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Event-Based Programming without Inversion of Control. Philipp Haller and Martin Odersky.

Scala is different from other concurrent languages in that it contains no language support for concurrency beyond the standard thread model offered by the host environment. Instead of specialized language constructs we rely on Scala's general abstraction capabilities to define higher-level concurrency models. In such a way, we were able to define all essential operations of Erlang's actor-based process model in the Scala library.

However, since Scala is implemented on the Java VM, we inherited some of the deficiencies of the host environment when it comes to concurrency, namely low maximum number of threads and high context-switch overhead. In this paper we have shown how to turn this weakness into a strength. By defining a new event-based model for actors, we could increase dramatically their efficiency and scalability. At the same time, we kept to a large extent the programming model of thread-based actors, which would not have been possible if we had switched to a traditional event-based architecture, because the latter causes an inversion of control.

(There's not really a proper abstract. The above is from the conclusion.)

I enjoyed this paper. It's a quick read and a nice demonstration of some of Scala's cool features. It's also a good example of using exceptions as delimited control operators, and in fact the one substantial restriction is imposed by the lack of the more powerful operators. They use Scala's type system to reduce the burden of this restriction, however, since they're able to state that a particular statement never returns normally (and thus must not be followed by more statements).

Those interested in the language/library boundary will also find it interesting for this reason:

The techniques presented in this paper are a good showcase of the increased flexibility offered by library-based designs. It allowed us to quickly address problems with the previous thread-based actor model by developing a parallel class hierarchy for event-based actors. Today, the two approaches exist side by side. Thread-based actors are still useful since they allow returning from a receive operation. Event-based actors are more restrictive in the programming style they allow, but they are also more efficient.

They have some fairly impressive empirical scalability results as well.

Being a little lazy at times, I tend to skip typing 'www.' before the domain name when I enter a URL in my web browser. No, it doesn't save me a whole lot of typing, but bear with me here. Most of the time it works fine and I end up on the site I expect.

But it really surprises me how often typing in a domain name without 'www.' in front results in one of the following:

• My browser displays an error message such as 'Safari can't open the page 'http://example.com/' because it can't find the server 'example.com'.'
• My browser finds a server but nothing happens because there is no website configured.
• I am redirected to a parked domain.
• I get a 'Directory listing denied' message.

This happens with all sorts of organisations, from the tiniest single-page websites to huge online presences of multi-national corporations.

You can add 'www.' in front of the domain name and all is fine. But should you really have to do that? What I think should happen is that the web server either responds on the address I entered or redirects me to the www host. Unlike the no-www and yes-www folks I'm 'www-agnostic' in that I don't really care if the preferred host is the bare domain name or 'www.' + domain name. Just make both work and redirect all traffic to one of them, I don't care which. I do however think that it makes a really bad impression when any of the above happens when you try to access an organisation's website without typing 'www.'.

I'm no DNS or web hosting expert, so there may well be technical reasons that I am unaware of that make it hard or impossible to configure all web servers to work with or without the 'www.'. But when this sort of thing has happened to clients, it usually turns out that whoever is hosting the site has simply forgotten about it.

Considering how many use their bare domain name in advertising, and looking at colleagues and relatives, I know I'm far from the only one who skips 'www.' when manually typing in a URL. And do you really want to risk your clients losing visitors due to a misconfigured web server? I thought not, so remember to check this with the persons or companies responsible for the servers your clients' sites are hosted on.

Add 456 Berea Street to your Technorati favorites.

Posted in Usability.

I've had lots of questions recently and no time to really get answers and post them up here.  If I haven't answered you question it's because I don't know the answer and haven't had enough time to get to the bottom of it yet.

First of all I had a couple of questions on MSAS which I don't know that much about.

Can I tell which tuner is being used when a recording takes place using MSAS? No, you can not.  What you can do, which may or may not help is use OnTVRecordStateChange from a background add-in which will give you a GUID and you could track which was in use - this won't help if a tuner is being used for live TV though.  Here's a code snippet on how to use OnTVRecordStateChange:

void IAddInEntryPoint.Launch(AddInHost host)
{

host.Television.OnTVRecordStateChange += new Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeDelegate(TvRecordStateChangedHandler);

...

