Just read Mitch's post: Is your general blogging? It's been some time now that I'm trying to convince my generals and colleagues to start blogging too. I feel somehow alone as the only Xceed member to blog. Moreover, I clearly don't have "all the picture" to share with you. It would be so great to see Odi and Dan open and share their experience as Xceed generals.

Odi Kosmatos

Odi is a geek (or greek, both apply)! When he gets interested in some technology, he'll read everything he can to master the subject. I needed winter tires for my car? I asked Odi. Pascal was curious about having a "music anywhere" house. He asked Odi. Odi could share so much on particular technologies using his own experiments and readings. What's even more interesting is that he gets really excited sharing his thoughts with us. Why not have fun blogging about them?

He's also deeply involved at Xceed with marketing, sales, web sites and next products/features decisions; he sure would have a lot of material for blogging.

Daniel Côté

His blog would be in French... or he wouldn't post enough. But I don't see why we couldn't blog in French too. Though Daniel earned the same computer science diploma as Odi and I, he has since concentrated his efforts on management, finances, and human resources. His blog would address the day to day experience of managing a software company and it's employes, dealing with decisions, relations, and the general image a serious company has to withstand.

Besides Xceed's generals, there are pillars at Xceed I would very much like to see blog.

Pascal Bourque

Friend, fellow lead developer and unofficial chief architect, Pascal is probably the person I'm the most eager to see blog. At the time he's reading this, he's probably mad I'm putting (yet again) more pressure on him blogging, but we would all benefit from the exercise, him first!

Let's make it clear: he's a master! Master at leveraging, quickly understanding and popularizing (is that a word?) any technology. And I mean any! He's amazing. He can quickly identify any technology that can get involved in a new product or feature, understand how it could be useful, and easily explain why. He's a very important part of Xceed's expertise.

Samy Kacem

Samy is our main webmaster. Speaking many languages and getting seriously involved in marketing, he has a clear and serious opinion on many worldwide subjects, and it's always a pleasure to discuss with him. And he's very funny, so his blog wouldn't be boring!

Many others here could also enrich the Xceed blogging community with their experience. I feel alone it that community. Help me convince them to join me!

Funny. When I saw the TopDesk post on Neowin, i told myself "Hmmm, looks nice, I should take a look at it one day", and I returned to my work.

This morning, I saw another TopDesk post, this time on ComputerZen. Scott is so impressed with TopDesk that he made a video capture of it in action. His demo and description sold me! I've installed TopDesk, and it's a great tool for only 10$.

It's not the first time Scott convinces me more than any onther people or article to try something. The power of blogging on small software companies is huge... and very important I realize! Maybe I can even try a conclusion: blogging is far more important for small companies than big companies.

Hint to the Otaku Software and Maxivista of this world: If someone named Scott Hanselman wants to buy your software, give him for free, it's a good investment.

Don pointed us to the Computerworld Development Survey, where we learn that developers use .NET and C# more than other frameworks and languages.

In the survey, you can read this:

What is your current position/job function?
IT manager	38%
Developer	36%
Non-developer IT staff	8%
Non-IT manager	5%
Other	13%

There are more IT managers than developers? What gives? Another table I had problems with is this one:

What is your current employment status?
Employed in organization with more than 100 employees	86%
Employed in organization with 100 or fewer employees	7%
Self-employed	6%
Not employed*	1%

Hmmm, that looks strange. I felt there were more smaller companies around. Then I read the end of the article:

Methodology
This study was conducted among subscribers to Computerworld.

Ok, now I understand. Surveys are biased by definition. You need the definition to understand them! My understanding is:

• Computerworld is read by IT managers, not developers.
• Big companies subscribe to Computerworld for their IT department. Small companies put their money elsewhere first.

Did you notice that when maps.google.com cannot find your location, it always displays the same map? It's somewhere in Kansas, close to the Oklahoma border:

It made me think of The Wizard of Oz, so I searched where Dorothy Gale was from. She's from Liberal, Kansas, which is way to the West of what's displayed.

The first thing you notice is the Coffeyville Country Club. So I've googled for "Coffeyville Country Club Google", and realized this was simply the default location when you open maps.google.com, and zoom in... Google Maps' center of the United-States... Dah! So much trouble for a so simple solution.

Just learned through Neowin.net that maps.google.com now supports switching between the drawn view of the map and a satellite view. Switching views is as simple as clicking on either "Map" or "Satellite". And guess what? Zooming and moving works as well in "Satellite" view. They were quite fast integrating their new Keyhole acquisition!

If you compare the "Link to this page" of the same area for both views, you can see that the only difference is the "t=k" extra parameter for the satellite view ("k" as in Keyhole).

Bravo Google, you did it again!

 

This one is my favorite news of this "fishy" day!

As a long time Win32/COM developer with several books containing many sample programmers [sic], I am just appalled that Microsoft would consider dropping support for classic IDL. This would cause trouble for developers who are still using the samples that I created 10+ years ago!
-- Geoffrey Rickder

That was funny!

Once my wife IMed me another severe earthquake just hit the Sumatra region, I searched for more technical information about the earthquake, and ended on the USGS site. Wow! Near-live information on seismic activity around the globe, even with an RSS feed. Subscribed, out of curiosity.

I've just finished a meeting about an issue we're having with our .NET components. Though I fully agree with our decision, it's very frustrating, and I thought I'd share this with you.

A few years ago, before .NET was officially released, we decided to embrace the idea of digitally signing our ActiveX DLLs. The idea was to garantee our clients those DLLs were really from us. It was an added value that had no (visible) impact on the products themselves.

When .NET came in, though one could argue the strong name was sufficient, we decided to stick with digitally signing and do both. Actually, the strong name isn't offering CRL verification, nor detailed information about the "signer". It's not actual identity, it's only integrity.

Somewhere in time (we're still not sure when... maybe since .NET 1.0 SP3/.NET 1.1 SP1?), clients started complaining about our assemblies causing a network access. For most of them, the only impact was their sudden suspicion that our products were spywares, while in reality it was Windows' WinVerifyTrust API accessing crl.verisign.com or crl.thawte.com to check if the certificate used to sign the DLL was revoked.

But others got bigger problems. Some people behind a very strick firewall, ignoring outgoing connections instead of rejecting them, had a timeout while loading our assemblies. That timeout (at least 15 seconds) is hardcoded in WinVerifyTrust! We can't do anything about it.

And finally, those using a dial-up connection were seeing their Dial-Up dialog box appearing when our assemblies were loaded. Nothing to put confidence in our products. How come using Xceed Grid for .NET causes a network access?

There are solutions for those clients, but ugly solutions that either involve disabling CRL checking in the first place (yeah, right, let's sign our DLLs, then ask our clients to turn off its use!), or regularly install our certificate in the list of trusted certificates, which is only good for a certain period, and must be repeated again and again.

We've just decided to stop signing our .NET assemblies. Most of our competitors don't anyway. And those that do are having the same problem. But it's so damn frustrating to see that security is again loosing a battle. Sure, the impact is quite minor, but I'm left with a mixed feeling of failure and blames against the current implementation of WinVerifyTrust.

Found this through ComputerZen. The whole Richard Grimes incident is getting out of hands. Come on, people! Managed applications are the future. The .NET framework is awesome! I gave COM/ATL/ActiveX courses in the past. I could see those VB6 developers in front of me staring at the immensity of exceptions and rules and gotchas behind the COM scene. For the user, COM is great. But for the creator, it's an infinite loop of pitfalls.

"1199 signatories including 202 Microsoft MVPs since March 8th, 2005."

202? I can't beleive it.