Geek Dinner Friday Night
A couple of weeks ago Robert Scoble announced a geek dinner on Friday, 12/30. He posted details here.
I won’t be able to make it to this one — have a beer for me. Or some cheesecake.
Tags: blog
Expert Texture
The blogged wandering of Robert W. AndersonArchive for December, 2005
Digipede News Feed Updated
Nathan just updated the Digipede News and Announcements feed to use FeedBurner. If you are interested in getting news about our product and company, subscribe to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DigipedeNewsAndAnnouncements.
Digipede Network gets 4 stars
This is not news to those who subscribe to Software Development Magazine, but they reviewed the Digipede Network in their January, 2006 issue. You normally would need to sign up for their online content to read it, but we purchased a reprint link which you can find here. Two things I’m happy about:
- The reviewer had virtually no interaction with us (i.e., install and configuration were easy); and,
- he gave our product 4 stars!
The reviewer, Mr. Rick Wayne, pointed out a couple of issues. Some of these we have already addressed and others are in our plans.
Thanks, Mr. Wayne — yes, we are listening).
On OO, SOA, and OOP-G
In Modeling Web Services using OO and moving on, Savas Parastatidis recently posted that object-orientation is a poor choice for modeling large-scale distributed applications. As he argues (and I agree), Service-Orientation is a better way to architect these applications.
My product, the Digipede Network, is built on a service-oriented architecture. So why do we Digipudlians talk so much about object-orientation (e.g. here and there)?
Tools
One reason is that our SDK makes it straight-forward for our customers to distribute their objects across a network of computers and perform work on them. They are generally using object-oriented development tools with .NET (e.g., Visual Studio with C# or VB) or COM objects. We take these objects and submit them into the Network (by value). The developer need not be troubled with the intricacies of the WSDL or Web services that underlie the architecture.
In other words, the tools are (mostly) OO, and the underlying services / architecture that supports the whole thing enables so much more. Our customers don’t need to get into that if they don’t want to.
Resonates with Developers
Another reason is that we connect a lot more quickly with developers by describing our model as a way to scale out OO applications quickly. The fact is that most businesses have existing non-SOA applications that can easily be distributed on the Digipede Network.
OO and SOA?
Of course, we don’t want to ignore SOA as this is our architecture and we want to enable these kinds of applications (we will be exposing rich Web services interfaces to our product in the coming year). To bring these two concepts of OO and SOA together, I have begun referring to this specific programming model as “object-oriented programming for grid over a services-oriented architecture”, or OOP-G over SOA and simply OOP-G for short.
Has a nice ring to it, no?
Google gives AOL what?
I have posted several times about the Microsoft / Google debate, making the point that the trust / faith people give to Google is beginning to wane. The news in the NYT about the AOL / Google agreement brings me back to this same point.
Like many, I am surprised at the deal Google struck with Time Warner for AOL. It isn’t the $1 Billion for 5% of AOL. That seems like a lot, but hey, they print money at the “plex”, don’t they?
But, preferential placement for AOL content throughout the Google services?
What?
One of the things that got people to trust Google in the first place was their stance on preferential treatment. So Google search users will get directed to AOL content instead of more-relevant content? John Batelle reports that (essentially) sponsored AOL links won’t be marked as such. (For those who don’t subscribe to the NYT, Nicholas Carr excerpts some of the article).
Google taught us that sponsored links should be marked; and so, have trained us to trust them. With AOL, they will violate this trust — go against what they have trained us to believe.
So, can we trust Google search if the AOL deal is consummated?
Can we trust it now?
Crisotunity: VSS 6d to VSS 8
Our source-control server crashed on Wednesday. The repository itself was unharmed (and we had good backups, too), but we have had to reinstall everything from scratch. Since the developers didn’t have access to source control for a day anyway, I decided to go ahead and install Visual SourceSafe 8 (we’ll be upgrading to Team Foundation Server at a later date). I’ve found little online about people actually making this transition, so I thought I’d blog about it. By the way, we also use SourceAnywhere for remote access so I had to install this too.
Since the OS had been loaded from scratch, this was a clean VSS install. I have read people saying it is OK to upgrade over VSS6; however, the included documentation says you must uninstall previous versions of VSS first (emphasis theirs).
