October 2003 - Posts
If you've attended PDC03, you must have seen the first demo made by Don Box and Chris Anderson which ended by submitting a post on Don Box's blog using Indigo. The post made in live is here.
Can you imagine that Don and Chris would have taken the risk to do this demo without a minimum "real life" testing and without repeating it some times do acquire a good practise? I don't.
Now guys, I'd like to launch a small game/contest. The goal is to identify all dummy posts on Don's blog, which might be the results of the tests and repeats of the demo. I already have some ideas on the question ;-)
I wish Don could comment this post and say if my theory is reality...
I stumbled over this page, announcing that now, hackers have their own official logo. Funny, isn't it? Imagine the case of a Perl monger who is an FSF enthusiast and works on an OpenBSD box. What a load of logos the guy has to put on his homepage ;-)
Well, I tought that the .NET hackers may be jalous and would have their own logo too, so I quickly made this "Stoopid Sharp hacker" logo ;-)
After all, why wouldn't we do some dumb things too, from times to times? BTW, this GIF file was hacked with MSPaint ;-)
I was at the Mono's talk yesterday evening. It looks like not all Bloggers do agree with Miguel de Icaza's repeated criticism against Microsoft yesterday, during this unofficial Mono talk.
Miguel detailed several project issues, and some MS and OSS hate/love took place.
and also
The most impressive thing to me about Miguel was his enthusiasm for the project, unsullied by too much of that really irritating "Microsoft sucks" stuff you see from Open Source guys.
Though, the discussions were interresting, and allowed to get the status on the different namespaces in the current implementation, as well as to know more on the team's plans about Avalon, Gtk#, Code Access Security, etc...
Luca Bolognese, Program Manager, introducing his ObjectSpaces session:
"You guys have already 600 or 700 slides, so my primary goal is to keep you awake."
A quick update now that the session is over. First, I wanted to say that Luca is a great speaker. He has the right balance between smart and cool jokes and serious contents. His session was essentially built around a single demo which contained all the scenarios that were demonstrated. I think I'll reuse this for my own demos.
One could say that the example chosen (Continents, Countries, Cities and Cats) was too simplistic, but remember that it was meant to be targetted to people with no basic knowledge of what a Persistence Layer or an O/R Mapping tool is.
I wsa a bit frustrated because I thought that we only scratched the surface of this very interresting piece of technology. But now, like most of the attendees i guess, I want to spend some time playing with the bits and hacking around to have a better indepth understanding. So, from this point of view, i think that the objective is reached.
[Update] There's an interesting entry on Benjamin Mitchell's blog about the contents of this session. Worth reading. Also another post on Peter Provost's blog that contains the sample code demoed by Luca Bolognese during his talk.
From Kamaljit Bath, Program Manager during the "Architecting End-to-End Enterprise Solutions: InfoPath with BizTalk 2004, SQL Server, "Indigo", WSE and Line-of-Business Applications" session:
"Infopath is to Biztalk what Outlook is to Exchange"
Well, PDC bloggers are really active, and it seems that almost all subjects are now covered. So, let me post some not so serious quotes from Don Box, during session WSV301 aka Indigo Part I:
- " One of you guys is rubbing his back on a plastic thing on the wall. This plastic thing happens to turn the light on and off. Please do what you want as long as you don’t totally turn off lights, and don’t change anything "
- " I am going to code while people are crawling underneath me " (guys are under the scene and try to fix the electricity)
- " Have you noticed how Whidbey starts fast? It starts fast so that everything else can be slow "
As a conclusion, as for Indigo transactions, the context matters ;-)
[Update] During WSV302, aka Indigo Part II, the same happened again, making it more funny, and Don said :
- " Did you notice at some point, when the speech makes sense, there’s a bright light … "
The Roadshow season has just begun here at Microsoft France. First event of the kind, called "360°", is meant to meet our local partners (SI, ISVs, VARs, ...). There are several keynote sessions in the morning, and breakout sessions by partner profile from 11:00 to noon. My group is involved in the ISV breakout sessions. We've prepare a lot of really cool demos showing .NET, Office 2003, Mobile devices and Windows Server 2003. Tuesday it was in Bordeaux - a region famous for it's wine - and today it was in Paris. The day ends with a special session : wine testings with an oenologist. Lucky partners ;-)
Today was also the launch of our broad ASP.NET campaign. It's going to be during two month 19 dates in 15 different towns. I'm going to do presentations and labs in Lyon, Nantes, Orléans, Paris and Strasbourg. With this campaign, we hope to meet people who are web developers, but who don't know and don't use ASP.NET. The format of the event is quite original: from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM it will be presentations, then from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM, launch and Hands On Labs, later in the afternoon will be the "Advanced" sessions (presentations). The attendees will also beenfit from trial hosting accounts provided by some hosters who are partners of this event. Then, the day will end from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM with Hand On Labs, a "Bring Your Own Laptop" kinda "Install Party" and soft drinks... Then after, for the more valiant and robust of the attendees, there'll be a diner with the speakers. If you're in France from mid-November to mid-January 2004, save the dates! It's definitely going to be a lot of fun.
[Insert Standard Disclaimer Here]
TheServerSide has published a news entitled "IBM hits out at .NET technology". Most of the comments are just another sterile debate, with the same already used and abused arguments from people from both sides. Among the exceptions, the comment from Jon Webster from Fitechlabs, a company that uses both technologies and provides a Java/.NET middleware really makes sense to me:
"I watch the controversy surrounding J2EE vs .Net with a healthy dose of skepticism, and not a little amount of amusement. The same recycled arguments end up presenting themselves and far too often the debate turns into an emotional appeal rather than an examination of the applicability of a given technology to supply a solution.
(...)
The thing that we should be doing is figuring out how to interoperate between J2EE and .Net in a performant and ubiquitous way!"
Like it or not, the Gartner and other analysts predict that Java and .NET will in the next years have nearly the same market shares. Trying to dominate or to standardize is useless. Learn to integrate and interoperate.
I found this article about "Software Fashion" on a19s.com. Interesting.
Stéphane pointed me to a 43 seconds long teaser video for Octane, aka Delphi .NET. I wish the teaser was longer and showed more.
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