Monthly Archives: June 2005

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Sleepless in Greenville

For two weeks solid, I’ve been stuck in some sort of zombie mode. I’ve been unable to sleep for more than an hour at a time, or not at all some nights. I have had some major back pain in the past week and a half too so that may have something to do with it. But as I sit her ein my computer nook at my baren apartment, I find myself wide awake but unable to concentrate enough to do anything constructive. I try doing my work and I cannot. I try taking a couple unisome and laying in bed, instead I feel like I’m on some sort of acid trip. The type of sleep that unisome attempts to induce is something very strange to me. Its like the drugs are trying to “trick” me into falling asleep. It may sound slightly crazy, but I’ve somehow conditioned myself to get wide awake when I feel I’m being tricked. So taking unisome just makes me feel very strange, but even more awake. I’m not anxious about anything. I’m not taking on more or less work than I usually do. I’m just, awake and in pain from my back.

I’ve tried everying I can think of and its getting worse. Does anyone else get this way?

Throw-away projects in .NET

There are tons of new features in Whidbey. Enough so that I feel that the learning curve going from 1.1 to 2.0 can be easily 50% that of the effort going from to 2.0 (if not more). You can spend your time learning generics and predicates and partial classes and reliability contracts for threading and , well, you name it. However, sometimes its the little features that mean so much. VS.NET 2005 provides a little known feature that allows you to create projects, run them, test them, etc. However, unlike you might be currently used to, when you close the project, you can make the whole thing go away. In other words, you can open VS.NET to test a theory, run the project, do your debugging, and then dump the project so it isn’t wasting file space of virus scanner time. To impliment this feature, go to Tools | Options to display the options dialog. Under this dialog, choose the Projects and Solutions tree node.Uncheck this “save new projects when created” checkbox. Apply the changes.


Now, when you close VS.NET with an open/active project, it will ask you if you want to save it. If you click no, the folders are complete gone. Isn’t that awesome!?


Well, I liked it anyway.

Atari 800XL – Old school fun

The other day, I posted an article about not having any gadgets to play with anymore.  So as I was sitting here debating what to buy, I started searching ebay and somehow came across an old Atari 800XL – Still in the box! This was the first computer I ever owned. My parents gave mine away several years and I haven’t been the same since. I wrote some of my first text-based games in 5th grade on that computer. In any case, I purchased the Atari and won it at a very hefty sum for what it was. I then went a little nuts and bought the assembler editor for it, Atari BASIC (my old programming language), and a few other extras. In case you are wondering, yes, those cartridges will fit into an Atari 2600. They wont do much though in the game console. I have to see if I can get a 1010 casette drive or a 1050 disk drive. I wouldn’t mind the 1030 printer either. I started surfing for some information on how to program these things, because its been 20 years since I’ve seen them. Low and behold, I hit the jackpot at www.atariarchives.org. This site is unbelievable. Tons of books on Atari programming online at no charge! They even had one of the books I had as a kid: Atari Player-Missle Graphics in BASIC. I don’t remember what the other book was, but I’ll continue digging when I’m more coherant. 
This is great stuff to play with, particularly if you are trying to learn the internals of a computer and how to program at machine, assembler, or high level language levels. Because this is an 8 bit primitive system, its much easier to learn how to manipulate the machine to do what you want. You can then scale that knowledge out to 16, 32 or 64 bit systems. I cannot wait to get this item shipped to me, and I’m dying to get it on my desk at work. 
So maybe this isn’t the high-tech I imagined myself buying as a first swat against the scurge of gadgetlessness, but it sure is going to be a very nice one for me. I promise to buy something more meaningful soon.

Overrides vs Shadows keywords in VB.NET

When most folks come from a VB 6 background (and only VB6) they tend not to quite grasp object oriented programming right off the bat. Its one of the reasons why inheritance topics are fairly common on the Visual Basic .NET forums and newsgroups. Today was no different. I woke up and browsed the MSDN forums to find another such question. The user was asking what the difference between an Overridable method being overriden with the “Overrides” keyword, or an ordinary method being overriden by the “Shadows” keyword.

I decided to write a quick article about this and post it for future reference.

First off, lets define the similarities between these two keywords. Both Shadows and Overrides define a means to decorate our methods so we can redefine the functionality provided by a base class. So if I create a BaseClass, and then create a SubClass that inherits from BaseClass, its possible that I might want to redefine how the base and sub classes behave and interact with one another. While I can use either of these keywords, they are completely different in their orientation.

Let’s jump right into it by writing ourselves a base class. This class will have two methods — one that has an overridable method, and one that uses an ordinary method.

