one love

one love

Originally uploaded by savaged.

It’s a lesser known fact that Bob M was inspired to write his song whilst on a trip to London’s banking district ;)

new Y2K

Could the disasters caused in server rooms by soaring temperatures bring on as much trouble as was forecast for Y2K?

conventional v custom

Mattdud has produced a well written blog IMHO. I think he’s hit the nail on the head as regards to design patterns allowing easy hand over between developers.

It’s fair to say that there’s quite a volume of turn-over in The City right now, and while we all play musical chairs some new guys will have it easier than others. Anyone turning up on their first day to find a project with judicious use of patterns will have a much better day than the poor fellow finding a whole heap of Darwinist gloop. Gloop that may have worked fine for years but gloop nonetheless. The gloop may be commented but how can the new guy be sure the comments are still in-line with the functionality?

I think this is one more case to put in the debate between ‘standards’ versus ‘bespoke’, or ‘industry-wide convention’ versus ‘in-house customisation’. The bespoke route can feel more productive as it is hacked out. Over the longer term however, surely the ability to easily re-resource on a conventional design is of higher value.

I think the Maven project is another good example of the right direction IMHO. Namely ‘convention versus configuration’. So many of us have scripted out various bits of ‘build and deploy’ workflow in our own hand-rolled way, while we could all have done these tasks one way. Our ‘first day developer’ could get his inherited project working locally and building out all without having to dig through docs and scripts.

Perhaps the RAD side of in-house solutions is the only option for fast paced front-office jobs, where the analyst wants his app yesterday. I would assert however, that for any other area a more industry approach builds a firmer foundation.

(See this blog on a similar vein)

my pain with a .Net web-service and a Java (AXIS) client

I’m making this post because I’ve been unable to find a post on the web for a problem I had with a .Net web-service and a Java (AXIS) client. I wanted to send a fairly large data transfer object over SOAP and found that I got the error message below. I found very little on the web but with the help of a colleague finally worked out that it can be solved by overriding a default in the web.config for the .Net web-service, like this: <httpRuntime maxRequestLength=”131072“/>

Here’s the exception: When RoutingStyle is set to RequestElement, SoapExtensions configured via an attribute on the method cannot modify the request stream before it is read. The extension must be configured via the SoapExtensionTypes element in web.config, or the request must arrive at the server as clear text. –> Object reference not set to an instance of an object.