Archives
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Visual Web Developer vs. Visual Studio 2005
It will be interesting to see how Microsoft's strategy of offering low price/enterprise IDEs for .NET 2.0 will play out. Of late I've been showing Visual Web Developer (low price) to several audiences and this weekend I did my first Visual Studio 2005 (enterprise) training, as you can create ASP.NET web sites with both it's a good question what features VWD doesn't have, up until today I hadn't seen a short list. Rob Howard is a regional director who used to by part of the ASP.NET team. Rob is co-author of ASP.NET v.2.0 - The Beta Version. Well, in the corrections of the book I finally found such list, that I reproduce here:
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A.I. in .NET
During the great MSDN Tour in Ecuador, one of the most interesting questions I got was made by a couple of students who, as part of their final work, needed to use/port A.I. algorithms to .NET. Scrambling for an answer I pointed them to Mondrian, but Mondrian is a functional language, a programming paradigm with deep roots in LISP but that leans more towards maths than to A.I. I also mentioned Mercury, and that was a better shot, because Mercury is a logic programming language (á la Prolog), Mercury is in beta but it may well be enough for their needs. Another possibility is DotLisp, a LISP dialect for .NET scripting, also in beta. Moving forward, we have P# which is a Prolog compiler that generates C#. Finally, a fascinating detail is the fact that the .NET Framework 1.1 includes a LISP mini-compiler here, the compiler is written in C# and generates MSIL, so it could be a good starting point for the translation of the algorithms. All in all, A.I. in .NET is possible but it is clearly in an early stage, which makes it a hot topic for a final paper.
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EDRA 1.1 Final is here!
The Enterprise Development Reference Architecture v 1.1 Final is available for download from its Gotdotnet workspace. Of late, I see a lot of activity (webcasts, on-site training, customer engagements) around EDRA and, here in Ecuador, at least a couple of very big projects are considering EDRA as its infraestructure. No wonder: security, logging, software updates, messaging et al. are resource-consuming features and drag the focus from the real need of commercial software: solving business problems. EDRA, although having a noticeable learning curve, is a good shot at solving this concerns while keeping you as focused in the business problem as possible.
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MSDN Regional Tour - Ecuador - Done!
But now we want more! It's been two weeks visiting ten cities and covering over 2.000 km of Ecuadorian roads. We had full-standing rooms in several places and people were enthusiastic about what we showed: Pablo Narváez, our local C# MVP, thrilled the audiences with WeRock247. In particular, the things you can do now with VSTO and Office 2003 (especially the Research Panel) got a lot of oh's and noddings. So I had to do my best to impress the crowds with Visual Web Developer 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0, funnily one of my high points was when I said that I was going to use SQL Server 2005 as my backend database (I guess, the expectation of seeing a Beta 1 *failing* to work with a Beta 2 was high, alas, it never failed). The other one was when I showed master pages. But in general, ASP.NET 2.0 was extremely well received. All in on all it's been a great experience: we talked to 2.400+ developers, we ate a lot of tasty and different local foods and I went to places I've never went before, so I'm looking forward to the next MSDN Regional Tour.
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MSDN Regional Tour - Ecuador
This is a cool initiative from Roberth Minga, Microsoft DE (Developer Evangelist) for my country (Ecuador is a small 13 million people country right between Colombia and Perú). During the next two weeks we will visiting ten cities (Ibarra, Quito, Ambato, Riobamba, Cuenca, Azogues, Loja, Machala, Guayaquil, Manta) to show what's coming in 2005 about developer tools, including .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and smart clients. Even though the focal point in every city will be a two and a half hours event, in several places we will seize the day and have breakfast with local software houses and meetings with developer teams. Tomorrow we will start with Ibarra and Quito (120 km away of each other) but from then on we will enjoy one city per day. The logistics of the trip are also cool: Roberth rented a car and, along with Pablo Narvaéz -our C# MVP-, we will drive along our country roads.