.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

.NET and Oracle

It's fun to see some love-hate relationships. Early on, Oracle bet on Java, so much so that only after Microsoft created its Oracle ADO.NET data provider and under pressure of the growing popularity of .NET, Oracle created its own ADO.NET data provider. And now increasingly, Oracle is accepting and taking positive steps about the popularity of .NET:

1. Watch the new .NET Developer Center at OTN
2. Check out the Beta 2 of Oracle Developers Tools for Visual Studio .NET, an add-in for working with Oracle from VS.NET (but if they don't hurry VS 2005 will be here ;-)

Oh, and I almost forgot: thank you Kevin Schuler for pointing me to these resources.

TechEd 2005: I'll be there

One of the perks of being an RD is that, from time to time, you get invited to cool events like this one. I look forward to meet with at least as many interesting people as I did last year. On the down side, T&E are on my tab, which could be expensive for a guy living in the Andes. Luckily, I've got a few months to do the savings.

SmartClient Offline Application Block on .NET 2.0

Today I had the pleasure of showing some concepts and examples of Smart Clients to over 200 people. For doing that, I used the Offline Application Block that has been around for a year already. The interesting thing is that I moved it to Visual Studio 2005 and I compiled it: a change here and there aside, the Application Block moved to .NET 2.0 without problem. Encouraged, I did the same with IssueVision and everything went OK again. It seems like compatibility between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 is doing pretty well. Oh, and I almost forgot: smart clients are cool.

VS 2005 Beta 2, RCs and Final Release Dates anyone?

Our small software shop has made its name by aggesively adopting new technologies. At different times it's been Pascal as a business apps language (we've been in the market for a long time... :-( ), LANs, PowerBuilder, Lotus Notes, Java, .NET. Along the years, we've been among the first in our country to create business apps using these technologies, often with Beta versions. Now is the time for .NET 2.0, VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005: we are currently working in 3 projects with these new technologies (it would've been 4, but the 4th was a big bank and they dimmed too risky to use 2005, so we settled on .NET 1.1 and VS 2003). About our 3 Whidbey projects:

1. The first one is a new product created in-house so any delay in the appearance of VS 2005 may impact our budget but otherwise we can pretty much handle it.
2. The second one is a joint migration from .NET 1.1 with an old friend and customer. as his target market is small financial institutions (tiny, from the US perspective) I'm confident we can go ahead with the Beta 2 Go Live license. Still, delays in Beta 2 or significant changes in further stages will be harder to handle.
3. The last one is a web site for a big local company (small from a US perspective), this is the one that has me worried as any delays in the roadmap will get the customer very nervous and impact the project.

That is why reading Shaykatc's blog has been reassuring: every time MS insiders start to talk about their bug fixing process, it means they are seeing the end of the tunnel really close, this particular tunnel being Beta 2. And of course I would like to hear stories of any other dare devils of commercial Beta development!

Wiki wiki patterns

Paraphrasing the Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET book, most complex systems are built by composing (and composing, and composing) simple, proven solutions. And of course, a programming pattern is a simple, proven mechanism that solves a small problem effectively. Hence the popularity of design and programming patterns. On the other hand, the wiki wiki web is a very effective tool for a community to build reference encyclopedias. Thus, it sounds like a great idea to have a patterns wiki. Come to think of it, there must be a handful already, but what caught my attention is a wiki specialized in patterns revolving around .NET:  http://patternshare.org. A place worth watching, not only because its renowned authors but because we can also actively contribute.