Free software

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 …

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I needed to create a virtual directory in IIS 6 during the deployment of one of our backend application on a Windows 2003 server. This application is a COM component written in C++ that I developed wrapping a very old VB6 COM component. The whole exposed as a Web Service using the SOAP Toolkit 3. I already discussed about it here.

So I created a script that will register both COM component, by the way regsvr32 is really bad cause it doesn’t return different value if it fails. Right now I have no verification in the script that let me know if the registration went well. I plan to add it in a second step by reading the content of the registry using the reg command. The script is using the SOAPVDIR.CMD packaged with the SOAP Toolkit 3 to create the Virtual Directory with the soap ISAPI of the SOAP Toolkit 3:

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After all servers problems from the last days, now I have an issue with IIS 5 on my notebook. I am currently working on a project for one of our subsidiaries in which we have to integrate a backend calculator application. In that project I have to restart IIS with the command iisreset to be able to compile my code and to deploy it, otherwise my dll is locked by IIS. I did it for sometime, and today I worked on the project and when I decided to restart IIS then I get an error message: “No such interface supported“. What the hell is this? Come on I need to work. I searched a couple of hours on the web trying different things then I end up uninstalling IIS from my machine rebooting and manually deleting files that where lying on my hard drive. Then after the 128th reboot of the last two weeks I reinstalled it and it worked. :-) :-) :-)

Now for the really cool thing (there is always blue sky after a storm ;) I found a weblog entry by Steven M. Cohn: Multiple IIS Virtual Servers on XP Pro. I really encourage you to read it if you develop ASP.NET websites on Windows XP Pro. Now I have multiple IIS virtual servers running on my notebook and I can switch from one to the other. Awesome.

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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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    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