Blog has moved

I'm now blogging at www.unravelled.info where i'm covering microsoft technology, CCR programming, webdesign and other interesting things

Daily Interests

Wow, I forgot about this series already! LOL

I’m currently watching a video ‘The Elephant in the Room’ by Nishant Kothary.  Great video about the design process and the ‘irrational human factor’.  Definitely worth watching, although it goes for nearly an hour (glass half full = “Great Value!”, half empty = “Wow there goes an hour of my life!”)

Mike Swanson has a write up on which videos were the most popular here

Daily Interests

I’m starting up a new series of posts.  I want to start bookmarking the interesting things I find and read on a daily basis.

Too often I’ve bookmarked in my browser only to never find the link again, forget where I filed it under… or, more permanently… deleted it thinking it was junk.

The main problem with bookmarking is that the mechanism is too clumsy. It can’t answer simple questions like, ‘what did I bookmark last week’, or ‘why did I bookmark this?’

The solution is quite simple really.  Put it in a BLOG!

• An Illustrated Guide to Matt Cutts' Comments
• In-depth details regarding Google indexing
• helpful analysis taken from another blog
• SEO Trademark Registration Terminated
• Unbelievably someone nearly managed to trademark ‘SEO’
• In the end it came down to a single person’s efforts to block the process!
• The Orchard Project
• Microsoft has released an early version of a new open source blog/CMS based on the ASP.net MVC 2.0 framework
• Trying to watch a video about it on channel 9, but it seems that the video content is crawling very slowly.

It’s been a while…

Wow, this has been a neglected blog! Almost not worth pointing out the obvious same old story.  Been busy etc. etc.

LOL

So… what have I been up to?

Been working hard on KeyRPM 2.0 which should be released with in the next couple of weeks (fingers crossed)

I launched a new Search engine called crawlabout.com, this is in it’s infancy and has a LONG way to go.  Just recently daily unique visitors passed the 100 mark – which is a exciting milestone.

I have recently completed the Source Church Stirling’s website. (The domain name is quite a mouth full!)  The church is in the beautiful Adelaide hills.

My current hot project is Sipping.com.au, which is a Review website focused on wineries in Adelaide.  The idea for the project grew out of my own need to solve a simple problem – Which wineries are worth the time to visit?  Anyway, more on the in another post.

Do ASMX or WCF Proxy clients use IO completion ports?

I'm in the middle of performance testing a critical section of my project, when I notice a whole lot of extra threads being used to to perform WaitOrTimerCallback operations. 

On closer inspection I can see that these are being spawned by my ASMX client proxy class for operations on a remote server.

I was under the impression that these were using IO completion ports like all of my other asynchronous IO Calls.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime Learning Resources

I have recently been learning the in's and out's of the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR). Finding good learning resources for this relatively new technology has been quite difficult.

(A quick Google search brings up "Credence Clearwater Revival" as the top result!)

Some of the resources I have found:

• Free e-book chapter from WROX on the Robotics Developer Studio
• Good Article/post on InfoQ
• Robotic's Member blog
• Very active MSDN CCR Forum - Got plenty of help from here!
• Great MSDN Magazine by Jeffrey Richter
• Official CCR User Guide - Didn't find this very helpful
• Great blogging series on CCR
• iodyner CCR Related Blog - Update: Moved to here
• Eight or so Videos on Channel9.msdn.com
• CCR Patterns page on MS Robotics Studio - I haven't read this yet
• 4 x CCR Questions on Stackoverflow - Most of the questions have been Mine! LOL

Do you have any good learning resources for the CCR?

I really hope that Microsoft will publish more material, so far it has been too Robotics specific. I believe that MS needs to acknowledge that most people are using the CCR in isolation from the DSS and Robotics Studio.

I also published this list at StackOverflow

BizSpark - Getting a Helping hand from MS

I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but Microsoft has launched a new service/program called BizSpark.

BizSpark is basically a kind of sponsorship program offered to startup companies working with the MS Technology stack.  They offer free access to their MSDN Subscription service for up to 3 years while you meant their restrictions and stick to their TOS.

For our small company this has been a God send.  I can finally get access to the development tools I need to launch our service!

Thanks Microsoft for giving back to the community!