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Within our company there has
been much discussion of the pros and cons of having C# and VB.NET lose their
virtual parity and become different horses for different courses. We wonder what
Microsoft thinks.
Assorted apropos language:
Lisping at
JPL.
XML
is not S-Expressions.
C# and
Java: The Smart Distinctions.
We have spoken about Intentional Programming before. What we do know, which
isn't much, has been gleaned from these resources:
Intentional Programming Presentation by Dr Oege de Moor,
Oxford University, Feb 2001
Lutz Roeder's Intentional Programming Page
The
Death Of Computer Languages, The Birth of Intentional Programming by Charles
Simonyi, Sep 1995
With the news of Simonyi and Kiczales forming Intentional Software there has
been some discussion about revolutionary new GUI ways of programming. For us,
the gold doesn't have to lie in a fancy editor, although no doubt there will be
one.
We'll see real value just from being able to forget the complex internals and
runtime overhead of IMessageSinks, RealProxies and ContextBoundObjects, yet
still be in a position to craft code declaratively and with brevity. Then again,
perhaps our humble requirements merely require a good pre-processor.
The FAQ page mentions many ideas that resonate fondly with us, such as "one difference is that UML is originally rooted in what might be called a 'code and design' philosophy, whereas our goal can be described as 'code is design'."
We teach, we consult, we build. We help others to be the best they can be by
using .NET technology.
Send me a note if you'd like to join the ride. You don't have to know all of .NET, so please don't be shy. But be aware you may be asked questions till you cry, and not because we ask daft crap like "tell me your worst trait". ;)
The loading of a managed program is a miracle of self-assembly, during which those inert blobs of metadata, resources, and CIL are transformed into instructions executing directly on the microprocessor.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Mono meetings take place at the developer level.
Cool. Which leads us to today's quote of
the day, by Miguel. Explore and you'll even find the name of the venerable
Dr. GUI.
It's been a month since our last post, but with leads like this one
on the name of Dr. GUI we sure understand why you come back.
;-)
"The .NET Framework is really about...increased programmer productivity"Joshua Allen, Microsoft employee, and writer of our favourite blog explains why he admires Miguel's patience.
"...my personal experience and the experience of some of my friends with this platform has been amazing."
"...we are bringing the best technology out there to our beloved free software platform."
Commentary and Analysis: Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram Newsletter, which includes today's quote-of-the-day in regards to Oracle's security-flawed 9i database, advertised as 'unbreakable': "I don't care who Larry Ellison is; he can't rewrite the dictionary."
Also, thanks to Don Box and DevelopMentor, they've made a bunch of other great Conference.NET sessions from folks like Brian Harry and Don Box himself available too.
BTW, after installing VS.NET (which is way cool despite a few quirks -- it sure is nice to have Intellisense back) we found ourselves navigating, via the hotlinks provided on the start page, to Keith Brown's site and from there to a most comical gem on SOAP interoperability. Eventually, after you've finished giggling yourself stoopid, you may like to check out Keith's article on .NET Code Access Security.
Oh, and Brandon reckons system administrators aren't going to be impressed by our attempts at a Rich Client Renaissance. He's right. Do you agree? Comment!
Putting bigger and bigger advertisements in our faces won't earn our trust. Sites that are doing that are on a death spiral. Nope, the Internet is different than magazines or TV or radio. Deal with it. Eyeballs aren't the answer -- trust is.
This episode is yet another reminder of how fickle the Internet remains. DoS attacks are rampant and ingress filtering is still not enforced. Really makes you wonder about the Application Service Provider model, doesn't it?
Now, we want to hear from you! Do you agree there's going to be a Rich Client
Renaissance or have you been warned off Rich Clients forever? Do you see flaws
in the Win Forms design that will have Thin Clients reigning supreme? What's
your IT department going to say about Win Forms? Do you have users crying out
for useability and disconnected access beyond that which thin clients can
provide? If you develop thin clients do you only target IE? Will you bother with
any other browsers in a year or two? Will you be as productive developing
ASP.NET forms as you will Win Forms? If you currently develop rich clients do
you plan to migrate immediately to Win Forms?
There are so many factors that
may make this a "disruptive technology" or a "white elephant". We have our
thoughts but we want to hear yours. Discuss!
Today is a good day. Its stories help reassure us on the decision we made about a year ago to shift our focus away from Java to .NET. So why would we need this reassurance, when the technical elegance of .NET is so obvious? Well, because technical elegance isn't always a determining factor of success. It's some of the other things that do the trick. Today's stories help promote some of those other things. On the subject of which, Tim Bray (of XML fame) talks about what it takes to have a technical hit during the last 5-10mins of his presentation on XML hits and misses (a topic we would otherwise probably find rather soporific).