}

public void TvRecordStateChangedHandler(object obj, Microsoft.MediaCenter.AddIn.TVRecordStateChangeArgs TVArgs) {

if (TVArgs.Started)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording started on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

else if (TVArgs.Stopped)

mcHost.HostControl.Dialog('Recording stopped on tuner ' + TVArgs.Tuner, 'TV Recording',1,10,false);

}

Can I use remote desktop to connect to a Media Center PC? Yes.  You can even use Media Center, but it won't play video over a RDP connection

Can I use animated backgrounds in an HTML page? Not really a media center question, but I don't see why not, use an animated gif.

Could I create an add-in that played a selection of WAV files with a gap between them? Yes, using Playmedia and Playrate you could contstruct an addin to do this - waiting until the playrate was stopped, then wating however long you want before playing the next file.  You could also use More With This  to make this work with any folder of audio files.

Can I use ASP.NET for development?  Yes.  You can use any web technology that outputs HTML.

Can I use WinForms for development?  Yes, but if you're running as a .exe you won't have access to Media Center APIs.  If you're running as a .NET applet in a webpage you'll have access to the Media Center APIs from the HTML page and will have to communicate between the page and the .NET applet to use the Media Center APIs - non-trivial to do, but not hard.

Well, this is a first for me—I’m pleased to announce the relaunch of a site that I relaunched in the past - http://www.burcoinc.com.

When I first started Boyink Interactive some six years ago now, Burco was one of my first clients.  The site was done - by client request - in MS Frontpage.  Their hope at the time was that they’d be able to make changes to it internally, but as time went on that never really happened.  The intermingling of content and design in the FrontPage interface was both overwhelming to get through and risky - one wrong mouse click and you could delete the entire navigation bar from that page.

So I was happy to re-pitch the project and catch them up to current technology when it comes to small business sites, and get them implemented on a database-driven site using ExpressionEngine.

The design was provided by Burco’s current graphics designer, and Boyink Interactive did the ExpressionEngine implementation.  The site is driven by 8 EE weblogs, and all navigation is created through the use of EE’s relationships.  The locations functionality and the online catalog are handled through the use of an iFrame - this approach let us build and host the site externally while leaving some current business applications and work processes in place.

Currently in development is a consumer-oriented version of the site, which will use ExpressionEngine’s Multi-Site Manager to allow Burco to manage both sites from one EE install.

Project Distributor: Introduction to our distributed web service model
So Darren and I have put in about a month now on the Project Distributor website. We are starting to reach that critical point where the site is pretty cool, we have plenty of users, we are thinking about running out of the allowable bandwidth for the demo site, and all sorts of other things that tend to happen all at once. Now, there are some problems you can design yourself out of, and others that you really have to throw some money at. Our latest enhancements can be summed up in a short list.

• Buy a domain name and start hosting in two places. Project Distributor.com should be up fairly soon to accompany MarkItUp.ASPXConnection.com
• Have people host their own versions of the application. And that means a big source release is in the future. At this juncture risk fragmentation.
• Design away fragmentation with a series of ingenious features that will make everyone want to use the application at hand.

I'm here to talk about the last two, since Darren already bought some additional hosting for us. The concept will be to release a fairly stable version of the application so that groups can host tools, code snippets and other source/binary releases for their teams to share. The application is very lightweight and easy to set-up, so it won't require a bunch of hand holding and configuration to get up and running initially. From our standpoint we solve a number of issues at this juncture. The most obvious problem is what we classify the Lutz Roeder use case. .NET Reflector is the key type of application we'd love to get hosted because it makes it a bit easier to find, not that Google does a bad job, we'd just like to get a bunch of tools in one place, with some features for feedback, new releases, and some cool client tools for publishing.

Now, Lutz would put his application up and he'd whack our bandwidth. He is the prime example of someone that should be hosting their own tools, but possibly using our interface. He doesn't have to, we haven't even asked him yet in fact, but if he decides to do so, then all the better for the web application moving forward. Users such as Lutz probably want a certain level of control over their own sites as well in terms of branding and controlling access. This will only come from hosting the application yourself (and maybe some other features we'll see later).

From a security standpoint many teams will also want to host their own servers. In this manner they get control over the hardware their sources and binaries are stored on. They can accept tools up to any maximum (instead of our imposed limits) and provide unlimited download bandwidth if they choose. Or they can take advantage of our gating mechanisms to make sure their server doesn't get overloaded with downloads and open their tools up to the public.

The only major problem from this source release is that the initial problem we were trying to solve, promoting the visibility of tools, starts to erode. You see, the more sites that host their own tools the harder it is to find the right site with the right tools. We are trying to solve this in a number of ways. The first is allowing users of a site to store bookmarks to other projects and external resources. This is only a temporary fix, because it still doesn't allow a mass search and categorization infrastructure required to truly promote the visibility of the tools being hosted. We have to come up with a solution that brings all of the sites, but we don't want to create just another portal or gateway site. That is boring. Now you have the background, so how will we solve the fragmentation issue?

