Witty for Identi.ca. Only the brave need apply.
July 17th, 2008
If you have a Windows machine with VS2008, .Net 3.5, svn and patch on it, you can get the source for Witty here [1] and a patch [2] that will make it run against Identi.ca
Enjoy!
[1] http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/source/checkout
[2] http://code.google.com/p/wittytwitter/issues/detail?id=147
Witty can talk to Identi.ca
July 14th, 2008

Due to the nice decoupling of the service API and the user interface in the project Witty it was relatively easy to create a basic service API for Identi.ca. There is still a lot of stuff to get working but at least the basic read and write are functioning.
I am hoping that I will be able enable both services at once so that I can view tweets/notices at once.
Better get back to my real work now!
Security and Http
June 4th, 2008
I did some experimentation today with authentication over http.
Using the System.Net.WebClient class I made requests against both a HttpListener based server and WCF service contract using webHttpBinding.
With HttpListener I can get Basic authentication and WindowsIntegratedAuthentication working just fine. With WebHttpBinding I cannot get either. I am aware that with WebHttpBinding over https you can do Basic Auth. I haven’t tried WindowsIntegratedAuthentication over https. I do understand the logic behind disallowing clear text passwords to be sent without any encryption but it is not that unusual a scenario (Twitter, POP, FTP). I’m not sure that it is Microsoft’s job to be the police in this situation.
What is even more cool is that I can connect to an HttpListener server over a VPN connection and I get the domain account of the remote user.
I was not able to implement both Basic and WindowsIntegrated at the same time. However, I did find AuthenticationSchemeSelectorDelegate which sounds very promising.
Programming Twitter without WCF 3.5
June 2nd, 2008
Via Twitter I came across this post showing how easy it is to interface with Twitter using WCF 3.5.
Dariusz hypothesizes that it would be cool to do
1: TwitterStatusProxy proxy = new TwitterStatusProxy( “username”, “password” );
2:
3: // retrieve friends timeline
4: XElement timeline = proxy.GetFriendsTimeline();
5:
6: // do whatever you want to do with the data
and proceeds to show how to implement TwitterStatusProxy. All very cool with bindings, channel factories, service contracts and operation contracts.
The only problem I see is that with only .Net 2.0 the same can be achieved with the following:
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(“username”,“password”);
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(wc.OpenRead(“http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml”));
Seems kind of crazy to pile the whole WCF infrastructure on top of something so simple in the first place.
P.S Sorry about the horrific code formatting, I need to find me a new theme that shows code better.
The hypermedia constraint?
May 8th, 2008
At the recent Pnp Summit, during a presentation on Ado.Net Data Services, I asked Scott Hanselman whether it supported the REST “hypermedia constraint”, to which he responded by asking me to clarify my question. At that point, and at several other times during the conference I realized that although I think I grok the concept, I certainly do a horrible job of attempting to explain it.
So I went searching and found a number of people who do a much better job of explaining it than I ever could. One of the advantages of a term so obtuse as “Hypermedia as the engine of application state” (HATEOAS) is that google does a great job of finding articles.
Stu Charlton explains HATEOAS from the perspective of an architect. My take away from this article is summarized by
making sure that your interfaces constrain the “when”: logical timing & ordering expectations
Peter Williams suggests that hypermedia gives you the flexibility to change your URL structure without breaking clients.
Paul James gives a concrete example of how hypermedia helps to decouple the client and the server. The best line of this article for me was,
So next time someone goes on about how RESTful systems can’t possibly work because they need some kind of description language to enable clients to be wired to servers, remind them of hypermedia and point them to any part of the Web for a real World example of REST in action.
For me I began to grok REST after reading Tim Ewald’s post. For him REST only became significant once he understood the notion of a “state machine as node graph traversed via URI”.
Too often REST is viewed as a HTTP/XML based data access layer. I think this wrong layer to deploy REST. REST for me is about exposing use cases/scenarios/stories to a non-human.
Maybe next time I get asked the question, I’ll actually be able to remember the phrase “Hypermedia as the engine of application state” and I might even be able to explain it.
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The ultimate WCF Service contract
May 8th, 2008
REST consulting
March 13th, 2008
Over the past year we have been working on the next generation of our product. After 10 years of fat client development we are rebuilding using REST as the foundation of our application architecture.
