Blogging Tools

I have tried several tools to read blogs and to publish on mine, I wanted to have one that combines all.

  • Newsgator
  • Newzcrawler
  • RSS Bandit
  • Sharpreader
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In the last blog I was talking about the end of two weeks of hell (End of two weeks of hell). I thought it was the end but it starts again this week :-(

I tried to install a new Windows 2003 Standard Server. The installation works ok. Then I use Windows Update to apply the 14 needed critical updates. Then the bad things starts. It can install 4 patches but 10 failed. Then it ask me to restart the server. And at reboot I get an error message:

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As reported by Didier here. We had the chance last thursday evening to meet Mr Gordon Simpson, deputy CTO of BEA Systems.

We discussed very intensively different themes, as:

  • the mid-term vision and positioning of [IBM Web Sphere](http://weblogs.asp.net/lkempe/admin/www.ibm.com/software/info1/websphere/index.jsp), [BEA Web Logic](http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/content/products/platform/) and the [Microsoft .NET](http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/) solutions
  • the current standardization processes ([J2EE](http://java.sun.com/j2ee/), Java, etc.) in comparison with other ones, not so successful (CORBA specs)
  • the future of SUN (HW, Java)
  • the strategy of BEA concerning Linux
  • [UDDI](http://www.uddi.org/): hype or market standard?
  • offline solution and caching
  • [SOA](http://www.service-architecture.com/web-services/articles/service-oriented_architecture_soa_definition.html) on IBM mainframes Continue reading
  • It is the end!!! And a good end :-) After two weeks of hard and long work, we have one of our applications in production. That’s was not without difficulties. And another part that was really important is that we have a second productive Windows 2003 Server. Our backend applications running on Windows 2003 Server are now load balanced between the two servers. And it works great with a good abstraction layer that handles discovery, call and failover of the services.

    The other important part of the week is that Olympique de Marseille, my favorite French soccer team is in UEFA cup final. The match was great and it seems really to have a team spirit like in a non professional team. I like that and I think that Pascal Belaud will not say something different.

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    I started yesterday to work on the second release of the publishing tool that we are using to write articles on my site Tech Head Brothers. The first version what packing everything needed (XML, pictures, source zip) into one zip file that the author was emailing me for publishing. The new idea is to have a Web Service on the web site that directly accept this zip file as a Dime attachment. So the author can directly post his article to the web site without passing it to me. I am so lazy ;-)

    I have this web service developped and the code in the VSTO project. Then I faced an issue during debugging. In fact when the debugger reach the point of calling the web service then I get back to the Word 2003 document, and can’t continue to debug and the web service is not called. If I remove the line of code that attach the Dime attachment to the request:
    srv.RequestSoapContext.Attachments.Add(attachment);
    and call the service then it works, but for sure that’s not what I want.

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    I continued the installation of Exchange 2003 and I am almost done with it. Currently I am able to send email, to get email from my different internet pop emails using Pullmail. But I can’t get directly emails for my domain. As I have a dynamic ip i used DynDns and changed the MX record of my DNS provider to point to a CNAME with the domain name used in DynDns. It seems that the problem is coming from there, but I could not fix it, and I don’t have any idea.

    I want to thanks Benoit Hamet for his wonderful support. I used also a really good article: Hosting Your Own SMTP Mail Using Exchange 2000 by Mark Fugatt. Thanks Mark.

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    Finally I managed to install my DC, DNS… I stopped this morning at 2 AM and restarted at 7:30 AM. Thanks to Thierry Mille (always of good support) and Tim Hines for his message that solved my issue. Now I start installing Exchange 2003, and hope that I will be successfull. For the moment it goes ok. When it will be finished I will need to reimport my user profile, that will tough, I guess. Thanks to Julia Lerman for her kind message, thats right we are only developers ;-)

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    Author's picture

    Laurent Kempé

    I am an experienced Team Leader & Distinguished Solution Architect with a passion for shipping high-quality products by empowering development team and culture toward an agile mindset. I bring technical vision and strategy, leading engineering teams to move product, processes and architecture forward.


    Team Leader, Distinguished Solutions Architect


    Illzach, France