So there I am specifying a some infrastructure for a customer who prefers HP hardware: the pricing/performance sweet spot still seems to be multi-core dual cpu so my choices are Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron. Well despite my normal preference for Opteron it seems that Intel’s 5000 series Xeon’s are offering the best performance and lowest power consumption at the moment.
So Xeon it is then, but behold, the quad cores are finally available with some decent clock speeds, so it seems like a no brainer :- 8 core performance for the price of 4 cores, how cool is that. 
So specification complete, I send it off to the customer and what’s the first thing that comes back ?
We don’t want quad core because we don’t want to spend the extra on Windows 2003 x64 Enterprise edition.
Of course, I get on the phone with them to see what the issue is and discover that the customer is looking at the specification on the MS site, where it clearly states that Standard Edition of 2003 x64 supports only 4 processors.
Immediately I think; “What they really mean is physical processors - number of cores don’t matter”, but to my surprise and frustration I can’t find the answer to my question anywhere. I contact my licensing expert, who can’t help me either. So it seems like I’m stuck with the possibility of having to purchase 2003 Enterprise Edition for a dual processor machine.
So this seems like a good time for a motivational exercise amongst the infrastructure team - the person who finds the answer to the question gets……. well nothing extra actually, but I’ll be really happy.
So several hours and some furious googling later - the facts are revealed and of course I felt it was my mission to share it with you all.
If the Server has….
* 4 single-core processors
* 4 single-core hyperthreaded processors
* 4 dual-core processors
* 4 quad-core processors
…then Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition is currently sufficient.
So here is the document MS Multicore Brief - enjoy
So it seems that for up to 16 core’s on 4 physical CPU’s Windows Server 2003 Standard will suffice - I almost feel like I’m getting something for nothing here.
- Thomas
DSI underlined its commitment to open source and technology leadership by announcing its future contribution to the Spring.NET framework today. Speaking at the IT@Cork ASP.NET AJAX seminar, Yagiz Erkan described how this open source community contribution will unleash a new dimension of developer innovation in DSI while stimulating the growth and adoption of the Spring.NET platform.
Spring.NET is an open source application framework used to build enterprise .NET applications and was founded on the success of the very popular Java Spring Framework. The Spring Framework is now the backbone of all DSI projects and has proved to be an ideal basis for standardised software development for their retail and insurance clients in the US and Europe.
As part of our continuing commitment to the principles of simple, testable and
productive software which underpin the Spring Framework, we are proud to announce this new collaboration: A selection of experienced .NET developers will be working with the team that has developed Spring.NET, in order to contribute to this exciting project. Initially the scope of this contribution will be assisting with bug fixes by supplying patches. Both parties hope that this will evolve into fuller development role, with DSI staff committing to the Spring.NET codebase.
This is a major development for DSI and marks the beginning of a new era for .NET technology innovation in the company. We will help the Spring.NET team lay the groundwork for accelerated adoption and development of the Spring.NET Framework, while encouraging a broader approach to innovation within DSI.
Aleksandar Seovic, co-lead for Spring.NET, commented, “DSI have demonstrated world-class Spring Framework experience in designing and building mission critical systems for global clients. We are very excited by the level of commitment and investment DSI is making in Spring.NET, and are looking forward to their contributions.”
Watch this space for further blogs on our progress with Spring.NET.
- Nessa
“Google Guice! Google Guice! Google Guice!” *waiting*… *nothing happens*… But… I said it three times. I was expecting something magical, something like my code would compile automagically, dependencies injected, tests created… Hold on a second! That was in another movie… 
Enough joking! Have you heard about Google Guice (as you’ve already guessed, it’s pronounced “Juice”)? It claims to be the “next generation” ultra-lightweight dependency injection container. Especially the “ultra-lightweight” bit makes me smile. It sounds like there’s a lightweightness competition and someone is trying hard to impress us :).
Well, I’m going to give it a shot. Whatever comes from Google shouldn’t be taken lightly (even though the technology itself is advertised as ultra-light ). First of all, I must say that their documentation is pretty poor, especially in terms of sample code. This is one thing that they should definitely improve on. If they want to be compared with Spring Framework, there’s a lot of work to do in terms of documentation. We like lightweight frameworks but we don’t like lightweight documentation (unless we had to write it ). We like examples, source code, sample applications… Give us at least a working example!
The main idea is that Guice does support external configuration but it doesn’t force the user to have one. “The end of XML hell” they say. By using annotations, the dependency injection remains closer to the code. I’ve just started to look at it so I’m definitely going to blog about it again but so far I think I prefer the Spring approach. Creating new annotations, having Guice dependency all over my code, using @ImplementedBy don’t really appeal to me at first glance. However, as I’ve already mentioned, I haven’t gone through a real example. I’ll have a better appreciation when I get my hands dirty.
To be continued…
- Yagiz Erkan -
Part 2 - First Code
Part 3 - Dependency Injection
Part 4 - @ImplementedBy and Annotating Bindings
Technorati Tags: Google Guice
“Next Generation Java Testing” is the name of the upcoming book from Cédric Beust and Hani Suleiman. And I’m honored to be selected as a technical reviewer for it. Both authors are very well respected in our software development community. Cédric is the creator of the popular Java testing framework called “TestNG”. And most of us know Hani from his famous blog “The BileBlog”. I just started to read their book and it looks very promising.
- Yagiz Erkan -
Technorati Tags: Cédric Beust, Hani Suleiman, TestNG, The BileBlog
