.NET advantage released!

For all people using .NET in your job, the basic controls/components of .NET are not enough sometimes and you have to develop components. you have a lot of .NET package on the .NET to help you.

With all this stuff, you extends the basic toolset with a lot of things and have not to reinvent the weel.

On of the most known package is NetAdvantage which contain a lot of controls, components, tools for ASP.NET and windows forms.

This new release bring new features:

• Vista look-and-feel without WPF needs
• Export PDF, XPS and Excel
• Improve Visual Studio help integration
• Improve AJAX support for WYSIWYG

source

help for suse

I have found a beautiful blog which talk about Suse Linux in French. It explain all basic and is great for newbies.

Thanks to this great blog, I have found a second great site named www.Kameleon-facile.org which can generate a script to add all repository easily!!

This script is generate for smart but you can just modify a little it for Yast by adding “zypper sa <URL> <name>” where URL is the URL you have and name is the name you want to attach to this repository.(Paid attention to have name in one word)

hello from linux !!

I have switch to Linux.

All I see is incredible far from what I have seen on Linux few years ago.

I run an OpenSuse 10.3 and all my bad point on Linux have disappear :

• The starting time have now reduce to about 30 seconds thanks to the SUPER project
• The delay and freeze that you have with yast have disappear… No need of smart!
• The installation system in general have been really improve. A single click is just what you need to install nvidia non oss driver!

There is a lot of other things which is really user friendly. Like the small textbox which appear when you are in a folder and hit some key to find a file. You will not just search with first letter but with you can hit more than one letter to find what you search. Yast is a lot easier and faster than previous version. You have search engine everywhere to find what you search quicker.
EDIT:

this is my desktop

yast:

start menu:

control center:

With only a small time I can only conclude that MS Windows is far from what we have now on Linux. It is amazing! Few years ago, we have a system where you have to use console every-time you want to do something and here you have a real desktop with 3D effect!

fish in the cube

cool animation when you close a window:

The first thing I do is get my rsa key from my windows partition and get svn/compile Mono It is faster than cygwin and easier

Rem: all screenshot come from opensuse site because I have not found how done screenshots ^^ (will try with print screen tonight). But I install compiz fusion and I have the same effect

Rem2: the only issue for moment is that I have no sound on flash player ( I have no sound for all at start but it is just because I have 2 sound card and I select the good one in admin panel)

wiki and code

The core ideas of wiki are:

• Every readers are authors
• Keep language easy ( easier than html)
• When you write a text you can flag all keyword to make it expandable for future.

The first is the concept is not far from open source : every user can read and modify source.

The second concept is to have the language which have the better ratio feature/lines of code. This is a key concept for all language. All modern language try to increase this ratio.

The third one is idea can be compared to the autogeneration of stubbed functions in VS2005.

It is funny to see that wiki key concept can be compare to the coding world.

busy life

So sorry to not post since 1 week but I had a lot of work.

First, I will leave soon pepsico France for SAGE.

The issue is that, I am the only one in IT team who know business part of supply chain and technique part of it. So, I have to transfer a lot of knowledge to other member of team and I have to finished my year objective before leaving.

So much thing to do… But I want to leave PepsiCo with a clean place.

• I have made some technical documentations about all part of the supply chain applications.
• I have made formation to other team member for all my application (Cost of goods, logistic gateway, claim system, palette system, data-warehouse logistic, client chase payment,…)
• I have get back 25K€ from one bill of our palette suppliers.
• I have improve end month process of Cost of goods application.

About the last point, I have done so much things. Before the end month process take 1H30 to import all data and calculate and now it take only 2min20. I have improve the logging system to have good reports to debug it and simplified the process. I have reformat all code to use standard naming rules. I have remove all extra call in our ERP to call data which is ever import in other part of data-warehouse. The other big point is that the human interface is just a page where you see a small image animation witch said process go on. And now we have a page with auto refresh and a table which show the state of the process to user. So now it is not a black box for users!!

So, now, I can say that this process is clean, standard, quick, user friendly and well logged.

This application is well known as the pain in the ass. 5 different people (including 3 trainees) have worked on it and it have finished to a bad designed application with a lot of issue and really bad performance. The core of the system is a end month process which calculate and reports errors to solve to close the period. The main user of the application is really happy for it.
I am really happy about all this work done in a real short time.

innovate !!

Who innovate today in desktop experience?

