Lufthansa relaunches broadband Internet on-board

In mid-2010 Lufthansa will reintroduce FlyNet, the most powerful inflight hotspot worldwide. With its new partner Panasonic, Lufthansa will enable its passengers in the future to communicate above the clouds via broadband Internet. Customers will also be able to send text messages by mobile phone and transfer data via smartphones such as PDA, iPhone or BlackBerry devices.

Lufthansa plans to equip a major part of its long-range fleet with FlyNet within the first year of operation.

.Net Coding Standards

Going through some recommended coding standards for .Net, here are a few useful links:

• Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries on MSDN
  
• IDesign coding standards for C# and WCF
  
• VB + C# Coding Standards documents
  
• Various standards (ssw)

Also check the following page for updates: Coding Standards.

MX Toolbox

MX Toolbox has a few tools to test any given domain name's mail server (whatever is at the MX record for the given domain). It will display the service status, relaying information, etc.

MX Lookup Tool - Check your DNS MX Records online - MxToolbox

Integrating FxCop with Visual Studio

At the link below are the instructions on how to integrate FxCop with Visual Studio.
Existing default rules can be used initially, until you write your own. :)

Visual Studio Integration of FxCop

Continuous Integration - CruiseControl.Net

CruiseControl.NET is an Open Source Continuous Integration package. This is the .Net version of CruiseControl. It works with SVN and MSBuild, NUnit, and other goodies.

CruiseControl.NET is an Automated Continuous Integration server, implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework.
A list of tools that CruiseControl.NET can integrate with can be read at Using CruiseControl.NET with other applications.(CVS,SVN,NAnt, MSBuild, NUnit, NDepend, ...)

From CruiseControl description:

CruiseControl is both a continuous integration tool and an extensible framework for creating a custom continuous build process. It includes dozens of plugins for a variety of source controls, build technologies, and notifications schemes including email and instant messaging. A web interface provides details of the current and previous builds. And the standard CruiseControl distribution is augmented through a rich selection of 3rd Party Tools.

Welcome to CruiseControl.NET - CruiseControl.NET - Confluence

NCache - Distributed In-Memory Object Cache

Another distributed memory solution. This one is more focused on .Net as a platform. Below is the link to Express, the free version of the product.

NCache Express – Free Distributed Cache, ASP.NET Session State, Distributed Caching for .NET and Caching Application Block

SharedCache - One More Memory Scale-Out Solution

Here is another solution for distributed memory: SharedCache. It is hosted on CodePlex and written in .Net. This is another option along ScaleOut, Velocity, memcached, etc.

Shared Cache is high performance distributed and replication
cache system build for .Net cache and enterprise application running in
server farms.

Shared Cache provides distributed
replicated cache to minimize the load factor. It consists the usage of
two or more servers in a farm. It's replicated all data within the
cluster. The big plus is simple, you have all your cache nodes on all
different servers. In case one of your servers get restarted, it will
receive all nodes automatically from its parent.

Shared Cache uses 100% managed code which is written .Net C#.

SharedCache.com - high-performance, distributed caching - Home

Memory-Based Architecture

Along my thoughts, there are quite a few products on the market that distribute RAM (used to be cache) as a medium shared among the instances of a web application in a farm/cloud. This article lists some of them.

High Scalability - High Scalability - Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?

Scale-Out Cache/Memory

Besides ScaleOut Software's solutions, here is a very popular free solution - memcached.

Memcached's APIs provides a giant hash table distributed across multiple machines. When the table is full, subsequent inserts cause older data to be purged in least recently used (LRU)
order. Applications using memcached typically layer memcached requests
and additions into core before falling back on a slower backing store,
such as a database.

memcached: a distributed memory object caching system

High Scalability

This web site/blog contains material on modern web technologies and high scalability solutions. Many topics, including Haboop, distributed file systems, scalable data storage, etc.

High Scalability - High Scalability

BigTable

BigTable - another concept from Google. This is a large flat data store that's running on top of a distributed file system. Used for high-performance and high data throughput applications.
Here is the list of Open Source solutions.

BigTable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hadoop & HDFS - Open Source Grid Computing

Hadoop is a project that employs principles behind Google's technical architecture. It is a framework that provides a computational and storage model that distributes the load across clusters of servers transparently.
HDFS is a distributed file system that can handle petabytes of data.
Hadoop is Open Source software and is used in many organizations, like Yahoo, IBM, Facebook...

Welcome to Apache Hadoop!

Conky - System Monitor for Linux Desktop

Conky - Home

Conky is awesome system monitor. It can be configured to display (almost) anything you want to know about your system. It is very flexible and there are loads of configuration files out there. Screenshots page shows some configurations, together with their rs files you can use. Variables page displays all the variables you can use.

Here is my conkyrc file, at Pastebin, - link.

Creating Own RPM Repository for openSUSE

There are multiple ways to create a custom RPM package repository in Linux. I was wondering if I could use just one online box to load the update packages on it and then distribute that to other Linux machines. This appears logical and straightforward as an idea. Well, in practise, it turns out equally simple. At the link below you can read a few ways (make sure you read the comments!) to do that.
The easiest (not tried, though) is to add a folder as a repository into Yast. Other ways are as easy, just different approaches depending on what you really want to do.

Install Downloaded RPM in YAST | OpenSUSE Linux Rants

Setting the Connection for LinqDataSource

Below is the summary of how to set a custom connection for LinqDataSource. It does not accept any parameters and creates a data context using the default constructor. If you want to set another connection string, set the ObjectInstance like this:

Protected Sub LinqDataSource1_ContextCreating(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.LinqDataSourceContextEventArgs) Handles LinqDataSource1.ContextCreating

    'Pass the custom connection string.
    Dim db As New DBADMDataContext(DBADMDataContext.getConnectionString())

    e.ObjectInstance = db

End Sub

linqdatasource runtime connection string - Application Forum at ObjectMix.com

By default, LinqDataSource create data context by using default
constructor. If you want to use specific connection, I think you can create
data context object by yourself, and assign the object to the
ObjectInstance property in ContextCreating event.

Please refer to the following document. There is a simple about how to
specify connect string for LinqDataSource by yourself.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...rols.linqdatas
ource.contextcreating.aspx
[LinqDataSource..::.ContextCreating Event]