Microsoft wins the PDA OS war

September 21, 2005 at 8:16 am · Filed under Miscellaneous

Business Week is reporting that soon there will be an announcement of a Windows Mobile Treo.  This was expected, but now it is (almost) official:

Microsoft has won the PDA OS wars

Being an avid user of Palm OS devices since the Pilot Professional and recently a user of the JASJAR (a Windows Mobile 5 Phone), I have to say that Microsoft won this one on marketing.

That is not to say that technically Windows Mobile isn’t impressive.  It certainly is; however, the ease of use and responsiveness of the T3 stands in stark contrast to the slowness and complexity of the JASJAR.  OK, I should try other Windows Mobile devices before I make a statement about relative speed, but the overall complexity of the PIM functionality makes Windows Mobile very hard to use. 

I just don’t see how an average (non-technical, non-geeky) user could use a Windows Mobile device as their PIM.

Update: fixed a typeo and an admission: no, Windows Mobile devices are not necessarily slow.

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Universal Studios Party

September 15, 2005 at 10:56 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous

The Universal Studios party was a lot of fun. I have not been there since the 70s. Jaws and the Six Million Dollar Man were the exciting things to see then. Now, I think the highlights are The Mummy Returns ride and the Jurassic Park ride.

They are not kidding when they say you get wet on Jurassic Park. The guys I went with weren’t too keen on getting wet, but I went straight for the front of the boat. The attendant told us the front-left was the worst on the boat. That is where I sat. I could tell what was coming because once I sat down (before the ride left) my pants were already quite wet. Anyway, it was a blast.

We brought a prospective customer with us to the party. He only recently began coding for the Microsoft OS. at one point, out of the blue, he said “Man, I have to tell you, that Visual Studio absolutely rocks!” He was talking about Visual Studio 2003.

Thanks to Microsoft for a great party and a great PDC05!

Tags: Microsoft, PDC05

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Update to VPN/SSH @ PDC05

September 12, 2005 at 7:25 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

I posted that we were having trouble with our VPN and SSH clients.  I was right – in principle, there is no problem using these services at PDC05.

Unfortunately, our VPN doesn’t support NATT so we won’t be getting our email while were here.  And one of our remote SSH boxes won’t reply to us if we run SSH2, but SSH1 works OK.  Not ideal, but it will have to do.

I hope.  Otherwise we’re going to make a grid out of four laptops.  That might be cool anyway.

Thanks to Chris Craig in network support for helping us diagnose the problem.

Tags: PDC05

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Tech @ PDC05

September 12, 2005 at 3:24 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous

Microsoft is presenting on and / or announcing a lot of new technologies at PDC05 that are interesting for us:

Windows Communications Framework (was Indigo) The more integrated the communications services are with Windows and the more transports-independent they are, the better. I look forward to giving our customers more options on how our components communicate (regarding protocols, transport, and security) to best fit their specific operating environment. Of course, a lot has already been written on WCF. I look forward to hearing more about future directions.

Windows Workflow Framework and Windows Workflow Services (was Windows Orchestration Engine): while we plan the enhancements in the workflow capabilities of the Digipede Network, integrating with existing systems is always a requirement. A no-brainer for us was/is to build a BizTalk adapter. WWS looks interesting (as it looks to replace the existing BizTalk Orchestration services) – it will allow us to integrate with BizTalk 2006 as well as Office 12. This means that Microsoft has just reduced the number of integration points we need while increasing the flexibility of the entire solution. Very cool.

Windows Server Compute Cluster Edition (CCE) This product is going to make a big splash in the growing 64-bit clustering market. The work that that team is doing to improve the platform for distributed computing is all good. As Dan said in a recent post, this is a critical move. I look forward to Kyril’s talk and to catching up with him on their plans.

And more. I’ll blog on that later . . .

Tags: .NET, PDC05, WCF, WF

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Cabbing to the PDC

September 12, 2005 at 2:50 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

I am sitting in the cab on the way to the LA convention center for PDC05. Dan is there now having some issues with network connectivity from our booth (#123). SSH and VPN ports blocked? Can’t be – I’m sure he’ll figure it out.

A few weeks ago, I was at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk with my family. I found out that my 4-year old has a stronger stomach than I do.

And I’ve just realized I cannot blog while in the back of an LA taxi.

Tags: PDC05

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Run Plazes while at PDC05

September 9, 2005 at 9:34 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

I have been checking out Plazes. If you haven’t tried it out yet, it is a way to share your location with others where location is defined by the network you are running on.

Kind of cool, but not too useful when sitting at home or in the office. I’m looking forward to trying it out at PDC05 to see how many people (and geeks like me) come up on the Plazes radar.

Maybe I’ll “see” you there.

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What is R Wandering?

September 3, 2005 at 4:39 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous

This blog will track my thoughts on software, process, tools, and technologies. I will also use it as a place to post approaches and solutions to technical problems I come across. I have a bit of a backlog of these that I plan to write up over the next month (e.g., some nant and ccnet stuff, developing COM interfaces and documentation for .NET, some Preemptive posts . . . ).

I have been developing software since high school and basically full time since I was a Junior at Cal. I finished there 15 years ago and have since helped build a couple of companies as the software technology lead. While my primary responsibility is generally planning, designing, and building software product I have also been responsible for or directly involved in every aspect of the business. I’ve been on company boards, managed human resources, hired and fired, performed technical selling and evangelism, worked through various due-diligence processes, sold a company, and more. Aside from developing software, one of my favorite things to do is to discuss business issues with fellow entrepreneurs.

My company, Digipede Technologies (www.digipede.net), sells the Digipede Network, a Windows-based distributed computing product built upon Microsoft .NET.

I became interested in distributed computing while at Energy Interactive (www.energyinteractive.com). Among other products we had an energy billing solution designed for billing the most complex commercial and industrial customer for energy providers. Billing was a long running process and we needed to come up with a way to shorten the total run time for a billing cycle. When scaling up was no longer an option, we did the next logical thing: we scaled out. To do this, we ended up rolling our own solution using DCOM, but, we felt that there had to be a better way. That is one of the motivations for the Digipede Network –a packaged solution with the tools to make it easy to grid-enable applications.

In terms of development technologies, I’ve spent most of my time working with Microsoft tools and technologies. I first started with Windows 2.0 and have, of course, worked on all of the Microsoft platforms since. I have worked with C++, VB, MFC, COM/DCOM, ATL, everything from ODBC to ADO.NET, Java, MSMQ, SQL Server, C#, ASP.NET, and more. Now, I am fully a .NET and WinFx developer.

In addition to my work I also manage a couple of FreeBSD servers for hosting email and Web sites.

And none of that explicitly defines R Wandering.

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