Designing away Fragmentation
I won't lie to you, I've implemented this model several times, but have never had a project that was capable of really showing off the feature set we are about to talk about. The concept is to unify all of the sites, by allowing them to easily manage views of data from all of the sites combined. Each site owns their own content, maintains their own users, but in turn peers with other sites to obtain additional content.

Web services provide a dual feature set in this model. At the current level they allow us to generate really great client-side tools for managing, well, your tools! We have a drop-client target right now so you can drag and drop new releases to existing projects in just a few seconds. Some new tools for working with build systems to promote the source code up to the server are in the works. We natively integrate with your RSS reader and will have our own alert services in the drop client just in case you don't have one. There aren't any search or local caching features, but those are also planned for the drop client so you can background download new releases, just like Windows Update.

That doesn't solve fragmentation though, that just makes me realize how much work I have left to do. The second feature of web services lies in the ability for each site to aggregate data from the many other sites that are out there hosting the application. Remember, everything we make available at the service layer can also now be remoted. The more caching we put into the data layer, the more performant the entire process will be, and we can even tune the caching depending on whether the data layer is merging off-site contents or database contents.

Peer Sites
I'm sure there is another name out there somewhere, but for the past 2 years I've called these peer sites. Each instance of the project distributor will have a number of options allowing for adding peers that will be aggregated and added to the local collection while users traverse the site. The first step is to get the peer sites running in a read-only mode. And set up some really great options so the entire process can be controlled. This solves a number of use case scenarios for us including the following.

• Fragmentation can be mitigated through proper configuration. If everyone aggregates 5 or 6 sites into their peers, then we have a huge network now of interconnected peers and users can pick and choose which one they use for purposes of searching the tool network.
• Peer connections are unidirectional or bidirectional. Access is configurable. Teams can include tools from external sites while keeping their own tools completely private. They can exist behind a DMZ or a private network.
• Users can host their own personal tool sites in the same manner as the team sites. They can configure statically which projects to make available even. In this way you can build a collection of personal tools that you love, and have the latest information automatically update on your machine for your perusal.

Peer sites solve plenty of visibility issues, but that is pretty much all they solve for now. We still want to enable all of the features available to the client tools. After all, the web service methods and proxy infrastructure is in place to do so much more.

Master Sites
Well, we want to solve another problem. That is where you edit your data. A master site is where the users, groups, projects, etc... are all hosted, but thankfully, you'll be able to log in through any site (assuming it is peered with your master site) and then edit your own projects and such. This is a remote principal context and is actually one of the cooler features associated with the peering functionality of project distributor. We'll be fully secure in our login and credentials region, but unfortunately we'll still be transferring data in open text in the short term. Maybe we'll fix that with enough push back.

Clone Sites
A clone site is where we empower a site to act on behalf of a master site. For me, my local project distributor is currently cloned to the main project distributor site. What does this mean? Right now it means I get all of the data from PD, and that users who trust my site can log-in to their project distributor accounts and cross edit data. Pretty nice if you ask me. It basically means you can fully host a project distributor installation and never, ever have to install a database server. Users can just act on behalf of a remote server.

Configuration
This isn't a super reusable model like some of those you read about in the popular software architecture books, and it probably accounts for why master/peer/clone sites don't exist very often. The considerations for every option are heavily customized to the problem being solved, and I'm sure we'll be making modifications or updating the configuration context for a while. Right now you can independently configure your primary server type, whether master or clone, whether or not users can use you for a pass-through authentication and edit server, whether or not web services are enabled so peers can enable unidirectional only communications, setting up asymmetric security credentials. Man, you name it and it is in there

For the peer section we have full and selective modes. A full peer pulls all of the data on the remote peer locally for display (in a delay caching manner, just like you'd expect, unless you set up a scheduled pull which is also possible). I expect most people to configure full peers because they really are really easy to set up and maintain. A selective peer is where you specify the groups/projects that you want to display. This is best for a user setting up their own personal toolbox who wants to select a couple of items from many different peers.