This is a complex question…

Google is the first who come in my mind. A lot of engineer have left Microsoft to Google. Google have make a lot of new things as Google hearth, Google Desktop, Gmail, Google reader, Igoogle, Gcalendar , Google spreadsheet,… But Google video was a badtrip and they have to buy Youtube. Google have nothing really new since few month… Google have done a great job to make a web “Office” but it is just a migration to web not a real new idea.

EDIT: they have just released the google presentation.

MAC OS X have add a lot of new idea in desktop but nothing new since it.Apple have take a strong leadership in mp3 reader and Iphone will be a success. So, Apple is now clearly investing in Iphone, Ipod which bring more money to them.

The big one, Microsoft, fall down. The OpenXML have been refused by International Organization for Standardization.Windows Vista is compare to the Windows Me and Microsoft have provide a downgrade to Win XP.

And Aero is not as good as compiz. Microsoft is good to copy something and make it better for everyone (MACOS->Windows, Lotus 1-2-3-> MS Excel, Java->.NET,…). But Microsoft is in bad way. MS Office and MS Windows are the products which bring cash to Microsoft. MS office is challenged by openOffice, Google spreadsheet,… And MS Windows is left for Linux on server side. and now the last part (but bigger one) desktop environment is more and more challenged by Untubu & Suse who have simplified Linux to make it usable for everyone.

Innovation come from open source today. Power of community get bigger!

The console is left for beautiful GUI on linux. Microsoft have seen the trap and contract with Novell to save him for future but revolution come fast and who know what will be the future market-share of desktop?

Imo, It will take time.I am switching to Linux as many other people. I am an engineer and for moment most of people who switch to Linux are IT engineer but they are prescriptor. When someone want to buy a computer and know nothing about it, he ask for advice to prescriptor. The other sign is that administration switch to Linux. A lot of project improve compatibility (Mono, Moonlight, cygwin…) and other products are on both plate-form (OpenOffice, Firefox,…). So all this things make migration easier but a lot of issue is still there because of the lack of support for Linux.

Compiz Fusion video

Compositing have bring a lot of thing in desktop experience.

Beryl which is a fork of Compiz have now fusion with Compiz Extra for plugin package part and have bring some features in compize core. To sum up, compiz is core with just few stable plugin and Compiz Fusion is a package of plugin which can be unstable on some plugin but which bring a lot of features to desktop.

Some video to show you progress of Compiz fusion and Compiz:

open ID

I have ever talked about open ID.

To sum up, Open ID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

For non geek people, You have only one password to remember which will authenticate you everywhere on web.

Else you can see this beautiful video or the one of 2006

This is very powerful to solve the identity theft. The main issue is that it must be used everywhere to be sure that it will become a standard.

You can get an openId here.

Major actors of web do not use it because they wait the new framework OpenId 2.0. The specs of this new framework are near finished and will be released soon.

So, we will see after the specs released what will be done by all main web actors. But we ever seen some sign that show that will be a success.

AOL have ever go ahead and used it today for 63 million users.

I am really proud of Orange (France telecom) who have invest in this new technology. You will have 40 millions of orange consumers who will used it.

Microsoft Monopole

In US you have the antitrust law in France we have the anti packaging law.

This law just said that you can not sell 2 products together without selling each products.

In France, you can only found PC with Windows on it and a lot of constructor do not allow consumer to buy PC without it. So we have a petition to warn our country about this issue who do not let a change to other product of the market. The cost of software installed on your PC is about 20/25% of the total cost. This not only for MS windows, you will have a lot of installed software

So you can sign the petition to stop this bad practice which make price expensive and do not let the choice for your software.

When firefox bring the web2.0 revolution…

Firefox is really a great browser with tabs , plugins, Anti fishing, RSS, … and many more things.

But the last Alpha 8 of Firefox bring a really cool thing: the web based protocol handlers.

This system allow people to register web service to open mime type. So you can open a file without local rich client to open it. The power of web service will do it for you.

Imagine you want to open a document .doc, but you do not want to install MS word, you will use the Google document web service to open it!!

This system is great because no issue about multi-OS support. Most of plate-form have a browser and this is the only thing needed!

PDF file is a pain to open because Acrobat reader is really slow and have to many module to load whereas it is quite never used. I have never understand why acrobat open all module even if not needed and why it will not check file content to see what is needed… I use Foxit reader to open PDF but now I will use WebService to open it.

Your computer will no more need extra application than a browser and access to web;)

A lot of web service is outside to help you to open document. In my opinion, it is the future for a big part of application. But this system is not perfect to do complex things (coding, compile, .. for example) but it is cool to view any format. So, you will no more need viewer because all will be online.