In Australia, we pay a levy (ie. a tax) that allows any resident to receive free treatment in Public Hospitals. Here at Dot Net Dan's headquarters we reckon we need music as much as our health...actually, probably to retain our health! So why not follow the health theme and impose a music (or, more generally, an entertainment) levy? We'd then be able to grab any and all music we desired in bit form without having to worry about micro-payments or infringing copyright laws. The artists (who we care about) would be properly remunerated and the distributors of jewel boxes (who we don't) would probably go the way of the dodo. Of course, this may be mind-shatteringly absurd, as we haven't done any research into how steep the levy would have to be. Discuss
Still, we are pleased to see Microsoft continue in its attempt to address Enterprise developer needs. They're listening, there's little doubt of that. But are we asking for the right things?
Is Amazon's "grow first, profit later" approach a case of building the moat before the business? Maybe this New York Times article can help you decide.
More interesting technology is Yenta. This kind of agent has been discussed for eons.
Hopefully Yenta transcends such vapour into kick-ass execution. However, as
Yenta currently only runs on Unix we haven't been able to confirm this for
ourselves.
What do both of these apps help demonstrate? The reports of P2P's death are just a little over-exagerrated. As Shirky says, just utter "decentralisation" rather than "P2P". If you're a sys admin, good luck for the next couple of years.
Related reading: Network Security by Clay Shirky.
Of course, none of this stuff is new to those of us who have been using Ward
Cunningham's Wiki Wiki Web
for quite a number of years. It was 'meta' before 'meta' became cool. (BTW, will
metaBlah replace i, e and webBlah as the next generation startup company
names?)
Today we downloaded BrowseUp -- a tool that allows you to add your own links from
any page to any other page -- to see if it's a step in the right direction. We
believe its current incarnation has some hurdles that will prevent its wide
adoption (it is only in beta, though). It's memory intensive, fairly difficult
to get up to speed with (hopeless help) and the overall usability ain't
necessarily great. Still, we do advise you check it out, as it is certainly
interesting. (Oh yeah, and we've used it to already tag Microsoft's .NET site
with a link to our own -- which is the only way that was ever gonna
happen.:-)
We were going to wait till Sunday to post this, just so that we could title the piece "Semantic Sunday" but for some reason our good judgement got the better of us and we didn't. Go figure.
Please let us know how long to make this initial .NET discussion page. For
new users, we think it's important to provide as much content as possible. But
for our beloved oldies, well, they just want the new juice.
If only it were
simple to satisfy both audiences. Unfortunately, our free web host doesn't
provide any server-side scripting facilities, so we can't dynamically choose how
much content to send over the wire.
The only thing we really could do to
reduce the burden of such a long page is not use tables. Our expectation is that
this will result in the newer content immediately rendering while the older
content is still downloading. If your mileage varies, please let us know over on
the forum.
Thanks!
(BTW, we apologise for being MIA recently but we'll resurface in the next day or two.)
When you get fed up reading the words and want to get your hands dirty with some of the details, take a look at the automated unit testing tool for .NET: NUnit and get Test Infected!
Dot Net Dan (an XP advocate since '97) is a little surprised how long it's taken for many people to realise that software is developed by humans (with all their foibles) rather than the droids that many methodologies seem to think do the work. He is very pleased with the recent publicity given to XP, though.
The team has been gaining more and more confidence with ADO.NET recently. However, they are still not sure of the drag 'n drop code generation provided by Visual Studio. They recognise it makes life easy but they question the difficulties it may pose to deployment. They also question whether the code breaks the Once And Only Once (OAOO) Principle.
Talking of code generation, boy does the Visual Studio application do a lot of it: .sdl files, .disco files, code-behind files, xml schemas, database access, just to name some. Phew! Those lads in Redmond have been busy.
Dot Net Dan was very interested to discover (in follow-up work to a reference in the article) that Joe Nalewabau, co-founder of the Sydney Java Users Group is now a Program Manager for Microsoft. Dot Net Dan is pleased he isn't the only Aussie to have abandoned the Java ship for more luxurious cruising. :-)
Throughout the process the team will provide references to sites that provide quality .NET (& other) information. They'll also discuss technical issues and other matters as they arise.
Dot Net Dan would like to thank the most excellent Joel Spolsky weblog for providing the impetus for this log. It has always contained material or references that have exceptional signal/noise ratios.