Mark Monster

Just a few days from now I’m going to mary my girlfriend Yvonne. Our wedding is going to be on September the 5th. We are marying at a small castle (not really a castle, but I don’t know the English word for “Landgoed”) in The Netherlands.

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After our wedding we’re going to have our wedding holiday on an island called Kos in Greece. So for some time there will be no blogging.

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Some time ago I did the technical proofreading of the Manning book PHP in Action by Dagfinn Reiersol. The book is available since the end of June.

During the technical proofreading and even before this during the normal review, I began to really like this book. It’s about building PHP applications, but doesn’t stop after “Hello, world!”. Not it doesn’t stop there at all, PHP in Action covers a lot of practices for building more enterprise like PHP applications and also covers design patterns.

Although I’m not longer a active PHP developer I really thing that every self-respecting php-developer should have this book on his bookshelf.

Hmm, still trying to test Astoria out, this time in combination with ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 2. Still not succesful however. I noticed the following things.

• When I try to add a “Web Data Service”, I got stuck in a Visual Studio error.
  Error: this template attempted to load an untrusted component ‘msastoriavs, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35′. For more information on this problem and how to enable this template, please see documentation on Customizing Project Templates.
• Besides this I compared the Entity Model I created, they greatly differ between Beta 1 and Beta 2.
  • The extension is changed from .csdl to .edmx.
  • The schema-prefix changed from edm: to edmx:

My conclusion so far. The projectteam for Astoria has to do some work to make Astoria work with Beta 2 of ADO.NET Entity Framework.

I just came across a three part article about creating a custom Launchy clone in .NET and WPF. Launchy is very nice application launcher I talked about in the past. The article is very detailed, I like it. And for all Launchy is very feature-rich, but I only use it for launching applications that are in my Start menu. Take a look at it for yourself.

• Building a simple Launchy clone in WPF (Part 1/3: Blend)
• Building a simple Launchy clone in WPF (Part 2/3: Visual Studio)
• Building a simple Launchy clone in WPF (Part 3/3: Tying things together)

Maybe I build my own Launchy clone. A good start to get to know WPF a little better, practice the Model View Presenter pattern and more.

I’ve never been a real fan of Enterprise Library. I’ve used User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block in the past no a few projects. Yes it was something interesting but it has been silent on UIP for a long time. And then there was Web Client Software Factory. But just very recently I came across the blog of Davin Hayden and notices he’s making screencasts about Enterprise Library 3.0. I’ve seen all of them and I am going to like Enterprise Library 3.0 more and more.

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I’ve read a lot about people moving from their own e-mail hosting to Google Apps mail hosting. So did I today.

I changed the MX-records so all mail previously managed by Alken Internet now is managed by Google Apps. I really like the service offered by Alken Internet, but Google Apps is free, and now I’ve got more hosting-space left for this blog ;-).

I’ve been looking around in the domain management tools offered by Alken Internet, but didn’t find anything to add CName records. I’ve now set webmail.mymonster.nl to redirect to Google Webmail, calendar.mymonster.nl to redirect to Google Calendar and docs.mymonster.nl to redirect to Google Docs. Maybe I’ll be able to change this to real CName records, instead of redirects.

Scott Hanselman also moved to Google Apps and has a very nice explaination about how he moved his family to Google Apps. I only move my fiancée and I, but who knows how large our family will grow in the future.

I’m not sure if any reader has an idea about documenting your Service Oriented Architecture. But I thought about it, I can just ask.

What are your ways to document a SOA?  I know the very useful tool called Word, but are there any industry standard tools to document your Services, their relations, versionin, functional and technical descriptions. I think it’s also interesting to know what kind of things you are documenting about the SOA in general and the Services specifically.

I’m waiting for your reply’s.

We’ve been waiting for some time to get the new Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC Image. We can download it now on: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC Demonstration - August 2007 Release

What’s in this Release?

• Windows 2003 R2 SP2
• SQL Server 2005
• Internet Explorer 7
• Office Professional Plus 2007
• Office Sharepoint Server 2007
• Dynamics CRM 3.0 (V3C, Rollup 2)
• Dynamics CRM Laptop and Desktop client
• Dynamics CRM SDK
• Dynamics Web Parts
• Visual Studio 2005
• Windows Desktop Search 3.01
• POP3 Services (no Exchange)

Hmm reading this. What about Visual Studio 2005? What’s the use of it, development for Dynamics CRM 3.0 needs to be in .NET 1.1. I know it is possible to use Visual Studio 2005 to target to .NET 1.1 but it isn’t that easy.

I’m going to download the image as soon as possible and maybe add some comments to this post as part of it.

A few days ago I wrote about trying out Astoria. Yesterday I started trying out. First I thought about using Astoria local, but that wasn’t succesful. On the Astoria Getting Started Guide it says you need to have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 in combination with Astoria. In my case I already have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, which in case doesn’t have ADO.NET Entity Framework available. And as a matter of fact Astoria is built on top of WCF and makes use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. But that’s no problem for setting up your own Astoria Data Service. Below are the detailed steps I took.

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Bizner bank has published some Podcasts about Entrepreneurship. They are in dutch and Ben Tiggelaar speaks on those Podcasts. The podcasts have the book “Dromen, Durven, Doen” (or translated: Dream, Dare, Do) in mind.

An overview of those podcasts in dutch:

1. Voor de starters: Ondernemen…?
2. Voor de ondernemers: Ondernemen…?
3. Wat heb je als ondernemer aan je oude schoolrapporten?
4. Hoe weet je welke keuzes je moet maken als je binnenkort wilt gaan starten?
5. Durf jij je dromen over een eigen onderneming ook echt uit te voeren?
6. Doen! De belangrijkste stap voor een nieuwe onderneming.