Blog ala Vidar

Tim is the IT Manager at TGE in Germany. I’ve been down there visiting them about a year ago, where I helped on upgrading their database to R3. The things I remember Tim always talked about was SharePoint and Web-services. I thought he was in love with Web services, because he talked so much about it. But, then I remembered that I talk A LOT about SQL Server, so, guess we’re even there :-P. The last week Tim and Florian (also from TGE) have been on AppFrame training, learning the inside of AppFrame. He’s already got 5 posts out!

What did you do before you started at TGE?
In the mid 1990’s some fellow students and I were running our own business focused on Linux. When starting with automated deployment of Windows NT 4.0 in 1997, I completely turned to the “dark side”.  In spring 2000 I joined an international operating Telco as “Client Systems Lead” for their ~5000 seats network. This was at the climax of the dot-com bubble. Due to some lucky turn of events I managed to stay with them and the successors as Microsoft Technology Architect and later as team lead for the backend systems and data centers. When I saw the job offer from TGE in 2005 – I knew that this has my name on it and I applied.

What do you think about AppFrame?
There are so many frameworks available. For example Habanero.Net, Spring.Net or TrueView. DevExpress and Telerik provide interesting ORM tools. While all of these have some interesting aspects, I am really confident that the choice of AppFrame R3 is the right one. The security design starts at db level, it provides SQL injection protection with AppFrame and it is possible to create solutions in WinForms and Web applications with lighting speed. (well – especially if the minimal allowed coding speed that Jan Leon showed us…  a web service,  a WinForms GUI both fully functional from scratch to compile in something like 6 minutes…)

You have any ideas on what to make in AppFrame? Web services talking to SharePoint?
Integration of AppframeR3 into SharePoint is certainly an important step. The upcoming build provides a good basis. I will blog about the currently available methods and our implementation in the near future.  But my wish list for AppFrame is longer… First I would like to see that the distributed file store concept gets an addition. I would like to be able to define a central file store. Files should be copied via BITS (Background Intelligent File Transfer Service). Another thing that would be awesome would be “afWebServiceDatasource”. While it is just a few lines of code to query a web service, it would be much better to centrally define which remote web services an AppFrame solution is using. If it should be executed on client or server side, if the result should be cached and so on.

What do you do when you’re not sitting in front of the computer?
Well, I guess then it must be broken and I will most likely sit behind it trying to fix it J. My wife always knew that I am a geek. I guess my two daughters and my son should know by now.