Mike Diehl's WebLog

I've been working on a project that will incorporate a number of pieces of technology: Biztalk, Host Integration Server, Hummingbird Document Management, Sybase, and perhaps a few others.

I'm working on a project now that has a lot of components and web services and a few client applications. And Biztalk.

There is a Web Application project in VS 2005.

I've started listening to podcasts from the PBS series NerdTv  and today I was listening to a conversation with Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of Paypal. who had just been through his third all-nighter - that week. He said it was not unusual for him to do this, and some people like all-nighters and some don't. (An all-nighter is when you work through the night on some problem, or coding thing - in Microserfs it was referred to as a "Trip To Australia".)

I was just looking at the Composite UI App Block (for .NET 2.0 recently released) and they ship with their framework both Nunit and Team System tests.

I love Authorization Manager (AzMan), especially the idea of using role-based authorization, but with the roles being outside of the application altogether. So, from an developer point of view, you tell AzMan that you have a certain named application, and it performs a set of operations, let's say "OrderWidget", "UpdateInventory", and "CreateNewProduct". Then an administrator can create roles, organize operations into tasks, and assign permission to roles for tasks or operations. Finally, administrators can map Active Directory users or groups (and with a little help, other types of non-AD identities) into those roles.

At the company Christmas Party a couple of weeks ago, the employees received an iPod (30GB) as a present. A great feature of these particular set of iPods was that our names were engraved on the back, otherwise I would have had a fight on my hands with my wife and my oldest daughter (who is turning into a big-time geek) over this new toy.

I'm getting into writing tests for a .NET 2.0 project, and I must say that one of the great things about writing unit tests in the Team Test environment is how easy it is to run those tests in the debugger in Visual Studio.