Lycangeek

Blogs-r-MS

If you are interested in learning more about the .NET CLR, they have finally grouped the list of bloggers by area at Microsoft - at least for this team.

Check 'em out.

http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnfa/archive/2005/02/08/369384.aspx

Web Services and LabVIEW

An important technology that is building is the whole "Service Oriented Architecture" based around Web Services. Something I just found is a handly little tool to create client interfaces for web services inside LabVIEW.

Take a look at http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/webmain/29543201344AA09F86256D740066839E?opendocument

CLR Profiler

For those unfamiliar with the profiler, I strongly recommend checking it out if you do any .NET development. It is a free tool you can download from Microsoft that will show you all sorts of detail about your application, especially its memory usage profile and full call tree. Check out the Word document in the unzip directory to get started.

If you are interested in seeing it in action, check out the MSDN TV episode just released.

LabVIEW.NET

Well, I have been at my new job for a few weeks now so I thought I would do a quick writeup on it and explain the type of posts I hope to do here.

The company is one I actually worked for 6 years ago (I guess that makes me the prodigal son) called National Instruments. This time around I am a developer in the product group for LabVIEW, which really is a pretty nifty program.

LabVIEW is a graphical language that has all the power of standard text-based languages such as Java or C# - it is just much easier for non-programmers to pick it up. Since it is targeted at scientists and engineers, that makes sense.

Well, my specific area of development is to provide integration between Microsoft's .NET system and LabVIEW. For the last two years I've been messing around in the guts of .NET (see my previous product [link added 3/4/05]) and so I am fairly comfortable on that side. The other - LabVIEW - is quite the challenge. It is a very large product that has been in development for around 15 years and I've barely scratched the surface in the last 3 weeks!

My hope is to talk a bit about the various implementation issues and design challenges that happen as we go along. Right now we provide a very simple integration but I am thinking BIG!

Spokes and Spurs

Well the cycling season is starting up again and my first organized ride is only a few weeks away. I've tried to stay on the bike, but it has been a bit of hit-n-miss. Considering that I signed up for the metric century (100km or around 62 miles), I might be a bit-o-an-optimist.

However, I do recommend checking out the charity behind this ride. They are a horse ranch that provides at-risk children with an opportunity to have some positive experiences in their lives. See them at http://www.spiritreins.org/

Lizzie goes home

I am pleased to annouce that ol' Godzilla found her forever-home today and after meeting her new family over some BBQ, I am very pleased. They seem like very nice people who were quite taken by her. One down...