A very interesting hobby

 Posted on September 8, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  108 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

I’ve grown interested in Chess programming this year, and started building my own chess engine that will understand the WinBoard protocol. Chess programming is fascinating. Initial development is difficult but I’m starting off with the basics : A simple bitboard representation. A simple implementation of the Alpha-Beta algorithm. Implementation of the WinBoard protocol. When that’s done there’s going to be ample room for improvement (twenty or so algorithms left to try out and then you can still play around with different representations of the board). [Read More]
hobby  chess  algorithms 

Time is of the essence (or so it seems)

 Posted on September 8, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  172 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

There’s been some long gaps between blog entries due to the amount of time I can afford to write. What am I up to these days? Still working my full time day job as a systems developer (I actually think it qualifies as a day-night job). Writing (and fixing) articles for CodeProject. Doing lots and lots of R&D (new frameworks, applications, technologies are emerging at an incredible rate these days). I blame this one on Microsoft with their pre-release software. [Read More]
life 

Creating or Input Multiple Messages from or to Biztalk Maps

 Posted on July 19, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  150 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Sure, we all know how to do that by know, right? Funny thing is, all the blog entries I’ve seen like the ones here and here, end up creating a new map, usually situated in the root of your assembly (or event worse, create temporary orchestrations to do that). In order to move it to another folder in your project you’ll have to edit the XML contained inside the map since it contains relative paths to the schemas mapped (and watch out for those namespaces). [Read More]
biztalk 

Sharepoint Object Model - Good Practices

 Posted on July 18, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  153 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Dispose those objects! If you’re using the SharePoint object model anywhere, make sure that you dispose any objects that you create (not those that the SharePoint object model creates for you, like calling GetContextWeb()). These objects have a small memory footprint visible to the Garbage Collector, but a large amount of unmanaged resources (effectively not visible to the Garbage Collector). If you don’t dispose of them, the GC will not be in any rush to free up the memory used by these objects since it can’t (or won’t) see the bigger picture. [Read More]
sharepoint 

.NET CF - Part 1

 Posted on July 15, 2006  |  2 minutes  |  347 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

I’ve been porting an application of ours to .NET CF 2.0, Mobile 5.0 and SQL Mobile the past couple of weeks. .NET CF 2.0 is impressive. The .NET Compact Framework 1 was a bit lacking in functionality - it felt like Microsoft shipped an unfinished product. .NET CF 2 provides a lot of new functionality : Pocket Outlook Access, Phone and messaging capabilities, new controls, etc. Basically everything the guys at OpenNet CF had in their previous version, is now in the new version of the framework. [Read More]
mobile 

SSIS Woes

 Posted on June 2, 2006  |  2 minutes  |  351 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

I’ve been dabbling with SQL 2005 a lot these days and two features impress me: SSIS and Reporting Services. You might find it difficult to actually deploy a SSIS package. I’m missing something with calling a web service in SSIS… Even when you change the connection manager setting for the HTTP Connection manager to a new value (say we deploy to a live environment), it still reads the WSDL file you provided and calls the wrong web service (Ethereal is the coolest network tracing tool ever btw. [Read More]
sql  ssis 

Windows Mobile 5.0

 Posted on May 20, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  45 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

Yeah! Finally got my new toy - an IMATE JAMIN with (very important) Windows Mobile 5.0. I’ll be playing around with the new SQL Mobile and .NET Compact Framework 2.0 on this device - expect a storm of new posts.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

mobile 

Biztalk Listen Shape

 Posted on May 19, 2006  |  1 minutes  |  173 words  |  Riaan Hanekom

I’m no Scott Woodgate, but I think I know a fair amount about BizTalk. However, it seems that I never recognized what the Listen shape actually does (you don’t see this mentioned very often btw.). Turns out that this little shape can solve many of the problems we’re currently having, mainly correlation issues, like situations where the message you are waiting for might never arrive, keeping your orchestration in a dehydrated state, waiting forever. [Read More]
biztalk