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Sessions that I attended today (most of the titles are actually in German, so I had to translate some):

• Rating of software architectures, Part 1: Method
  Dr. Gernot Starke – very good speaker
  Experience is required for rating architectures; functional requirements are not enough; Quality tree -> ISO…, ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (SEI))
• SOA – Defining services from a business point of view
  Lars Roewekamp, OpenKnowledge GmbH – ok, slides hardly readable from the back (small fonts)
  Some interesting thoughts about structuring services and service operations according to business requirements rather than existing IT architectures.
• Keynote: Bringing Web 2.0 in the Enterprise
  Rahul Patel (Oracle)
• Persistence with Spring
  Eberhard Wolff, Interface21 Germany – very good speaker
  Comparison of different persistence approaches using spring templates for plain JDBC, iBatis and O/R-mappers like Hibernate; recommendation to use O/R-mappers with great care, especially if database-centric/relational concepts have to be considered (batch operations, stored procedures etc.).
• Keynote: The security development lifecycle at Microsoft
  Sebastian Weber, Microsoft Deutschland GmbH
  www.thedailywtf.com ;)
• Message-oriented architectures based on Spring
  Jürgen Höller, Interface21 – good speaker
  API-oriented approach outlining the differences between messaging and asynchronous execution; would have expected to see some example architectures, but there were “only” small source code examples; nevertheless an interesting topic
• Eclipse Code Camp Night
  Moderated by Wayne Beaton, Eclipse Foundation
  Some specific eclipse development problems were discussed ad-hoc; had some discussion with Wayne and Bernd Kolb about security in enterprise application clients based on RCP, but came to the conclusion that there is no project/proposal yet, unless I wrote one ;)

So we (a co-worker and me) have arrived at our hotel in Wiesbaden (Germany). Tomorrow in the morning we will check in at the “Rhein-Main-Hallen” where the event is located. The first talk that I will probably attend is about rating software architectures. More on this later, maybe…

Milestone 6 of Eclipse 3.3 development runs on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) as you can see on the New & Noteworthy page. Furthermore, SWT now uses native Vista features for improved performance. I haven’t tried it yet, but since I’m running Vista on my work laptop, I will probably look into it soon.

Another annoying thing in Vista (Business): Where are those windows games? Oh, must be a decision regarding productivity, that they are not installed in Vista. But do you really have an important job, if you need to play card games during work? ;)

However, if you have Vista Business on your machine and would like to play the windows games (in your spare time, of course ;) ), here is how you can do that:

1. Open the control center.
2. Select Programs.
3. Turn windows functions on or off. (I’m not quite sure, how this is called in the English version, but it’s the only item on the page requiring administrative privileges.)
4. In the dialog, activate the entry for games.
5. The games folder will be filled with the default vista games.

Have fun!

An annoying thing that occured to me when starting work with Vista was the small default size of the windows explorer. Unfortunately, saving the folder settings and applying them to all folders via the folder settings dialog had no effect. Not even as administrator.

Finally, I found the trick:

1. Open an explorer with your preferred method (start menu, [Windows]+E, anything else?)
2. Resize the window to the desired initial size.
3. Close the window while pressing the shift key.

The next time you open the explorer, it should have the size of your choice.

Well no aliens, but…

Read it on your own

Is the electricity bill worth it? ;)

This is the opportunity to vote for ideas that Dell should implement to improve customer satisfaction.

Personally, I would like to be able to create more flexible configurations, concerning the operating system. At the moment it’s impossible to buy only hardware – you are always tied to a windows license, even if you don’t need it. A lot of money could be saved, if you intend to install another OS anyway.

What do you think? Would you like to be able to buy a linux laptop or a bare computer without any OS at all from Dell?

Edit: Some more info on this topic.

Google has a new service for searching source code that is publicly available in .zip, .tar.gz files or even in repositories such as CVS or Subversion.

The search can be constrained e.g. by language or even by license (GPL, BSD etc.). The use of regular expressions is possible, too.

By the way, comments are included in the search of course, so have fun ;)

When you read this, you already know that I have moved my blog from Blogger to my personal webspace at martinklinke.com for playing around with WordPress and getting better content, structure and design than when coding everything by hand in pure and ugly HTML ;)

It has been quite some time between now and my previous post. And in this regard quite some things have changed, too. After developing in Java/J2EE/Eclipse RCP for about 4 years now, I’m currently on an excursion in the land of .NET. It’s also some kind of time travel, since the project environment requires the use of .NET 1.1 and therefore Visual Studio 2003.
While I’m pretty spoiled from coding in Eclipse 3.2, VS 2003′s editing “capabilities” seem like stone-age…
Maybe I can leverage some of the information issued in this article on devx.com about the add-in architecture of VS .NET to increase comfort at least a little bit… if there is time though…