After the install (which went without a hitch), I attached to our existing repository with the VSS Admin tool. That asked me to run an “Analyze” since it had been more than 30 days since it was last run. This is a nice new feature. It found a few minor errors. At the end it suggested I run it again from the command-line with the -f command to actually fix the errors. I really wish it could just offer to do that for me, but that is a minor complaint.
Interestingly, the database hasn’t changed format leading me to believe that VSS is just as good (i.e., problematic) as it used to be.
Which might explain why nobody has blogged about this — migration itself isn’t so interesting if the DB hasn’t changed. VSS6 clients still can connect to it without trouble.
So, it worked fine — with no problems and as far as I can tell, no advantages either.
On Dan’l’s List
Today Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft Corporate VP of .NET Business Development, highlights some startups using .NET (see Checked My List Twice). Of course, he included Digipede! About his list, he says:
I believe they are among the most creative, inventive (and yes, ‘innovative’ startups) that we follow. They are doing some amazing things — creating solutions and products that would definitely make it to Santa’s list (not that any of us actually make lists anymore.)
Thanks Dan’l!
Postscript: Robert Scoble and Don Dodge blogged about Dan’l’s list too.
CCR SDK and more benefits to .NET
There is a new video on the Concurrency and Coordination Runtime on Channel9. The CCR was developed by the Bigtop group and led by George Chrysanthakopoulos and Satnam Singh. In the video, these two describe the problem they were trying to solve, their approach, and some of its features.
CCR is billed as an Asynchronous Messaging Library for C# 2.0. This is a modest tagline considering it appears to greatly ease the coordination of large numbers of concurrent tasks that one would typically implement using threads and locking mechanisms. Anyone who has tried to do this manually knows that this can be quite a chore to write not to mention to write properly. Mr. Singh correctly points out that one of the problems with typical development of multi-threaded code is to analyze every possible interleaving of code paths. It appears that using this library one can greatly simplify the coordination necessary between these different concurrent tasks.
One of the most compelling facets of this work is that it is a library not a language nor set of language extensions. This means that all of the .NET languages can benefit from this SDK. The library may be billed as being for C#, but from the discussion in the video, it is clear that it can be used from myriad languages. I think this is important. In one of my recent posts, I made a point that VB6 was always a second-class language for Microsoft, but that VB.NET is not. The CCR being developed in and for .NET 2.0 underscores this point: it provides benefits to developers regardless of which language they choose.
The advantages that Microsoft is handing to the ISVs developing with managed code are impressive. At first, managed code meant “just” the .NET Framework. Now it is becoming to mean so much more: Microsoft is pushing managed code into the OS (i.e., WinFx) and into its products (e.g., SQL Server 2005 and Office); SDKs like the CCR and Windows Workflow Foundation provide much more than you would expect out of a Framework. Is it any wonder that I push .NET development?
Anyway, the release of the CCR is “imminent” or “in the first half of 2006 or earlier”. You can find more information on the CCR wiki. There is a link there to a paper which appears to be a superset of the wiki content.
I look forward to evaluating it in more detail. I’m excited by the leverage that this SDK will bring to the Digipede Network.
Reviewing the eWeek VS2005 Review
Peter Coffee just reviewed Visual Studio 2005 in eWeek: Visual Studio 2005: Bright Lights and Shadows.
This article seems less a review and more a warning to developers to think hard about adopting the Microsoft development tools. The article is not exactly anti-Microsoft. Mr. Coffee has a good point when he says that the developer gets great productivity gains at the cost of adopting the entire Microsoft strategy; however, is this any different from the other major integrated environments?
In a related interview on AttentionTech (see Coffee Talk), Mr. Coffee points out that in their labs, they cannot test across a wide enough range of scenarios to verify stability issues reported by the user community. As a result, he cannot answer questions regarding the stability of VS 2005 and the greater question: was it ready to be released? While I accept this as a limitation, I do wonder what it means for the validity of the review. How was time spent in the lab?
Refactoring versus 400Mb files
For example, the review mentions that VS 2005 finally supports refactoring. It is a real productivity benefit for developers and is important for people evaluating the platform. This topic gets just a paragraph. Does it work well? The review doesn’t say. My experience is that it does not (as I write this post, I am also manually propagating a refactoring change across 15 different VS2005 projects).
