Tales from the Evil Empire

Rob has found a use for dynamic:
http://blog.wekeroad.com/2010/08/06/flexible-parameters-with-csharp

Before I joined Microsoft seven years ago, I had spent a couple of years building a Web CMS. It wasn’t open-source unfortunately but the experience convinced me that most public-facing web sites would shortly use some form of CMS. I also forged strong opinions about the right level of component granularity that a CMS must implement.

There’s some kind of controversy going on today in our microcosm. I don’t want to enter that controversy because I think nobody’s willing to listen to anybody but themselves.

It has been pointed out by several commenters that CallStream was a reinvention of monads. Not quite so, but the nuance is subtle.

The first post in this series can be found here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2010/06/16/how-i-understood-monads-part-1-2-sleepless-and-self-loathing-in-seattle.aspx

For some time now, I had been noticing some interest for monads, mostly in the form of unintelligible (to me) blog posts and comments saying “oh, yeah, that’s a monad” about random stuff as if it were absolutely obvious and if I didn’t know what they were talking about, I was probably an uneducated idiot, ignorant about the simplest and most fundamental concepts of functional programming. Fair enough, I am pretty much exactly that.

I just finished writing a long documentation topic on the Orchard project wiki that aims at being a good starting point for developers who want to understand the architecture, structure and general philosophy behind the Orchard CMS.

Warning: this post is going to be slightly off-topic and non-technical. Well, not computer science technical at least.