' BaseClass impliments an overridable and ordinary method
Public Class BaseClass
  Public Overridable Sub OverridableSub()
    Console.WriteLine(" BaseClass.OverridableSub() called")
  End Sub
  Public Sub OrdinarySub()
    Console.WriteLine(" BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called")
  End Sub
End Class

When you see the overridable keyword in a piece of Visual Basic code, it is an indicator that the designer of this class intended or expected that this class would be Subclassed (overridden) at some point and that “OverridableSub” was a likely candidate for functionality redefnition. You can also deduce that the designer didn’t intend for OrdinarySub to be overriden.

For a bit of advanced education, lets look at the IL produced by these methods.First off, the OrdinarySub looks like any other subroutine we’ve seen in IL before.

.method public instance void OrdinarySub() cil managed

We have a public instance method. Look what happens, however, with our OverridableSub method signature.

.method public newslot virtual instance void OverridableSub() cil managed

Notice we have two additional method characteristics added : virtual and newslot. The virtual characteristic should be familiar to most C# developers. It indicates that the item can be overridden. With that definition, it should now be obvious to VB.NET developers that this means the method has the Overridable modifier. The second characteristic is newslot which indicates that the method will always get a new slot on the object’s vtable. We’ll get into this more later.

So if we want to test our BaseClass, we might write a piece of code something like this in our Main method:

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Create an instance of the base class and call it directly
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling BaseClass Methods")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        Dim bc As New BaseClass
        bc.OverridableSub()
        bc.OrdinarySub()
        Console.ReadLine()
    End Sub
End Module

And of course executing this code we would get our exepcted results as follows:

+ Calling BaseClass Methods
--------------------------------------------------
   BaseClass.OverridableSub() called
   BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called
As you'll notice it states that we executed both of our methods against the BaseClass instance. Sounds great, now let's say we now want to create a class that inherits from BaseClass:

' SubClass impliments an overriden BaseClass with overrides and shadows modifiers
Public Class SubClass
    Inherits BaseClass

    Public Overrides Sub OverridableSub()
        Console.WriteLine("   SubClass.OverridableSub() called")
    End Sub
    Public Shadows Sub OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine("   SubClass.OrdinarySub() called")
    End Sub
End Class

To be able to override both of these methods, and stop the compiler from barking at us, we needed to use the overrides keyword on our OverridableSub and the Shadows keyword on our OrdinarySub. This is obviously because of the way we have implemented these methods in the base class. Shadows is a fairly appropriate word because what we are doing is putting the original method (OrdinarySub) in the proverbial shadow of our new method. Our new method stands over top of the old method and executes any time we call against a direct instance of SubClass. Let’s exand our Main method to execute both our SubClass and our BaseClass to see what the difference is:

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Create an instance of the base class and call it directly
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling BaseClass Methods")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        Dim bc As New BaseClass
        bc.OverridableSub()
        bc.OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine()

        ' Create an instance of the sub class and call it directly
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling SubClass Methods ")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        Dim sc As New SubClass
        sc.OverridableSub()
        sc.OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine()
        Console.ReadLine()
    End Sub
End Module 

It follows that because we’ve overridden both of our methods our output would look as follows:

+ Calling BaseClass Methods
--------------------------------------------------
   BaseClass.OverridableSub() called
   BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called

+ Calling SubClass Methods
--------------------------------------------------
   SubClass.OverridableSub() called
   SubClass.OrdinarySub() called

We now are executing code that executes against a BaseClass instance, and we can tell by the output that we are calling the base class methods. We are also executing code against a SubClass instance and we can tell that this is executing our new functionality because the method states its executing SubClass.OverridableSub() and SubClass.OrdinarySub(), not BaseClass.OverridableSub() and BaseClass.OrdinarySub().OK, so we still haven’t seen a difference. Both of these methods really accomplished the same thing didn’t they? We had a base class behavior and both methods overrode that behavior with our newly created methods, right? True enough, but lets look at the consequential differences when we pass our reference around in different ways. We can see example after example in the framework where a method will take a parameter as a general type, but it really expects us to pass in a more specific type. For instance, if a parameter is typed as an XmlNode, we can pass in XmlElements, XmlAttributes, XmlConfigurationElement etc. The list goes on. Why can we do this? Because generally speaking, if I’m an XmlElement, I am also an XmlNode. An XmlElement is a more specific implementation of an XmlNode, so while the XmlElement has more functionality, it still has the base functionality provided by its inherited type XmlNode. So what happens if we create methods that takes BaseClass as a parameter and we pass in an instance of a SubClass as follows?

