Gearing up for the Summit!

Gearing up for the upcoming MVP Summit! Cool that I will be able to attend this year's edition. Almost always saddled with so much around this time of year that I will have to bust plans of attending at the last minute! Breaking up the ginx this year! I should hope that's a good sign.

This year is particularly different, not only my decision to attend crippled by saddled workload, also the global financial crisis is dealing a good blow and the unexplainable diving of the Nigerian Naira against the USD. But I still gotta attend all the same.

So much I am hoping to gain this year apart from the Great View of Seattle from Top floors of The Westin Seattle. Another great opportunity to relate with the C# team apart from the mail relationship at Private Newsgroup and the C# Insiders and much more.

I am also hoping to meet the Channel 9 Team (probably they may feature me in one of their videos). and much more ..

.Net and Java Inteoperability

I recently was saddled with the task of developing a component for a Telecoms (GSM) company. This is a company that has huge investment in Java-based applications on Sun Solaris boxes. The requirement of the component warrants a need to connect my ASP.Net based application to an existing connection pooling java-based socket application.

Immediately, interoperability comes to mind. Which is best? Some of the thots that came to mind are

- Use JNBridge (license cost)
- use a message based intermediary (MSMQ - requires modification of Java component which not allowed)

There is a whole lot of options in this space which I will not want to go into in this blog

- IKVM.Net (read all about this but not sure it works)

Other constraint is I had budget constraint that knocks off JNBridge and also not allowed to modify the service component as some other production applications depends on it. Whick left me with IKVM.Net.

First, I wrote a Java client application that uses this service, compiled and tested it well, then I use IKVM to generate a .Net dll off this java class file and Voila!, task got done!. It's no trouble getting this into my ASP.Net bin folder.

> javac SVClient
> ikvmc SVClient -target:library

Refer to IKVM.Net tutorial

The great thing about IKVM is that it works without any dependency to the original java class file. It's a complete conversion of the java code.

I got curious a bit and opened the dll in Red Gate's .Net Reflector and learned a lot on what underlying code.

Google Cloud

Spent half the entire day cranking at a Silverlight application and just when I got fedup with work for the entire day, I decided to get my hands dirty with the Google App Engine alt="Powered by Google App Engine" />. I have read quite a bit about it but scared of investing in a learning curve coupled with the fact that I am not going to be writing a c# code.

It is python! thats something I love too though I have experience in IronPython just then I stumbled on this you-tube video and it's a cool starter. Simply follow the installation instruction provided by Google and with that video you are set for an Hello World experience.