Archive for December, 2009

What is an "open" API anyway? (case YouTube / TotLol)

TotLol is a membership-based site that aggregates YouTube content for kids. What’s interesting is its background story and how it went from being ad-based to almost non-existent to membership-based. The author’s version of the story is interesting. Harshly compressed: He claims to have created a service that was one of the first on YouTube APIs. […]

December 30, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Web

ReaderWriterLockSlim performance

A while ago I blogged about the performance of various thread synchronization primitives. Due to the insufficient accuracy of my memory cells, I forgot ReaderWriterLockSlim out of the comparison. Let that be fixed here and now. The comparison method is still the same, and I have amended the previous post with the results of the […]

December 29, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

UTF-8 preamble is a problem when you concatenate files

You’re just changing a couple of words in an XML file with Notepad. Your data modifications are guaranteed to be valid by schema. That couldn’t possibly break anything, could it? <insert the ugly buzzer sound> It quite likely couldn’t, unless you were editing an XML file that happened to be using UTF-8. Because while Notepad […]

December 21, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: .NET, Misc. programming

Visual Studio 2010 delayed – but it’s not a bad thing

Yesterday, Soma announced that Visual Studio 2010 would be delayed for a few weeks (apparently from the original 22nd March 2010 launch date). But really, we should all be happy – we’re getting a February Release Candidate in return. If you’ve followed the VS2010 lifecycle, you’ll already guess it’s the performance. If you’re interested and […]

December 18, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: .NET

Performance overhead of thread synchronization

One of the main problems with multithreaded application development is handling the synchronization of data. The failure to do so can result in data corruption. On the other hand, over-synchronizing causes loss of performance. But how slow is synchronization, really? Edit: As discussed in the comments section, ReaderWriterLockSlim was accidentally forgotten out of the comparison. […]

December 17, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

Opalis acquisition adds more automation to the System Center family

Microsoft is boosting its System Center family of products by acquiring a Canadian IT automation company called Opalis Software. What does this mean? Opalis does IT automation. Taking a look at the material on the Opalis site, the key components seem to be: A workflow platform that enables easier automation of IT tasks (responding to […]

December 11, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Windows IT

Security problems with downloaded .NET assemblies

Have two copies of the same file with exactly the same content on a bit-to-bit level, yet one works and the other one fails with a security error? Yeah, that could happen. In this post, I will discuss two features of Windows that may not be familiar to you. First, files in the NTFS file […]

December 10, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 4 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Windows IT

ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta and Visual Studio 2010

If you’re eager to try out new things, you probably already run Visual Studio 2010 beta 2. If you do, it’s good to realize that trying out ASP.NET MVC 2 beta on the same machine isn’t really supported – not even on Visual Studio 2008. But as usual, it works just fine if you hack […]

December 9, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

What’s new in .NET 4.0? (in Finnish)

Just a quick heads-up for my countrymen reading this: I have written and published an 18-page white paper on “What’s new in .NET 4.0” (including changes in C# 4.0 and Visual Basic 2010). Unfortunately for the international audience, the article is written in Finnish. Available on the ITpro.fi web site. Enjoy!

December 4, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 3 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

Silverlight and Bing Maps: Good or bad for the web?

By now you may have heard about the recent release of the new Bing Maps Beta. It’s a pretty total retake on the concept of maps on the web, integrating maps, aerial imagery and street-side photography all into one seamless experience. The web-ĂĽbergeek crux of the matter: It’s powered by Silverlight. Various writers have already […]

December 3, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Web