Neblog

I’m honored that one of the reasons why companies contract with me and Nebula R&D is because they want well organized code, not just functional code. Almost anyone can write functional code, that’s an exercise with syntax and debugging. A company tends to have more appreciation for code that’s truly "designed", not just "written", only after they’ve paid a lot to re-write existing code to do something just a little different. I’ve written a number of forum postings on Model-View-Controller (MVC) code organization, but nothing yet for the blog here - until now.

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Our Pick / Multi-Value community has always prided itself on being able to run great multi-user applications in a powerful database with a small footprint.. The Pick model DBMS used to be called the Pick Operating system because we bundled all of these things into a package that was installable to make a piece of hardware an Application Engine. The box in the corner did nothing more than run business software and manipulate data. Then as the Windows and the Unix/*nix operating systems gained popularity, we shed the Operating System positioning and became one of many applications that co-exist in a more general purpose environment which manages the underlying resources. As they say, what goes around comes around, and what used to be popular will be again. What we’re seeing now is a trend back to dedicating entire operating environments to a specific purpose.

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This is an in-depth explanation of how web clients consume licenses with a back-end MV DBMS. It might be too basic for some people but it should help to bring everyone up to a common level for discussions on this important topic.

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A recent U2 forum inquiry asks about using the SoapRequest functions in BASIC to make a Web Service Client call via SOAP. I think it’s inefficient to do things like this directly to/from MV DBMS platforms.

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Want a rich browser interface for your business software? Consider another option.

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I was just installing Norton AntiVirus 2006 from Symantec, and as I was setting up the Exclusion list of files to not scan I figured I’d share my list with you.

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I’m starting to get more questions about .NET with Linux, using ASP.NET with Apache, writing Web Services in C# with Mono, etc. I’m providing some excerpts and paraphrasing here of recent exchanges I’ve had with prospects and clients.

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The site has been updated to WordPress v2.0.1, the very latest version of the blog software available. This requires the simultaneous update of many plugins from independent authors. As I find out what works with this release I will be adding some features and removing others - that’s how this game is played. Please let me know if you find any errors via e-mail or by adding a comment to this post. This post will be updated with more information about all of the plugins being used on this site.

I’d like you to think a moment about a recurring pattern of chaos, definition, and discovery. In each of the following instances there was a perceived sense of chaos which prompted people to develop document definitions. From those definitions technologies have been developed to allow discovery, sorting, and many new applications to facilitate searching and data acquisition.

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If you’re new to Visual Studio you’ll eventually find out about snippets, think they’re cool, and sigh at all of the code that you used to cut and paste manually. If you use C# you’ll suddenly feel cheated when you see how many snippets are in VB.NET and how few are in C#. Here’s the cure.

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