Seriously Netflix...Wow...

http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/30/netflix-watch-instantly-coming-to-tivo/

Netflix clearly has a brilliant partner engagement team. Bravo.

Wait a Second: Is Mozilla Corp. in Trouble Because of Google Chrome?

I think I'm finally starting to put some of the pieces together on Google Chrome (which I have yet to try).

In 2006, 85% of Mozilla Corporation's revenues came from Google. Google has a contract until 2011 to pay for every ad someone clicks on after using the Google search box in Firefox.

If Google makes its own browser, which they have, and it costs them less than they pay every year to Mozilla Corp., they might not renew that contract again in 2011. Mozilla is heavily dependent on the revenues from Google, and I see this as a brilliant way for Google to hedge its bets on the future.

Bravo.

New Microsoft Ad: Actually Cool

The new Microsoft Ad "I'm a PC" is actually pretty cool. I use Macs at home, and the commercial isn't going to change my mind, but it was great. It stays on-message for Microsoft's new campaign (which I enjoy), and I really like the background music.

wsdl.exe Hates Me

So hopefully this post gets picked up by some search engines, as it might be able to help some other unfortunate soul in some small way.

You want to let your .NET application access a web service, right? Well that means either importing directly into Visual Studio via the "Add Web Reference" feature or, if like me you're using the .NET Compact Framework, you'll have to run wsdl.exe. Of all of the other websites I found no one said that it should be in C:\Program Files\Windows SDKs\v.xxx\bin\wsdl.exe. You'll run this application with the URL/path to your WSDL as an argument.

It turns out that this application is very picky about the WSDL file that it will accept. I had used an online WSDL validator which said that my file was just peachy. wsdl.exe was returning a horrible and unhelpful error about how the portType in the namespace was missing. The problem was that my binding's type was missing the namespace.

So I had to change this:



To this:



Now I understand this whole process of WSDL parsing is difficult, but even after this step I had to manually edit the generated code to remove all of the junk it adds about asynchronous calls that the .NET Compact Framework doesn't support. It would be nice if wsdl.exe had added a command line option for the feature, which I would guess a fair number of mobile developers would be able to take advantage of.

But seriously, couldn't wsdl.exe have just figured out that that was what I meant, when an online validator and PHP's SOAP extension were both capable of easily understanding my intentions?

Freeduino

I just finished assembling my first Freeduino board, based on the Arduino platform, but a little cheaper and with some slightly more convenient components. I think this might be the first time that I have soldered something together or apart without burning myself in some way. I guess that means that I'm getting better at this. I'm excited by all of the nefarious possibilities that an easy-to-use microcontroller like this one puts in my hands. Let's see what happens.