I’ve switched from my two three years old dedicated servers to one brand new virtual server. Reasons are : These servers costed me too much and they were becoming old (risk of failure increases). It wasn’t worth it. I spent last night doing that because I didn’t want to interrupt anybody using these servers. My two servers were running some Debian and I’m now switching to a CentOS virtual server. I was a little bit worried at first that CentOS would have a crappy package management system, but its yum is in fact working the same way as Debian’s apt-get and OpenSuse’s zypper. The oool thing is that these three package management systems roughly work the same way : <apt-get/yum/zypper> install , you don’t have to learn a new “ultimate” way to upgrade your software (like on FreeBSD). By the way, the faster package management system is yum, and the slowest one is zypper. ...

I recently thought that it could be interesting to automatically get everything I needed about a MiWi network using a program reading the .zna capture files. I wanted to check every data sent on the 802.15.4 layer at a higher layer than Zena. But the project has been cancelled, so I won’t make this program. But still, I decided to give the format of the file for those who would have the same needs. ...

I’m in holiday right now. I received invitation from Microsoft to test their Office 2010. I’ve downloaded it (with my HSPDA card which is very slow (5 to 40 KB/s) here). It looks like they took the time to improve everything in order to reach the level of Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2007. These 3 products haven’t changed much, they just have some new colors, a new special menu and some new little features. ...

I recently took the time to take a look inside the Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll using reflector. I’m not sure I have the right to do that. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have the right to publish any code extracted from it, so I won’t show any. Using SPSite(s) and SPWeb(s) If you do some timing on the SPWeb creation call (SPSite.OpenWeb), you will find out that it’s freaking fast (less then 1 ms on my server). The reason is that the most heavy object, the SPRequest class, is shared among SPWebs of a SPSite. The Dispose call only “Invalidate” the SPWeb, and if this SPWeb is the owner of the SPRequest (which is SPContext.Current.Web object in most of the cases), it releases it. ...

WARNING: All the Cinterion related content from this blog will be removed to go to the javacint wiki soon. Please get used to going there. I have just made a little update to the SMSOTAP program so that the little message generation wizzard can add the NETUSER and NETPWD parameters in the OTAP SM sent to the TC65. Thank you John for this little feature request. This pretty useful, without it you could end up adding a new SM and editing each message. ...

Yes, I have tested MonoVS with the version 0.2.2641 (on both client and server). I installed OpenSuse 11.1 and added the MonoVS software repository, and everything worked ! I would have prefer to get it from SVN in order to use it in my Debian hosts but the mono development team seems to have removed it from their SVN repository. So, the Mono Remote Debugger for Visual Studio works, but there still some bugs. Deployment is super fast and it copies all the required DLL. ...

.Net reflector is a really good tool. You can see the content of any assembly very easily. But it’s not really easy to see the full content of a class, or a library with it. The File Disassembler add-in is a totally crazy stuff. You can take any assembly and totally disassemble it. It even creates the .csproj so that you just have to open the project in Visual Studio. But don’t get too excited if the code is obfuscated you will get some “empty” methods with just this comment : ...

What for ? Sharepoint’s API provides some standard form controls to render each column. This is the controls used to render the standard add and edit forms. And they all inherit the BaseFieldControl class. In other word: In any SPList, you have some SPField fields and each of these SPField has the super power to create a BaseFieldControl. Each BaseFieldControl is a CompositeControl containing ASP.Net controls. For a single line field, you will just have a wrapped TextBox. But for some more advanced fields like a multi-select lookup field (SPFieldLookup) or rich text field, it can generate some “complex” controls and their related javascript code. ...

Just a little post for all these people who seem to think Mono is just an other short-term open-source software. I’ve used it for quite some time with a production “real time” network server, which is running for something like 6 months now, and it performs very well. I do everything on my Windows host and then copy and launch the final app on the Linux host. But there are still two problems : ...

Sharepoint debugging isn’t fully automated. So you should really know how to debug and diagnose your assemblies in any given situation. 1. Attaching to the process It only applies to a debugging environnement. This is the one that everybody knows (or should at least). You deploy your DLL in the GAC, restart your application pool, access your sharepoint web application in order to load the application pool and the DLL and then attach to the right w3wp.exe process (or every w3wp.exe process if you don’t really know which one to choose). ...