Mono, Whidbey, performance, Yukon, and Lima
This has been an hectic day, it started at 7:30 AM when we did a breakfast for a few really Microsoft-reluctant friends about Project Mono, it went well but I had to leave the event in the hands of my OSS-prone partners because I had to start at 9:00 AM a presentation to a very big local ISV who's deciding whether to rewrite their successful VB 6.0 systems in J2EE or .NET, allegedly the presentation was going to focus on multi-tiered distributed architectures but it briefly derived into an ASP.NET 2.0 presentation and then in an intense Q&A about application servers, COM+ and Indigo. At 11:00 I had to go to my office just to sign some papers and then run to another customer to discuss some severe performance problems they are having in a distributed application, the culprit: a number of fine grained remoting components that move some heavy datasets, the solutions that we started to implement was: a) cache the datasets in the client, b) coarse the interfaces, c) add a ziping sink to the remoting stack, d) download the datasets in a background thread. Then at 1:00 PM I had a lunch with an old friend and customer and discuss some future .NET projects and again Mono (they are currently a Java and Powerbuilder shop). At 3:00 PM I had a rush meeting (on a car, on the way to the airport) with a small ISV that is sending me to Lima, Perú to help them in selling its ASP.NET solution to a big company there. In the plane I unexpectedly run into a colleague who puts me uptodate in his successful .NET project. At 8:00 PM I am at Lima, talk by phone with Jorge Oblitas, the Peruvian RD, and I end up giving a talk about Visual Web Developer 2005 and SQL Server 2005 to some 20 people in a local university. At 10:30 PM we go to dinner with Jorge, and I finally leave technology behind as we have a long and pleaseant conversation with the owner of a chinese restaurant. I really feel happy about this day yet I hope I won't have a day like this in a few moons...