We are fortunate in that our existing applications map very nicely to some of the principles such as “uniform interface” and “addressability”.
However, only knowing about the existence of REST for less than a year, I am still pretty green. I decided that maybe I should look for some help.
I was very fortunate to discover that, not only does Mark Baker live and work pretty close to me, but that he does consulting work and he just happens to be one of the most recognized authorities on the subject of REST.
I was able to meet with Mark and give him a idea of where we were coming from, where we want to go and show him some of the REST work that we have done to date.
Mark’s insight was invaluable and I believe has helped to point me in the right direction at the beginning of a long journey. I look forward to working with him again as our project progresses.
Unfortunately, REST has already started to become “just another buzzword” because people are developing interfaces with only a partial understanding of the underlying concepts. I would urge anyone starting a REST based project to get guidance from someone with a deep understanding of the subtleties of doing REST design.
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It’s a sad day
March 3rd, 2008
It is a real shame when people do not feel free to express an opinion without some form of backlash.
We will miss your raw opinions Dare.
Opportunistic locking and remote desktop
December 18th, 2007
Here’s a little word of warning to others who may spend some of their time in the IT trenches. If someone asks you to change the Windows Opportunistic Locking settings, as per this knowledge base article. Be warned, it may break your ability to remote desktop to the server. It did for me.
Of course, changing the setting back when you cannot remote desktop back in is a little trickier. Thankfully, remote registry and Shutdown.exe came to the rescue.
And if you are wondering why the hell I was playing with the opportunistic locking settings, well it appears that some business applications still use ISAM database architectures which are extremely prone to data corruption. Don’t get me started…
Why WPF for LOB applications?
October 29th, 2007
Glenn Block announces some details on P&P’s plans for the new WPF Composite Client. In general this is great news. Unfortunately it comes one day after I bitched to him about how P&P were neglecting WPF based smart clients
What specifically I want to comment on is the following quotes
Win Forms is the recommended breadth solution for LOB application development for the foreseeable future
I see so many developers moving to WPF for no better reason than that it is the new thing. They are unable to articulate a business need.
Here are my reasons why we are migrating from a WinForms app to a WPF application:
- Scaling the UI. Since the rise in popularity of LCD monitors, we have seen a huge number of problems relating to screen resolution. Users who don’t know better set their LCD’s to non-native resolutions and get fuzzy displays. Some use 17″ monitors at 1280 x 1024 and sit the monitor on the front edge of the desk so that they can see it. Some actually try and change the resolution to 120% and then find half of their applications don’t resize properly! The sales value of an application that a 60 year old company president can actually read is invaluable.
- Themes and styles. Our users don’t really care too much about skinning their ERP application, but it does need to look good and it should be consistent. Stock Winforms controls look like crap and once you start using third party toolkits you get to choose from a whole array of styles: Office 2003, Office 2007, Visual Studio 2005, ad nauseam. Applying those styles consistently across an entire application is a major pain.
- Maybe I’m just not very talented but I think handling CTRL-C and CTRL-V is just way harder than it needs to be in WinForms. WPF seems to have the capability to handle this stuff properly.
- Databinding - .Net 1.1 was horrible. .Net 2.0 was just about usable in most scenarios and WPF seems to have taken it to a level that I probably will not write my own binder.
- Design time experience - Expression Blend is an incredible product for a V1. It is rock solid in comparison to the WinForms Designer in VS2005. No more white screen of death!
- Run time performance. My informal performance comparisons have shown a significantly better experience with displaying WPF controls over Winforms controls. Try running the WPF sample from the SCSF May 2007. When you resize the window, the shaded graphical treeview based org chart, with reflections, scales smoothly and the five Winforms textboxes flicker like a 1920’s movie.
- The problem with WinForms was that as soon as you wanted any capability beyond the standard controls you had to commit to a third party toolkit. And because it is not really realistic to pick and choose controls from different toolkits, you sort of get bound to the future of that toolkit. WPF makes it realistic for mere mortals to make changes to the behaviour and appearance of standard controls.
I have to agree with Glenn’s sentiment that moving to WPF will not be easy. It is not something that can be easily “migrated”. I am glad that Microsoft are not pushing this technology down our throats and are advising caution. However, I don’t believe that WinForms has any more value than providing a stopgap until we learn how to use WPF properly.