June 2005 - Posts
I can't contain myself - I am overjoyed to learn that our client,
AfterMail, is a finalist for the
2005 Microsoft ISV Partner of the Year award. The awards recognize Microsoft Partners globally for products and solutions that showcase Microsoft technologies.
Winners to be announced early July - good luck and way to go
the Kiwis!
During the video one of the program managers, the one who spoke the most, bought time during a question (I mean he needed time to answer and cover up his hesitation at answering the question so repeated the question with flair), that question was "is Microsoft hijacking the RSS protocol?" - I'm not sure I'm impressed by the answer - in fact I'm rather worried. Go see for yourself!
Hmmm... CDuce is fresh on my radar, but that's nothing new - love Rich's style though - see below..
We wouldn't recommend Java or C# for any serious work since they're
generally horrible languages. Verbose type declarations everywhere
are so 1960s.
You might be interested in what we are using :-) We wrote a complete
WSDL & XML Schema validator & parser in a language called CDuce
[http://www.cduce.org/] over a long weekend. CDuce is a very
efficient language for parsing and transforming XML, preserving type
safety, which was why this was possible in such a short time. The
language generates type-safe, efficient stubs in Objective CAML
[http://caml.inria.fr/] which are then compiled to machine code which
runs about as fast as a program written in C. You can download it all
from our website (including the Adwords API), under an LGPL license:
http://sardes.inrialpes.fr/~aschmitt/cwn/2005.06.14.html#5
Eventually I'll get around to putting up a proper web page about this.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
In short - what a lovely guy - I was truly touched to listen to Charlie.
Charlie did a talk last night at the London DotNet user group run by Ian Cooper. We're very fortunate that Microsoft looks kindly on this user group as we get to use their cool offices in SoHo and of sufficient eye-brow raising humour is the meeting room - known as the swimming pool because.... it looks like one, that'll be those little square tiles then.
Comedy was a strong theme as Charlie perhaps demostrating the theory of nUnit had not brought his USA/UK power adapter so instead went 'back to basics' i.e. used pen and paper and he did a splendid job.
Of note were the following:
- he advised us to read up on the paper from an XP conference a few years back that explained the trade-offs between dynamic and static code analysis
- he has just attended the latest XP conference in UK and at this conference a paper was presented to explain re-factoring will break code-coverage so make sure you run nCover after you've re-factored
- nUnit is moving into extensibility and to the credit of the nUnit development team they are pushing further into complexity which is admirable and superb news for us - some very cool things to emerge soon once they've resolved the usual issues
- Charlie understands open source very well - and it was very reassuring to witness that when he was talking to us
- Charlie thinks Microsoft employs really smart people, in his words "brains follow money" - I was tempted to disagree but for fear of proving him right ;-)
- Charlie is a huge agile fan - he know's it makes sense as well
This is great and I think a top idea - well done Microsoft PDC events team!!
For all those of you out there who are not blessed with big corporate budgets but sure as hell deserve to be rubbing shoulders with other leading .NETters then this is for you:
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Write some code with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005, put the Shareware Starter Kit Beta through its paces and just maybe you’ll attend PDC05 for free!*
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Do you blog?
Here’s a contest that’s very easy to enter. Write a blog entry that explains why you want to go to the PDC, add the special contest flair to the entry and you just might be able to attend PDC05 for free*
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Nice idea - I wonder whether it will stand on it's own, get swallowed up by Yahoo 360 or be imitated elsewhere. I guess that depends on how they've protected their IP.
I'm serious, that's what they want to do, be the knowledge economy, being as we can't afford to manufacture anything except luxuries these days and even then it's a close call as to whether it gets offshored or not.
It does at least follow on from what Bertie was saying at Davos though so I guess we can now all read about it!
Enjoy!
...Perhaps surprisingly, the report indicated Indian union leaders feel empathy for European and American workers stung by offshore outsourcing. "As union members, we must understand that for every job that we get in India, a job is lost in the outsourcing country," the report said. "And the beneficiary is always the employer because in India he has to pay only a fraction of the wages that he pays in his own country."
We're all human, even developers :-)
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