Archives
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Macromedia Central Failing
So, Central 1.0 has been out for quite some time (and the betas for even longer)... but, no one seems to be making any Central apps available (I see 6 total Central apps, all free samples). To the contrary, interested developers end up posting things like this in Macromedia's forums:
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Bad Interfaces
“If you have a good interface on your system, and a budget of money and time, you can work on your system. If your system has bugs or is too slow, you can improve it. But if your system has a bad interface, you basically have nothing. It won't matter if it is a work of the highest craftsmanship on the inside. If your system has a bad interface, no one will use it. So the interface or surface of the system, whether to users or other machines, is very important.” [1]
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Offshoring Not 100% Bad?
I have to agree with Anand's statement that “not everyone in India is an illitrate person coding for peanuts.“ In a project I am currently involved in, we have a dev from India who just happens to be one of the best (if not the best) experts on the jacked up PowerPoint object model. He has been working magic in ways that the American devs I have worked with on this same sort of thing could only dream.
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Longhorn and Yukon Actually Don't Share That Much Code
“Clearing up some of the mystery surrounding Microsoft's efforts, Sorensen said that products using the storage technology will not have common code, as many industry watchers have thought. Instead, individual product groups within Microsoft will each develop storage systems based on a common design specification.
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The One SQL Tool That Might Save Your Job
What happens when you load up Query Analyzer, generate a database script based off an existing database, then run that script to create an identical database? Theoretically, it creates the new database, right? Well... some times, query analyzer decides to put “USE“ statements inside the script, which means that instead of creating the new database, you will drop all the tables in the old database and then recreate them... which, of course, means that all your data will instantly dissappear (doesn't matter if it is $10 of data, or $10 million dollars of data, it will be gone). Now, assuming that your backups are all running (and are in working order), and your transaction logs contain all the information you need (which won't be the case if you are using image or text fields and haven't set explicitly told SQL to save that info), you might be able to undo the damage. But, you know what they say about assumptions...
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.NET Weblogs Archive Up Again
Had a little downtime on the .NET Weblogs Archive. It is up and running again. Sorry for any missed blog reading this might have caused anyone.
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Kick @#$! Client Side Scripting Demos
At Darren's request, I have put up a little demo of the client scripting samples from last night. You can find it here:
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Client Side Scripts Part 2: Flex Style Animations in DHTML
Previously, I presented a framework for using client side events. Now, just to get your imaginative juices flowing, here is a sample that illustrates how you could easily implement a Flex style animation framework to add life to your UIs. Imagine being able to add rich animations to your UI with something as simple as: “<Animate Event="OnClick" ControlToModify="MyControl" PropertyToModify="Width" StartValue=“0“ EndValue=“400“ Duration=“1000“ Relative=“True“ />“. Sound interesting... read on...:
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Client Side Events, A Kick @#$% Solution
After reading a recent blog post by Ted Neward, I was once again reminded of why ASP.NET's class library sucks when it comes to client side events. Apparently, the ASP.NET team thinks everyone should code client side scripts in JavaScript. While that is definately one way to do it, that solution is a piece of crap, because no one actually does this. However, 90% of the time, reacting to client-side events on the client-side (what a concept...) can add a ton to your UI. Users should have to wait 3-5 seconds every time they click a button just so that you can refresh the UI a bit.
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Why Standards Are Better
“Signage has always offered HCI people a lot of laughs. A friend of mine recently linked to this sign at a Japanese metro (I think it's a sign on the train itself, not the station). What do you think the signs mean? I will post a comment with the answers tomorrow.“
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Competitive Strategy for Software Start-ups
The rules of competitive strategy state that all competitive strategies must fall into one of four categories:
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Google's Anti-Competitive Behavior
http://www.ftponline.com/weblogger/forum.aspx?ID=1&DATE=12/15/2003
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BEA Offline
JD points out that BEA is going to be coming out with an offline J2EE server that integrates with there stuff. Looks like the SOA space is heating up...
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Longhorn in 2008?
According to Gartner, Longhorn isn't going to ship until late 2006-2008:
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Longhorn Installation Guide
Installed Longhorn under Virtual PC 2004 last night. Despite what some people might have you believe, it works like a charm. However, you do have to configure it properly (and I don't have it installed on a powerhouse desktop, just a 1.4 ghz notebook with a little over 700 mb ram).
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Dare at XML 2003
Dare has an excellent writeup of some conversations he had at XML 2003. Great stuff.
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Extending Amazon
Now that Amazon has full text search, what would really be nice is full-cross referecing of books. So that I can see, “What do other authors have to say about this book?” or “Who is putting this book in their bibliography?” Wouldn't it be great to look up a page in your favorite book and see a list of the authors who agreed / disagreed with what it was saying? Now that would be a killer app.
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Joel on UNIX
“The very fact that the Unix world is so full of self-righteous cultural superiority, "advocacy," and slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism while the Windows world is more practical ("yeah, whatever, I just need to make a living here") stems from a culture that feels itself under siege, unable to break out of the server closet and hobbyist market and onto the mainstream desktop.” [1]
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Building Bridges
“You're a consultant. Your job is to help organizations build bridges. You have a new client who brings you a proposal that looks like this:
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Anders on Artima
Yet another great Artima article is up:
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Microsoft Business Builder
Continuing its push toward helping ISVs succeed, Microsoft has set up the business builder program:
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.NET Scripting Language Performance Blows Away Java
“The early results with IronPython show that Python compiled to IL can run fast. On the standard pystone benchmark, IronPython-0.1 is 70% faster than CPython-2.3. The numbers for pystone as well as several micro-benchmarks are shown below. For ease of comparison, all times are normalized to Python-2.3. Smaller numbers indicate faster performance...
...There are a few points to note about the comparison with Jython's performance. First, IronPython-0.1 is still a rough prototype while Jython-2.1 is a full implementation of the Python platform used in many commercial projects. Recently, correctness and completeness have been the primary drivers of Jython's development. On the other hand, Jython is one of the highest performing scripting languages for Java...and thus the performance comparison bodes very well for other scripting languages on the CLR.” [1] -
Mono ASP.NET Feature Complete
“Check out the Release notes for details on Mono 0.29. This release includes the PPC JIT engine running `Hello World' and ASP.NET is considered feature-complete.” [1]
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WebResourceAttribute should be ResourceAttribute?
Nikhil gives a great overview of the problems that the web resource attribute is intended to solve. I think the idea is pretty cool, though the execution could definately be a bit better (especially considering upcoming OS metadata enhancements). My main question is why is all this stuff being done only on the web side through the web resource request handler? The ASP.NET team is going through an aweful lot of work to:
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Embedding ASP.NET Resources (ASP.NET 2.0 and Our Way Of Doing Things)
I've seen lots of examples for embedding resources in ASP.NET assemblies (which you can do in v2.0 without much trouble). However, they all seem to get it wrong (they send the bits, but forget the ContentType, which is a very important part of sending back requests). Microsoft's APS.NET 2 implementation gets it right, but requires a bunch of WebResourceAttributes to be appended to an assembly, which basically have a resource name and then a content type... this seems kind of strange to me, as IIS should already have the ContentType for the data you are adding.