Hugo’s blog

I spent a good chunk of my weekend figuring out what program to use to track personal finances, and was that a painful exercise! You would think that in 2008, with Money and Quicken around for about 20 years, you were going to be blown away by those programs. You could not be more wrong.

I decided to give Money a try, as we had a Money 2007 around. The problem is that I couldn’t find my Money 2007 CD, so I went online and downloaded a free 60-day Microsoft Money Plus 2008 Deluxe trial, until I locate our copy.

Since I’m a newbie, I was after something fairly basic: have Money download my statements from the banks’ Web sites, and have the transactions categorized to have a vision of what where our money is spent, projections for the future, etc. Nothing really fancy, but that was way too much for Money.

First, Money gives you the choice to store passwords locally, or in the Windows Live vault. I chose to do this locally, even though it promised me a pessimal experience. It quickly took a stronger tone while I was setting up one of my accounts by telling me that if I wanted to download transactions automatically, I had to use Windows Live. That was the first turn off for me.

But the next one was even stronger. Money can consolidate transactions based on variations of the name of the payee. However, it does not support any kind of wildcarding. Let’s take an example. I have auto bill pay at my bank. Those get reported as: Payee Date Time. So, I get:

JOHN SMITH FEB 28 21:03:02
JOHN SMITH MAR 28 21:06:43
…

I couldn’t figure out how to tell it that all of those ought to be in a specific category. Actually, it was not obvious how to assign default categories to transactions. The combination of all that made me reconsider using Quicken.

I read a few more bad Quicken reviews on Amazon (note that Money’s are actually worse), and decided to give it a try. The problem is that the only trial advertized on Intuit’s Web site is for their online version that I didn’t want to use. With a few Web searches, I discovered that there actually is an unadvertised Quicken Deluxe 2008 60-day trial.

I gave it a try, and Quicken looks much better than Money. First, all the account information is kept locally. It doesn’t seem to support as money banks as Money, but it’s pretty good at giving instructions when it fails. Second, it’s really easy to set up automatic categories for transactions. Not only that, but in my example above, Quicken automatically recognizes that all those transactions are for JOHN SMITH.

So, for now, I’m pretty happy with Quicken, and I’ll order the full version if things stay this way.

That being said, I’m enthusiastic about the basic functionality, when I was looking forward to being blown away. Reading the various reviews, all those new versions of Money and Quicken are barely fixing bugs, and that’s very disappointing. It seems that people who invested in one solution are stuck with it, and they seem to be very little incentive for Microsoft and Intuit to innovate; it’s sufficiently bad that You Need A Budget, a program written by one guy in his spare time, is seen as a viable alternative. Worst, Quicken seem to be deactivating copies of Quicken after 4 years, forcing people to upgrade to marginally better versions.

So Quicken is not the loser of the game, but there’s no winner.

Omri Gazitt writes about the new .Net framework:

Deeper Support for the Web
A big focus area has been to support more web protocols and formats out of the box.  In .NET FX 3.0, we focused on nailing some key enterprise scenarios, like reliable exchange, transaction flow, end-to-end security, and queuing transports, to name a few.  For .NET FX 3.5, we offer some nice features for public web services as well:

• Syndication: we have some classes for publishing and consuming RSS and Atom feeds.  These formats (Atom especially) are quickly emerging as payload formats for all kinds of schematized data, not just blog entries or newsfeeds.  You can use our classes independently from WCF for a simple OM on top of either format, and we integrate into WCF by implementing the obvious serialization interfaces, so that you can pass SyndicationFeeds into and out of service operations.  I used an early version of this feature to create WCF-based RSS/Atom endpoints for my dasBlog instance.
• webHttpBinding: a new standard binding that has all the right defaults for “web” services - including support for GET as a verb, and a “bare” encoding (losing the SOAP envelope so that you have a POX message).  Stay tuned, beta2 has MUCH more in store for the Web programmer… including deeper support for URL-based dispatch, more declarative support for GET and other verbs, and support for content-types beyond text/xml
• […]

It looks like Microsoft is going to come and play in the world of non-SOAP-based Web services. They’re not giving up on SOAP (which is not surprising), but are starting to give more credit to alternative ways of doing things, as they should.

Something which is very interesting to me is the following: deeper support for URL-based dispatch. Part of the whole EPR / reference properties discussion a couple of years ago was, according to their proponents – which included Microsoft, about dispatch and how much better dispatching on XML elements was, and that basically the EPR address was not enough. And now that they’re looking beyond SOAP, guess what, it looks like the URL (the EPR’s address) may be useful for dispatching in the end. Since this is presented as a binding, this means that it’s something that could be used with their SOAP stuff as well. Well, this is supposing that my interpretation of binding is right, since binding is one of the most overused terms in Web services land. I’m staying tuned indeed for this one!

I have to admit that I love the quotes around Web. Since (SOAP) Web services have not much to do with the Web in the end or at least not the way they are being used (for example because of the EPR mess), then “Web services” – meaning services on the Web, the HTTP ones – cannot be referred to as Web services in the mind of people who have a SOAP mindset, but (insert air quotes here as you read this) “Web” services. Ironic, isn’t it?

Anyway, it’s good to see new tools coming for HTTP Web services. Read Omri’s post for the full story.