Archives for August 2004

I worked in the fingerprint biometric business for almost 4 years and I am happy to see that Microsoft will deliver fingerprint readers. I am curious to see which company is providing the hardware, the algorithm and the software. Maybe the result of the acquisition of the BAPI technology from I/OSoftware. I am also curious to see if the reader is an optical one or a silicon one. I would really like them to provide us with the SDK based on BAPI so that I can develop a new version of the Windows login i developed in the past.

This evening, I mean morning, it is already almost 1 AM, I read the article about NHibernate from Justin Gehtland on TheServerSide.NET. Btw it is a good introduction. I am playing now for some time with O/R frameworks. And i must say that I appreciate tools like NHibernate but also tools like Data Tier Modeler. This tool is great to use for new projects, but what about projects that already have a database? In this case you might use tools like NHibernate. What I really like in DTM is that you use a UML tool to model your domain. Then the tool consume this model and generate all the plumbing needed to store your objects states. So you really deal with your domain objects and do not need to create mapping files or things out of your domain. There is another project that Ikeep an eye on is Neo, it is really similar to DTM. If you look at the ppt presentations of both you will see the idea are the same.

In some portal scenarios you might want to have only webmaster(s) manage the layout of the site. So your goal is to avoid that a registered user change it. With Webparts you might build portal that match this scenario like this: Add to you web.config:

<system.web>
    ...
    <webParts>
        <personalization>
            <authorization>
                <allow roles="webmasters" verbs="enterSharedScope"/>
            </authorization>
        </personalization>
    </webParts>
    ...
</system.web>

This configuration set that only users with the role webmaster might change the layout.

Then you might place a WebPartPageMenu control on your site. This control is listing all the personalisation to the webpart system you might do as a logged in user. In the case of a user in the role of webmasters, the WebPartPageMenu will have one of it entries set to: Show Share view. You can select this entry and then Design Page Layout to be able to design the layout of the page for the user the anonymous users.

I am reading through the different blog I subscribed to and saw that interesting entry. I have so many discussions at work concerning Free Software compared to Microsoft way of doing business with Not Free Software. Thats Life, real Life. Another way of seeing the real life is pointed by an opened letter from Clemens Vasters, here. So true.

About FREE software ...