June 2004 - Posts
Brad mentioned it, I have been snowed under with interview stuff so forgot to blog it (whoops :). Some really great stuff
Hoping Chris will talk a little about hosting. In answer to Brad's question, members of the Rotor team on Channel 9 would really, really rock !
From the Mono feed :)
Be the first kid in your block to install the it-took-us-three-years-but-we-did-it development platform.
Well blogged by now, I saw it first on Jesse's blog so he gets the mention :) Mono 1.0, bang on time and at the 1.0 milestone. Well done to everyone, its going to be a fun ride.
Joel explains the draught of posts with a recent visit to a Rotor workshop in Singapore. Exploring some of the links
Dom has a great blog with some very interesting posts on F#, subscribed. Slides from the event would be great to see.
Sean has some notes on this post about Microsoft, developments tools and developers keeping up. In addition he makes some notes on Mono. Starting with the Microsoft tools.
The learning curve between one tool and the next for developers can be something that gets in the way, not all development houses can buy in the tools so they stick with what they have got and make the migration when they can. Those that can afford it want to take advantage of what Microsoft are doing, how they are forever pushing the edges of what they doing, how they are listening to developers and crafting the tools that developers want. Thats not a bad thing, in our industry sitting still is rather a bad thing.
Mono, its too early to say what will happen with Mono. Plans for running windows form apps and such forth are afoot but again its too early in the day. Let me say this, its an opensource project lead by a very smart bunch of people. What ever they decide for Mono it will be what folks want for the project. I don't see Longhorn effecting Mono, .NET 2.0, the CLR and C# specs are not one and the same. Longhorn failing would not effect a system thats running on other platforms, other windows and hosted Mono platforms alike. Anything wrong with Java, no nothing, but finding risk in Mono is like finding risk in Java.
A great
article on Whitehorse in this months MSDN mag. Yet more to look foward to in Whidby.
Macromedia's Sean Neville has an interesting post on the Flex list
The .NET version of the AMF gateway supports ADO.NET data marshaling, and
the web service proxy supports data set marshaling through SOAP, but perhaps
more important than the underlying mechanisms is general support for the
pattern language, as it is philosophically different from Java.
A Java enterprise developer, if he adheres to patterns and best practices
for his platform, typically tackles a problem by sketching a domain model
based on the requirements, breaking that domain model into sequences and
class hierarchies (this is called the dominant decomposition), and then
dealing with issues such as security, distribution, and persistence as
aspects of that domain model. A .NET developer, on the other hand, typically
tackles the same sort of problem by sketching a data model rather than a
domain model first, and creating hierarchies of data objects rather than
domain objects. Rather than creating a pure OO model to which O/R tools,
CMP, Hibernate, DAO's, Data Transfer Objects, etc. can be applied, the
typical .NET developer composes a data model to which objects, xml,
relational data, documents, etc. can be applied. It may seem a subtle
difference, or it may seem impure in OO terms to Java patterns purists, but
one of its strengths is that it is by and large a simple and extremely
flexible way of managing data across tiers. .NET has no CMP equivalent per
se, and escapes debates about JDO vs. EJB vs. Hibernate by simply making
data objects a top-level first class design element rather than an aspect of
a domain model.
I'm not espousing one approach over the other, merely pointing out that
there are architectural differences in the way data is typically managed on
the two platforms and that we're addressing it in Flex as well. At a
practical level, this means support for ADO.NET-style data binding and
first-class handling of ADO.NET data sets
Would be interested to hear folks thoughts?
Been a while since I checked this show out, very pleased to see my old friend (and Flash god) Chrissy Rey getting her JobVibe web site nominated. I was surprised not to see Flex in the sessions, my other surprise was show speaker Manuel Clement a product designer working on next generation development tools at Microsoft. Its very, very cool to hear that Microsoft have such a Flash pro on staff, can anyone say Sparkle ;-)
A CLR version of the popular Flash Remoting server has been released, been testing this through the beta stages and it really offers a lot of options to transport data to Flash over the wire. With the arrival of Indigo (if MS keep the word on a Xp/Win 2003 release) this product could really up the stakes. An article on the product is available here.
Just back from 1 week holiday in Tunsia, me and em needed a break before the wedding prep really starts. Wish I was still soaking up the rays on the beach....you bet ! :( My email and blog agg are full of a weeks worth of traffic so this could get quite big.....starting with Flex.
- Christophe matches Sarah (Laszlo) and Joe (XAML) for a RIA based on the Amazon web services API. Nice to see SOAP and XML/HTTP examples.
- Steve has a post on an example chapter from his and Alistair's forthcoming Flex book. The book is aimed at building RIA apps in Flex rather than finer details (those can be found in the great freely available MM docs). Not seen the book yet so its hard to say for sure (err...HINT ;-) but given the nature of Flex at the moment the book has a very J2EE slant, when the .NET version comes around I am sure that a future version of the book will address the balance. Also the web services chapter looks very generic, thats a very good thing (and IMHO the correct thing to do) but there are several .NET things you need to know when dealing with .NET web services and Flex.
- Microsoft graphics tool has SWF export, unsure if this product has a live cycle but I am sure the sparkle rumors will start again shortly ;-)
- VB.NET Refactoring, Don is stunned. :D
- RSS Bandit features, my blog weapon of choice. Looking good Dare :)
- Had a few on the CLR team last month (I think), now some job openings on the XML team at Microsoft. Live and breath it, take a chance and apply.
- Rob lets us know just what he is up to, good luck with it all. If Scott leaves I will faint ;-)
- Mono beta 2 is out of the door, congrats to the team, next stop v 1.0.....
- Datasets in web services (via John), Scott thinks its a bad sin (the bowl and fruit concept is a good one). His does list all the points as to why it bad and can see why you would, but like most things in the world (and that goes double for programming) you must tread carefully, sometimes its good to use them and sometimes its bad. The point about Java web services interop is a very, very valid one (ditto for all non .NET web service interop). Datasets in .NET web services don't play nice in the interop world, this gives you an idea of what I mean. At some point I will get around to posting my thoughts on it.
- Andrew Grey left a message on the Rotor mailing list that some progress has been made on the Rotor port of the MMTk toolkit,the mark-sweep GC is now running using the toolkit. Even at this stage it would be interesting to see some bench mark results from the standard GC.
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