDL file you will need to edit this by hand.

Chapter four looks at a number of specifications related to reliable messaging. These are WS-Addressing, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Routing and WS-Referral. WS-Addressing implements a number of ways of specifying how a message should be addressed and routed. It includes most of the functionality that is contained in WS-Routing which looks like it will probably be discontinued in future versions of WSE. WS-Referral implements a way for a receiver of a message to have rules set up to pass on a message to another location to be dealt with. WS-Routing and WS-Referral have both been around since the GX-WSA days but have not been picked up by anyone except Microsoft. As one of the main pushes behind Web Services is interoperability, there is a good chance that both of these will be dropped by Microsoft in the future. WS-ReliableMessaging allows you to specify that messages should implement a particular order, receipt acknowledgements and other policies. This specification is pretty new and is not implemented in WSE 2.0.

Chapter five addresses security. It opens with a description of some of the issues that need to be addressed in the context of web services. It then looks at the WS-Security specification. Finally there is WSE code to handle security tokens, sign a SOAP message and encrypt a SOAP message. All these things can be done without the use of WSE but Jeannine shows how much easier it is to let WSE handle this. It also has the advantage that it is being done in a standardised way as WS-Security has quickly become that standard mechanism for dealing with security.

Chapter six looks at WS-Policy and how this allows you to define the Web Service Requirements that have to be fulfilled for a message to be processed. This would be things like specifying security arrangements or requiring a particular attachment be included with the message. It also looks at making policies discoverable by linking them to the WSDL document. Again, this is not supported by WSE as yet. It then looks at using the WSE Settings Tool to specify policies for a particular web service. WS-Policy (and the closely related WS-PolicyAttachment) are not fully supported by WSE but it still offers some useful functionality.

Chapter seven looks at the area of transactions in respect to web services. It describes the defining characteristics of transactions and looks at coordinating web service transactions using WS-Coordination and WS-AtomicTransaction These specifications are not implemented as part of WSE but will probably be implemented by future platforms (eg Windows, Biztalk Server etc.)

Chapter eight looks again at security and in particular the aspects that are not defined in WS-Security but instead in WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation. These are implemented in WSE and allow the setting up of trust networks and for messages to be secured using tokens.

Chapter nine wraps up the book with a look at the future of Web Services and WSE. Some of this is more speculative than not but it does allow Jeannine to wrap up the book in a friendlier and less formal manner than the rest of the book. In the way of firm predictions (by Keith Ballinger, lead program manager of WSE) WSE 3.0 is expected to support WS-ReliableMessaging although there is a competing specification called WS-Reliability that has been submitted to the OASIS standards group by Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu.

All in all, this is a useful and well written book. I don't have an immediate application in mind but I definitely want to keep an eye on WSE and where it is going to. I suspect that I will be using it a lot in the future and that this book will be steering me through a lot of the problems.

Page 23

Stuart Radcliffe — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 12:54:00 GMT

- Understanding Web Services Specifications and the WSE by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Over 2000 Weblogs lemmings have leaped off this same cliff. And its, late and I'm tired so I'm going to do the same.

Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Obviously when page 23 contains nothing but xml from a WSDL file its not only difficult to decide what the 5th sentence is but no matter what you pick, its meaningless and unintresting.

Oh well. I'll blame Ian Griffiths' Weblog.