DDE Hell?

That last post seemed to have sparked a bit of nostalgia. =) Looks like I have a little direction though. I'll start the path here.

DDE Servers and .NET

I've been asked to create a link between a product called WonderWare and a system written with .NET. It uses DDE as the link. DDE is totally new to me. Can anybody steer me in the right direction?

C# design patterns

The data & object factory folks have a pretty cool list of design patterns all in C#. It looks like a comprehensive list drawn from the Gang of Four book.

boycott copy-protection schemes

"From CNet: Software, music and movies that employ copy-protection schemes must be prominently labeled with consumer warnings, according to a bill introduced in Congress this week.

Yes, and then consumers should boycott such music CDs!" [Ottmar Liebert]

WOW!

Microsoft Site Server as a prevalence system

"Microsoft's Site Server Commerce 3.0 (perhaps earlier/later versions as well, but I haven't used them) employed a similar model: using a collection of COM components one would (de)serialize the shopping cart using to a table in the database. You would simply deserialize the shopping cart, add/update/remove fields, and serialize the shopping cart again. When an order was placed it would again deserialize the shopping cart and pass it off to a chain of responsibility'esque handler that would run (in|out)side of MTS called a "pipeline." Using another collection of COM components one would have the header and detail information for the order inserted into the appropriate tables as individual records." [Chad Osgood]

Interesting. Aside from reading a few articles on it I have no experience with MS Site Server. Is anybody still using it in production?

Prevalence + Database

I wrote a little about my lastest project which uses bamboo.Prevalence.

MSDN Chat

Host: Scott (Microsoft)
Q: Re: IE support, I'd rather use C# for scripting than JavaScript. Absolutely!

A: We are working on Longhorn-timeframe work that will address this. You’ll be able to use markup and C# to do rich client apps in a web-like manner.


Host: Anders (Microsoft)
Q: Is it planned to have nulls for ValueTypes ?

A: We will most likely have an Optional generic type that can be used to combine a value type with a bool flag that says whether the value is present. You could then have ?Optional x;? and say ?if (x.Defined) DoSomething(x.Value);?.

[MSDN Chat]

To quotes that perked me up...

Test post from email

Where have I been?  I just now saw a feature to blog via email with BloggerPRO.