We have an extensively exhaustive configuration module already and we'll be continuously adding more to it. The concept is to easily modify your toolbox to your own designs without having to touch the code. If we haven't given you enough options to satisfy your need then we'll have to make something up, because I'm just about running out ;-)

These are the basics of the model ideas I have for project distributor. That doesn't mean Darren doesn't have other great ideas happening as well. He has some pretty extensive UI enhancements, but I'll let him talk about those. We even have another product idea that is kind of a bolt-on for project distributor, but that is probably a couple of months out putting it into next year. Unfortunately we have too many ideas for our own good right now. Better than not having any ideas I guess. I'll try to drop some code with some of the ideas above, that way you can get a look at how the entire system is implemented. I have some diagrams as well, but I'm far too tired right now to add the img tags to the HTML view.

Now hosted by RimuHosting

From the “John does Linux” files (see the last episode; okay, so that was Unix)…

This site is now running on a Virtual Private Server from RimuHosting. Who cares? No one but me.

What a deal!

RimuHosting is a nice upgrade from my TotalChoice account, both in terms of sheer “horsepower” as well as flexibility. Not only do I get 4GB of disk space and 30GB bandwidth for $20/month, but I have root access to the VPS and all the privileges that affords me.

DIY hosting

Well, almost.

I’m used to web hosts that include Cpanel and/or Web Host Manager. RimuHosting gives you nothing of the sort — which is fine by me. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent hours pouring over Apache documentation and testing various configurations. I only had to ask Joe for help a couple of times.

Amazing support

None of this would’ve happened without RimuHosting’s friendly and helpful support team. I’ve emailed them at all hours of the day and night, and they always get back to me within a few hours. Keep up the good work, guys.

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Sending an HTML Email with Visual Studio 2005

Question: I am trying to send an email with Visual Studio 2005 using System.Web.Mail and it keeps telling me that it is obsolete? What should I use? Also if you have an example of how to send an HTML email that would also help.

Answer: Within Visual Studio 2005 you can use the System.Net.Mail namespace. This contains the classes used to send email using SMTP. The MailMessage class is used to represent the content of an email message. The SmtpClient transmits email to the SMTP host that you designate for mail delivery. For example you can use the following code within a button of a Windows form to send an HTML email.

Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click

        Dim client As New SmtpClient('smtp.server')
        Dim toAddr As New MailAddress(trobbins@microsoft.com)  
        Dim fromAddr As New MailAddress(trobbins@microsoft.com)
        Dim message As New MailMessage(fromAddr, toAddr)

        message.IsBodyHtml = True
        message.Subject = 'This is a Test'

        message.Body = '<html><body><b>This is an </b> <font color=red>HTML Message</font></body></html> '

        client.Send(message)

    End Sub

The email that is sent looks like the following

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IE8 Beta 2 Coming in August

In addition to the features for developers we showed in IE8 Beta 1, we?ve been working on great new features for consumers and IT professionals (as well as doing even more cool stuff for developers). I?m happy to announce that we?re on track to deliver IE8 Beta 2 this August when you?ll get a chance to see what we?ve been up to in these areas. Furthermore, in order to help us get even more feedback for this global product, we?ll be releasing Beta 2 in over twenty languages within a month of the initial release. This is a big step up from the three languages we released for beta 1 and much more than we ever did during IE7.

On behalf of the team, I?d like to thank you all for your help with beta 1. Since we released Beta 1 in March we?ve had over two million downloads so far with lots of good, useful feedback. We?ve been listening to that feedback and making improvements to our work on an interoperable platform that has full CSS 2.1 support, faster script performance, and significantly more capable developer tools as well as our cool new features like Activities and Web Slices. We?ve learned a lot from this first beta ? keep the comments coming please!

Between now and August, there are a few ways you can prepare your sites for Beta 2. First, take advantage of Activities and Web Slices on your site. Second, make sure your site looks great in IE8; as you may recall, IE8 will use our new, more standards-compliant layout and rendering engine for strict doctype pages by default. This may cause IE8 to layout pages differently than IE7 did. If you haven?t had a chance to test your pages yet or don?t want to make changes yet, remember that you can have your site tell IE to use our IE7 layout engine for your strict doctype pages by adding the X-UA-Compatible http header to your HTTP headers or on a per document basis. You can learn more about how to ensure site compat with IE8 on our new IE Compat pages.

Tony Chor
Group Program Manager

P.S. In case you?re curious here?s the list of languages/locales we?re planning on for beta 2. We?ll keep evaluating the list based on our progress.

Arabic
Chinese (Hong Kong)
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Polish
Russian
Spanish
Turkish
Swedish

Edit: Add 'released' to second paragraph; replaced 'host' with 'HTTP' in last paragraph

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