Things I'm looking forward to

Ok, I seem to have failed miserably in my goal of posting to my blog more often.  What can I say there's no excuse, the time just flows by.  Well its no longer football season, we're now in the long dark times :(    I guess there area couple things to look forward to, Spring, NFL Draft, a Whidbey Beta, and hopefully a generally available Yukon beta.  Yuck, this is one reason that I'd very much like to go to a more temperate climate, perhaps the Northwest. 

NFL Draft, well my favorite team the Giants had about as miserable of a season as they could have. In the end they lost their head coach, which was a happy/sad thing as he wasn't completely at fault.  But then again you don't get rewarded for going 4-12 in a season that was supposed to be your superbowl year.  One player on their team said that he was going to have a much better year this coming year, well its good to have goals but this particular player didn't even suit up this past season.  All he has to do is put on a uniform and stand at the sidelines for one game and he's had a better year.  I don't think they will do as bad next year, but I'm not sure if playoffs are in their immediate future. 

A Whidbey Beta, there's been a lot of talk about whidbey of late.  I have to admit I'm getting more and more excited with everything I read about it.  The bits I've seen are buggy and not entirely stable (very old bits) but they show incredible promise.  I'm an asp.net developer, I spend most of my time building HttpHandlers or HttpModules, Class hierarchies, and webforms.  Recently however I built my first windows forms application (.NET 1.1) (an internal tool to support our development effort).  I was very surprised with how easy somethings were and how difficult others are (the datagrid and I had serious differences of opinions).  One of the cool things I'm looking forward to in whidbey is a lot of the new controls and functionality for the windows forms development, I was amazed at some of the stuff that I saw in demos and in the bits.  I'm also incredibly excited about the new things in ASP.NET, the top of the list for me personally is going to be Master Pages and the provider model.  The time those two things will save me is going to be unreal.  Master pages will make my life a piece of cake (provided that I learn how to put together a nice visual UI design), and the provider model is just awesome.  I love how i can define my own providers but still use a lot of the out of the box webcontrols.  It will be cool to create providers for things like Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL (perhaps a provider that interacts directly with MSSQL's user system). Its a great design pattern as it enables me to build an application and let the people who use the app figure out what user mechanism they'd like to use, very cool.

A Yukon Beta (that's generally available).  This is another thing I'm hoping for in the coming spring/summer.  I can't wait to play with the advanced features in Yukon, the SQLCLR, TRY-Catch in TSQL, Hierarchical queries and lots more that I don't even know about.  I've had mixed feelings about the sqlclr, I for one am not going to drop TSQL for my stored procedures.  Stored procedures should be SET Based and that's what TSQL is. However I can't deny the fact that I've seen oracle leverage the Java in the RDBMS to bring some very cool functionality to their platform, I'm hoping the sqlclr will open a whole new world of database applications and capabilities.  I like the idea of being able to define a c# class for a datatype (I think that's something Yukon will support) it won't be a useful for every situation and is certainly not a “This is the new standard for doing things” but it will offer yet one more tool in my toolbox.  I really like having the ability to access functionality that was previously only available to extended stored procedures in a much safer clr way.  One thing that's been recently talked and blogged about is that Yukon will not ship till 2005, some people are saying that's way too late and that 5 years is unreasonably long between major dbms releases.  I disagree, If I'm a big enterprise customer I can't rewrite or redeploy my application every two years (even small customers can't always to that).  So for something the .NET Framework, it makes considerable sense to release more frequently but for a database platform i say take your time and get it right.  In one of my database courses in college, the professor told us that companies on the average will pick a new development tool every two to three years, but they will only switch major rdbms systems every 5 - 10 years.  For Developers however we've an insatiable appetite for new technology, we want that new release of Yukon or Whidbey or Longhorn or etc.. that's just who we are. 

There is however such a thing as releasing too often, at my current job that's often the case.  We pick dates and release, as a result our dev cycle is short and its difficult to get major features revamped or added.  There's also a negative being on the user side, take oracle for instance.  They've released the 9i, 9iR2, and 10g versions of their rdbms while between the time SQL2000 rtm'd and now (their release naming convention alone has me mystified).  I love playing with oracle's database technology and still do it quite a bit.  But with releases so fast and furious I felt like I couldn't stop and take a look at the technology, the new features before it was time to upgrade.  From what i've heard Oracle added some awesome new text search, and XML storage functionality in the 9i time frame, but I haven't gotten a chance to sit and play with it.  I like how Microsoft took sometime between SQL 2000 and Yukon, I got to know sql 2000 very well and I feel comfortable with it.  When I do get to play with Yukon I will be able to intelligently evaluate the new features and put them to use.  I can see the obvious enhancements and advancements that were made/are being made to Yukon, I understand the need behind them.  With oracle's super fast releases I'm just confused, what was wrong with 9i?  What new super needed thing did 9iR2 bring to the table?  etc..  Don't get me wrong I still enjoy using oracle, I just hate doing major installs on an almost yearly basis. 

Something else I'm looking forward to, the MVP Summit.  This will be my first summit, I'll have to get up at 3:45 AM that Saturday to make my 6am flight but I can't wait!

My $.02