' Calls the OverridableSub method of the instance passed to it
Public Sub CallOverridableSub(ByVal instance As BaseClass)
    instance.OverridableSub()
End Sub

' Calls the OrdinarySub method of the instance passed to it
Public Sub CallOrdinarySub(ByVal instance As BaseClass)
    instance.OrdinarySub()
End Sub

Notice that we have too methods that both take an instance of BaseClass, not the more specific SubClass. Additionally, we are calling the OverridableSub() method in one of these methods, and OrdinarySub() in the other. Let’s add more code to our Main method to execute these methods passing in an instance of a SubClass. The full code for our example should look like this:

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Create an instance of the base class and call it directly
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling BaseClass Methods")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        Dim bc As New BaseClass
        bc.OverridableSub()
        bc.OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine()

        ' Create an instance of the sub class and call it directly
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling SubClass Methods ")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        Dim sc As New SubClass
        sc.OverridableSub()
        sc.OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine()

        ' Pass the SubClass instance to a method passed as a BaseClass reference
        Console.WriteLine("+ Calling SubClass Methods passed as BaseClass")
        Console.WriteLine("--------------------------------------------------")
        CallOverridableSub(sc)
        CallOrdinarySub(sc)
        Console.WriteLine()
        Console.ReadLine()
    End Sub

    ' Calls the OverridableSub method of the instance passed to it
    Public Sub CallOverridableSub(ByVal instance As BaseClass)
        instance.OverridableSub()
    End Sub

    ' Calls the OrdinarySub method of the instance passed to it
    Public Sub CallOrdinarySub(ByVal instance As BaseClass)
        instance.OrdinarySub()
    End Sub
End Module


' BaseClass impliments an overridable and ordinary method
Public Class BaseClass
    Public Overridable Sub OverridableSub()
        Console.WriteLine("   BaseClass.OverridableSub() called")
    End Sub
    Public Sub OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine("   BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called")
    End Sub
End Class

' SubClass impliments an overriden BaseClass with overrides and shadows modifiers
Public Class SubClass
    Inherits BaseClass

    Public Overrides Sub OverridableSub()
        Console.WriteLine("   SubClass.OverridableSub() called")
    End Sub
    Public Shadows Sub OrdinarySub()
        Console.WriteLine("   SubClass.OrdinarySub() called")
    End Sub
End Class

What happens when we execute our code now?

+ Calling BaseClass Methods
--------------------------------------------------
   BaseClass.OverridableSub() called
   BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called

+ Calling SubClass Methods
--------------------------------------------------
   SubClass.OverridableSub() called
   SubClass.OrdinarySub() called

+ Calling SubClass Methods passed as BaseClass
--------------------------------------------------
   SubClass.OverridableSub() called
   BaseClass.OrdinarySub() called

Notice that we are passing the same instance into both methods. Both methods are accepting “BaseClass”, not “SubClass” as a parameter. Our results are completely different. For our OverridableSub, our SubClass method is still called even though we passed this in as a BaseClass instance. However, for our OrdinarySub that used the Shadows modifier, we are getting results from our BaseClass. That is because of some fundamentals in Object Oriented programming. When we override behavior, its overriden no matter how we pass the class to a parameter (with some exceptions made during type casting). However, when we override using the Shadows modifier, our old functionality is only “lurking in the shadows” — not completely overriden. Remember this when trying to override functionality that wasn’t designed to be overriden as such. Your Shadows modifier may help you out when calling against your SubClass, but not when executing against a BaseClass instance.

SaveToby.com? Unbelievable!

I don’t know what’s funnier, that some guy made a website threatening to eat a “cute bunny rabbit” if he didn’t get $50,000 US before the 30th of this month, or that he’s made half of his goal so far in donations! As the folks at .NET Rocks mentioned, this has to be some psych major’s thesis project or something. I know this isn’t tech related, but lets turn this into a security related issue.

The biggest security threat still open today is social engineering. I first heard this term ages ago reading The Cookoo’s Egg (or some other related ‘hacker’ book). The concept is that you can use your whits, not just computer savy, to gain elevated priviledges. We have to do a better job at not falling for every little trick in the book. We have to be more alert. For instance, I received a bounced message in my inbox this morning. I do get a lot of these for several reasons and every now and again, I check them out if I get a lot of them. Looking at the message though, I could tell it wasn’t a real bounced message. It was a phishing scam. The reason why is that it pointed me to my domain with the opportunity to view the bounced message online. The link it pointed me to was using PHP and was in a subdirectory that didn’t exist on my hosting server (I run my own hosting business). This was rather clever, and I’m sure that a lot of these actually yield results.

So while SaveToby.com isn’t a security hole in itself, the concept of engineering a psychological scam on people is not. Be alert. Be vigilant. Be ready to watch a rabbit die now and again.

Longhorn is all over RSS

Like it or not, Microsoft is going to start adding a lot of extensions to RSS to produce some cool features for Longhorn. I have a love-hate relationship with this idea. What really chaps my hide about this video because the first guy acts like he is the first guy to think of these ideas. I actually see this in Microsoft employees a lot. They come out looking smug (and I know they don’t mean to be) as though they thought up this great idea and they want you to come up to their level of thinking. What this really comes down to is that a lot of the features you and I have wanted to create and use RSS for are now going to be a lot easier to use from Longhorn.

