Archives
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Windows Communications Foundation goes live (and WFW too)
I just received an e-mail and then read at the MSDN blogs about the Jan'06 CTP of WCF and WFW. Two big surprises for me: first, they've both got a Go Live! License. It so happens that a couple of months ago I convinced a friend to ride the wave and use Indigo in a big project, we both knew Indigo could slip its schedule but he took the risk anyway, now that we have a GLL far before the project is finished I feel relieved. The second surprise for me is how fast Workflow Foundation is maturing, I had decided to concentrate on WCF for the time being, in spite of the immediate usefulness of WWF in our current projects: I guess now I'll have to reconsider some decisions.
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Java at schools considered dangerous
Joel Spolsky caused quite a stir (as he likes so much doing) with his article about schools that use Java mostly/exclusively in their curricula. At TheServerSide it created one of the longest threads I've seen there: Joel was called everything from a modern day dinosaur to right on the mark. A lot of paranoia and hate messaging, as one could expect from a Java only site, but several posters maintained that O-O is just one of the programming paradigms (albeit the most popular one right now) and in that sense Java (or C# or VB.NET) should be used only in part of the curriculum, generous space was claimed for functional programming (Scheme was mentioned a lot, but personally I like Haskell better) and also for C++ (more for the pointers and low-level programming than for the O-O aspects of it). Down here in Ecuador, most schools have adopted C++ as the main programming language and a migration to Java was getting momentum when .NET hit the market, after ignoring C# for a couple of years, academia is starting to adopt it with good, although very few, results so far. How is it in your region?