Archive for category asides
Adobe Flex going open source
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on April 26, 2007
An interesting new player comes to the open source world – Adobe Flex. Flex seems to be a powerful choice for building the new buzzword Rich Internet Applications. I’m still unsold on having an entire application be one giant flash movie but time will tell. It does have some powerful capabilities especially in the enterprise dashboard realm. MicroStrategy has released some new flex based functionality to allow developers to build dashboards on top of normal business intelligence reports served by MicroStrategy’s BI platform. I think Flex is a good fit in this arena as it is able to aggregate many reports into a sleek and sexy dashboard. Yet, I’m still struggling to see where this technology will make its place in the traditional web application environment. It is very good for displaying data to a user and providing drill down and aggregation, but I can’t see it replacing the standard forms based approach to transactional based web systems.
A nice article is here at Ryan Stewart’s Universal Desktop.
Hat tip to Nick for sending me the article.
xmas early: hardware
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on December 6, 2006
Ahh…the joys of setting up a data center environment. We’ve got a new Watchguard Firebox x750e sitting here waiting on our cabinet, servers, UPS and managed switches to get here. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and start setting everything up. It will be quite the steep learning curve for me and my associate that are handling this initiative as we both have about the same knowledge of networking and it is limited to basic tcp/ip, subnetting, etc. We’re going to be setting up some sweet VLAN’s and that is definitely an area we lack expertise in. Long hours and lots of beer should ensue shortly!
when the IDE hoses you
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 29, 2006
Great advances have been made in Integrated Development Environments over the past three years. These IDE’s aim to simplify every day development tasks – everything from compiling code to handling check in procedures with a version control provider to providing drag and drop design interfaces. I am constantly amazed at the advances made in Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET 2003 and they bested themselves once again with the 2005 version. Eclipse for java based development has come a long way since the first time I looked at it.
I’m lazy. Any advantage an IDE has to offer me, I’ll try and oblige them the opportunity. At my last company I did an experiment with our service oriented architecture to utilize the IDE to do most of the wiring for me from the data access to the visual representation by working with typed datasets returned from web services and presenting them via data grids. This was excellent as the IDE was able to save me many lines of code. Based on that success, I’ve tried to let IDE’s do things for me that I could normally do on my own. The attractive part of this type of functionality is that it saves you time and handles the plumbing portion for you.
exchange 2003 and rpc over http(s)
Posted by Matt Brotherson in asides on November 20, 2006
Whew. Finally after some trials and tribulations I have managed to get rpc over http(s) working with my home exchange server. I followed many of the guides online and there are even some tools to help aid the process of the configuration. Exchange 2003 with service pack 2 and the aforementioned guide/tools makes the setup a breeze.
I still couldn’t get outlook to connect to exchange outside my LAN. What good does that do me? Not much which is the whole reason I wanted to get exchange running over http. Outlook would fire up and eventually prompt me for a login (good.) However it would never fully connect. The problem: SSL certificates. I haven’t paid for an SSL cert yet so I use my own certificate authority to grant the certificate. Ok, all set. Nope. I had to make sure the certificate had the FQDN of the exchange server in it and also import that certificate into my trusted authorities in IE. Presto! Now we have connectivity.
Daniel Petri advises that most if not all of the connectivity issues are related to certificate issues. Make sure you check your certs and if possible, buy one from an online vendor so you don’t have to import anything.
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