Looking over the shoulder of an attacker

If you ever thought that it wasn’t important to keep that windows update working on schedule, think again. Security Monkey has posted a small blog entry entitled “Looking over the should of an attacker“. Its definitely interested and should be a warning. However, I would remind you that just about any public internet service , Windows w/IIS or Linux w/Apache, you simply must not be complacent about how you configure your systems or keep them updated.

Where’d all my ‘tech’ go?

I’m sitting in my apartment in Greenville, SC looking over the pool, listening to a television that’s sitting on the floor, watching commercials for one piece of technology after another. Suddenly something hit me.

When I was a poor guy working for next to nothing, I had access to pretty much the best of technology. I always had a computer or two that were top of the line with the best graphics and processor upgrades available. I had the newest cell phone and knew about pretty much every gadget coming out in the next 6 months to a year.

I sit here in astonishment wondering where did all of my technology go? I still have ALL CRT displays in my house, I have mediocre computers with the exception of a laptop that the company issued me — which of course really isn’t top of the line either. My cell phone is old and tired. I don’t even own a PDA. I see one of our GS folks at work won an HP63xx Pocket PC and isn’t even using the cell phone built into it. I don’t own a tablet PC. I don’t even have my own subscription to MSDN universal anymore. What happened to me?

Has anyone else noticed this sort of trend in their own lives? Its not that I don’t have the money. It’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy playing with the gadgets. I just, don’t seem to have the time to do the research on the products anymore. I go to the local electronics store and stand in front of the latest super-snazzy tech and then try to decide which is best based on the specs, but then decide I’ll go back home and do some more research before buying the item. By the time I remember to look it up, some new gadget is out and I repeat the cycle. I’m sort of frustrated now and I feel like I may just have tech-envy. I see everyone else with their gadgets and I have to say… where’s my tech? Someone please stop me from running to the store in a panic and buying up a storm! Tell me this is normal. Someone? Anyone?

AJAX is a Fraud

I’ve been around long enough in this industry to recognize marketing fraud when I see it. The buzzword that has become of AJAX is one such instance. I’ve about had it with hearing people talk about how its so new and innovative. I know of at least 5 people, including myself, who were using Xml Data islands and javascript to produce dynamic output into a browser as early as 1999 and 2000. I find it amazing that an article can be written by a virtual nobody in the industry like Jesse James Garrett that proclaims something as “new” that has been around since before the first victim of the DotBomb industry.

The reality of the situation is that these technologies have been around for ages, but the world wasn’t quite ready for them yet. The industry was bellowing, “Bring out your dead” and Netscape refused to answer, insisting “I’m not dead yet”. Sorry for the Monty Python analogy but rings true. Now that the platform market has been mostly conglomerated, it’s much easier to roll client-side to server-side javascripting out to the public.

Additional influences like the proliferation of broadband internet access to the masses has made such uses of bandwidth possible on the public internet space as opposed to being restricted to local intranets — much like several of my similar implementations of the technology at AIMCO years ago.

This article isn’t all about anger over this marketing BS — although it is admittedly part of it. Its partly about the idea that marketing has taken over innovation in this world. Between all of the patent wars in the big companies, and other corporations, like Adaptive Path, taking over technologies and name them as their own the industry has just become a big war-ground for business folks. Lastly, this is about the idea that I’m about to post a few scripting examples of this in the next month. I don’t want them to be chalked up in the AJAX hype column.

Where am I?

Only in the blogging world does a subject like “where am I?” get past the most curious of eyes without suspicion of insanity of the author. The truth is I’ve been asked by a couple of people why I haven’t posted anything in the past few days. You can rest assure that I have a slew of articles on various topics coming, but you’ll have to wait for me to start posting them for about another week. I’ve been involved in a couple of ultra super secret Whidbey projects for Microsoft. They keep it so secret I don’t even know what I’m doing for them! OK, in all seriousness, I’ll be flying to Redmond tomorrow and will be spending the rest of the week basking in the clouded downpours, sipping various coffees, and listening to more grunge rock than I can handle, and really, isnbt that about 15 seconds of it? I like visiting the area but every time I go up there I ultimately end up sitting in my hotel room all night after doing my duties at Microsoft. I intend to go out and find something to do or some exquisite place to eat. I even get in my rental go-cart and drive around for a few seconds before stopping at the nearest fast food joint, grabbing a number n and heading back to the hotel. Such is my existence as a non-adventurous kind of guy.

So in case any of you have never been to Redmond, let me share a small piece of it with you. This is where I’ll be. It’s the aerial view of the main campus — albeit 3 years ago.

Microsoft Campus

Wasn’t that thrilling? OK, I’ll see you next week.

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