Iimmediately preceding the re-factoring paragraph are three paragraphs about why developers shouldn’t expect a single IDE to do everything for them. The shining example here is that VS 2005 cannot open a 400Mb text file. It turns out that none of the major IDEs support files of the size. Is this a more useful test for a review than seeing how well refactoring works? I don’t think so.
VB6
About 20% of the article is devoted to issues for VB6 developers. Isn’t this old news? I can completely understand why the VB6 community feels slighted by Microsoft; however, the greater good for the development platform built upon a common framework has been proven. VB6 developers were always treated as second class citizens in terms of both development tools and resulting capabilities. While this is still the case for VB6, VB.NET developers don’t face this hurdle. This could not have (reasonably) been done without changes to the VB6 language. VB developers are second-class citizens no longer.
Strategy
I recommend the interview AttentionTech interview (see Coffee Talk). He discusses his review as well as the greater Microsoft strategy regarding integration of VS 2005 and SQL Server touching on the future with .NET 3.0 and LINQ. He does a good job of explaining this strategy as well as the value of these products for developers.
Tags: .NET, clr, eweek, linq, Microsoft, sql, sql2005, VB6, vs2005
Skype 2.0 eliminates the “Skype Scramble”?
There has been a lot of recent discussion about Skype 2.0, what integrating video does for Skype and if it even matters. I have 2.0 beta and am still using it for (just) voice calls.
One thing that occurred to me, though, is that video calls (w/microphone and speaker-enabled cameras) might help reduce what I call the “Skype Scramble”, or for short, “Skrymble”.
If you use Skype (or any other computer / VOIP software), you know what I’m talking about. This is when your computer starts to ring and you start scrambling for your headset. It often goes something like this:
- Computer starts ringing.
- Where is my headset? There it is. Grab it.
- Begin untangling the wires.
- Instant message the caller to say “hold on, I’m untangling my wires.”
- Settle for your wires being hopelessly tangled and crouch close to your computer.
- Answer the call.
- Say “hello” a few times though you cannot hear anything.
- Adjust your headset volume through its built in dial.
- Say “hello” a few more times. Still cannot hear anything.
- Realize your computer volume is too low for voice. Adjust that.
- Now you can hear. Say “hello” again because the caller clearly cannot hear you.
- Flip the “mute” switch on your headset.
- Proclaim success. Apologize.
- Enjoy your free call.
A video camera with integrated mic and audio mitigates this problem, right?
At least if it is plugged in . . . 
OK, so maybe I don’t see why Skype 2 matters either.
Fix to recent-links RSS feed
I haven’t been posting to my linkblog recently because of the title/description duplication problem with the recent-links plug-in through FeedBurner. Eric Lunt, the FeedBurner CTO, pointed out the duplication is caused by the content:encoded element. Thanks, Eric.
If you have this same problem, edit your wp-recent-links-rss2.php file and look for the following code (towards the end of the file):
echo '
The use of $raw_caption here is the problem. Replace this line with:
echo '
Blogs disconnected from the real world?
In his post, Off to go to Dublin, Disconnects between Blogosphere and Real World, Robert Scoble asks if there are disconnects between blogs and the real world.
He cites as an example the outpouring of enthusiasm for the Visual Studio / SQL Server / Biztalk launches and the lack of blogging about these products. I know I did it (VS drink menu, anyone?).
But Robert, there are easily hundreds of bloggers that have hyped up these launch events and blog about these products every single day.
Maybe these don’t appear on the general blogger “radar” because the vast majority of these Microsoft-focused bloggers are not tagging nor are they really interacting with the Web 2.0 blogosphere.
If I am right, Robert could do a great service to Microsoft and its Web 2.0 push by helping to better integrate the vast Microsoft blogging community with the rest of the blogosphere. For example, there are several siloed Microsoft-enthusiast blogger communities. Wouldn’t it be cool if those sites made it easy (or automatic) for their users to tag their blogs with Technorati tags? Couldn’t this increase the awareness of the general blogosphere about Microsoft and all their cool development tools?
Robert, what you think?
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