A Rant on the .NET Certification Guides. I thought Microsoft wanted more people to pass their MCSD .NET certification exams. Apparently not, when you look at their .NET certification guide books. [Sam Gentile’s Radio Weblog]

I have mixed feelings about “certification guides” like the ones talked about in the article above.  I strongly feel that certification should reflect experience with a technology; not just that you studied very hard and passed a test.

Back when I was teaching a Microsoft MFC class, I met a guy who took the certification test something like 6 times and finally passed it.  He then went to a customer to teach the class, and they threw him out on the first day for an obvious lack of experience. 

Certification should mean something…and something more than “hey, I bought the book, and I remember every page.”

SOAP Faults with Headers

Thanks again Greg for spurring the old brain juices.  [Justin Rudd’s Radio Weblog]

Glad I could help!

Ok, this is a bit off topic (do I have a topic?), but what is it with people and their cigarette butts?  Just today, I saw 3 separate burning butts ejected out of car windows, burning ashes flying everywhere.  Two of those were on a narrow divided highway with dry grass in the median.  Do people not make the connection between fire on the end of their cigarette and the 200,000 some acres that have burned in the last month in Colorado alone?  Come on, people.  Your car has an ashtray, for crying out loud.  Use it.

Ben Lowery posts HttpCompressionModule, an IHttpModule implementation with source that does gzip/deflate HTTP compression. [Peter Drayton’s Radio Weblog] Hmmm, alternatively you could just turn on the built in support for this. [Simon Fell]

The built-in IIS implementation in Windows 2000 and earlier has some limitations, though; the most significant is that if you turn on compression for, say, .asmx responses, then every .asmx response will be compressed.  You may prefer to only compress certain responses.  Further, it is a machine-wide setting; to be truly useful in a typical production environment, IMHO, it needs to at least support turning compression on/off per site, if not per-virtual directory.

Australian scientists claim teleporting success

“[…] scientists in Australia have successfully teleported a laser beam of light from one spot to another in a split second”

“[…] not too far from being able to teleport solid matter from one location to another.”

Cool!

From this article:

“Most observers say Web services do not yet lend themselves to huge, transaction-based systems because there is some delay associated with Web services making requests, particularly across multiple networks.”

“[…] it soon became apparent’ that the Web services approach would not fly, Johnson said. The [HSN.com] search engine handles more than 200,000 requests every day — and that volume goes up significantly during the holiday season.”

First of all, you can certainly build “huge” systems with web services; you just need to architect them correctly.  Sure, each call to a web service might take a bit longer than a different kind of call; but in transactional systems, we’ve all learned over the years to do a lot of work in each call, to reduce “chattiness”.  This reduces the relative method call cost in a well-designed system.  As for the transactional system reference, the way things work today, you’ll be fine as long as you don’t allow a transaction to live across multiple service calls.  This is how most highly scalable systems are built anyway; it’s nothing new.

As for the 200,000 requests/day, if I apply some calculations used in the past, this comes out to 5.6 requests/second sustained during the peak period of the day (this is of course an estimate based on guesses about their traffic patterns, guessing 50% of traffic during a 5-hour peak period).  A 3x instantaneous peak during this window would give us 16.8 requests/second peak.  This still doesn’t seem large; if there was a performance bottleneck, it sounds to me like it wasn’t due to the fact that there was a web service entry point.  At a previous employer, we designed and tested a system which handled 100-300 real-world web service requests/second on modest hardware clusters. 

I hate to see articles saying “web services don’t perform.”  It’s all about good design.

It’s a girl. Karyn gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Elaina Margaret Weakliem today (6/16) at 6:28 AM.  Mother and baby are doing fine.  Elaina is 5 lb. 13 oz., 19″ long, and has a full head of hair and dark eyes.  She’s been pretty sleepy today so we’ve been enjoying the quiet.  I’m very happy with my father’s day present :-)
[Gordon Weakliem’s Radio Weblog]

Congratulations Gordon!

Sun plays catch up with Web services. The company, sensing it has fallen behind rivals Microsoft and IBM in Web services leadership, is launching a renewed strategy in an attempt to play catch up. [CNET News.com] [Drew’s Blog]

I still haven’t seen a lot of evidence that Sun really wants to play in the web services world; at least not the world that’s being defined with the initiative of Microsoft and IBM.  And here’s a snippet from an interesting article:

“The second danger comes from Sun and its ownership of Java. Sun’s position on interoperability is “Java everywhere.” Web services present a real threat to one of Java’s strongest selling points—the ability to write code on any platform that integrates easily with Java code running on other platforms. Sun derives revenue from all Java tools, even those coming from other vendors. Clearly Sun would prefer that organizations look to Java as their interoperability strategy rather than a language-independent solution such as Web services. “

Microsoft SQLXML 3.0 lets you leverage you existing Transact-SQL stored procedures by generating WSDL files for single or multiple query resultsets. This article shows you how to take advantage of SQLXML 3.0’s new capabilities, such as delivering strongly-typed DataSets to populate DataGrids. It also includes source code for a Visual Basic .NET Windows form consumer of sample Web services from the OakLeaf Web site.
[Sam Gentile’s Radio Weblog]

You know, the whole idea of web services exposed from SQL Server is pretty cool – for internal-use services.  What I worry about, though, is people exposing these services directly on the internet.  Over the last few years, we’ve finally gotten to the point where people have learned not to expose their databases directly to the internet; but exposing web services from the DB makes it that much more tempting again.  I’ve seen newsgroup postings where people are thinking about doing this…pretty scary. 

The Right Car

Mounting problems with the BMW 7 Series. Maybe one day people will realize how overrated the Beemer really is. Nice car for the most part but definetly much to overhyped. Don’t believe me? Just test drive a 330 and a Infiniti G35 back to back. And then decide what to do with the $10K that you can save with the Infiniti G35 [The Wagner Blog]

Right sentiment, wrong car. ;) I’ve had my Audi A6 2.7t for almost 2 years, and I’ve never driven a car that’s even remotely like it, especially not for the price. Where $40k might get you into a bottom level 3-Series, it buys you one of the fastest, most comfortable, and downright well appointed luxury cars on the road. The twin turbos show virtually no lag, even here at 6500 feet. Oh, and with fully-independent full-time all wheel drive, it handles like a snowmobile in the winter weather. :)  [The .NET Guy]

I tried very hard to let this go, but being a die-hard car guy and race driver I just couldn’t.  ;-)  I’m a BMW guy myself; don’t have one any more, but I’ve missed them ever since I sold my 328.  There’s a certain driving feel to most BMW’s that has yet to be matched in any Audi that I have driven; balance and steering feedback is top-notch.  The closest to this was a friend’s S4, but still not the same (although I must confess, I only drove the S4 twice).  But for the track, I’d take a BMW over either the Infiniti or an Audi.

Now when the snow falls, as you mention, it’s a whole different story.  :-)

While I have you here, check out The BMW Century: The Ultimate Performance Machines – for real BMW fans only!