rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for January, 2006
January 31, 2006 at 11:47 am · Filed under .NET
Pat Helland, Senior Principal Engineer of Amazon, gave a talk titled Programming for Scalability. Very good speaker. He went through the evolution to his views of building highly scalable systems and is now an apostate of the ACID, distributed transactions, single serializability scope-religion.
He walked through his approach to designing databases for high scalability from the start so applications don’t need to be rewritten when data-partitioning becomes inevitable.
He didn’t speak about Amazon in particular, but these are the kinds of things he works on there.
While this talk was quite high-level and following the “SOA and messaging” mantra, it was very practical too. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk, take it.
Tags: .NET, Amazon, VSLive
January 31, 2006 at 10:30 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I met Chuck Berg, the chair of the SDForum Windows SIG.
He is speaking February 1st on Getting Started with Visual Studio Team System. I’m sure it will be an interesting talk and a chance to take advantage of his real experience getting it up and running.
If you make it to his talk, try to convince him to blog about his experiences — I’ll subscribe.
Tags: .NET, SDForum, VSTS
January 31, 2006 at 10:01 am · Filed under .NET
Not the sonic-software Dave Chappell, but the one of Chappell & Associates on Building Modern Software: Services, Workflow, Integration.
Exuberant speaker. Ex-funk pianist.
Walked through service-orientation as the current default enterprise architecture; and how the new Microsoft technologies underly this architecture: WCF, WF, and BizTalk.
This was a good overview of these issues (but, I wish I could get to the Digipede VPN from here . . . ).
Tags: BizTalk, SOA, VSLive, WCF, WF
January 30, 2006 at 2:09 pm · Filed under .NET
We got the Microsoft development rally cry from S. (Soma) Somasegar. Visual Studio / SQL Server have really come a long way in terms of their broad application to many types of development. Anyway, here are some stats (I don’t recall how these have changed since the Visual Studio launch) about adoption:
- Over 10 million .NET Framework 2.0 downloads. Good (as this is a pet issue for me). I still wonder about penetration of .NET 1.1 / .NET 2.0 on consumer machines.
- 1.8 million Visual Studio Express downloads.
- Over 300,000 SQL Server Express downloads.
The new platform is beating Java in the enterprise: platform chosen for mission critical applications: 25% Java / J2EE, 35% Microsoft .NET. Look at this IDC report for these and other statistics.
There was also a very cool demo of Visual Studio Team System and server builds — the coolest part being the workflow model for builds. Significant Team Foundation Server dates:
- There will be a Team Foundation Server Release Candidate at the end of this week.
- RTM in March.
Maybe I’ll start playing with the RC once it is out (in my “spare” time).
January 30, 2006 at 9:19 am · Filed under .NET
In response to the renewed interest in SSDL prompted by the IEEE article, Jim Webber recently posted about how SSDL compares to the existing W3C/OASIS stack. I blogged about the article in my previous post, I like SSDL.
The post is worth checking out if you are interested in SSDL; however, I’m disappointed by the last comment:
Of course the practicalities of the situation with huge existing investments in the W3C/OASIS stack means that SSDL will most likely remain nothing more than a toolkit for academics and geeks.
Pragmatic and perhaps true, but I hope that doesn’t turn out to be the case.
I’m still hoping to see this in a future version of WCF — I’m counting on Savas to make this happen 😉
Tags: .NET, SSDL, WCF, WSDL
January 27, 2006 at 9:16 am · Filed under Web 2.0
And a thanks to Dave Winer for organizing the event. Sorry to say, I still haven’t met the man. Had a good time at the dinner last night — met many interesting people:
- Scott Mace: working on the swamp of calendar formats so we can actually have shared calendars that work.
- Scott Rosenberg: look for his coming book (in November) on the Chandler product.
- Sylvia Paull: talked about what to blog and what not to blog; what to look forward to as a parent; and about nerdliness.
- Jay Cross: talked about all sorts of things . . . he pointed out that Vista is going to be a bonanza for training companies.
- Steve Hill: has a cool idea for geographically distributed events.
- Edward Piou: cool to talk to a FreeBSD user for a change. FreeBSD rocks!
And a shout out to the enigmatic Dr. Chadblog (aka Chad Williams) — didn’t get a chance to talk this time.
Tags: Blogger_dinner, FreeBSD, Vista, Web2.0
January 26, 2006 at 11:09 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I will be attending VSLive! next week in San Francisco.
I probably spend most of my time in sessions on WCF, WF and Atlas; but haven’t quite decided yet.
If you plan to be there and want to meet up, contact me through this blog or at robert at digipede dot net.
Tags: Atlas, VSLive
January 24, 2006 at 7:13 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
In Perils of a poor Computer Science Education — Part I, I said that I basically agree with Joel Spolsky in his post, The Perils of Java Schools. I do, but I can’t give the impression that this is the only path to being a great developer.
At UC Berkeley, the classes used Scheme, assembly, other languages, and primarily C. The very first course was nearly all functional programming using Scheme. I think using Scheme had three main purposes: to teach recursion (duh), to expand the students view into other programming models, and take the hot-shots down a peg — it leveled the playing field (a little). Most of the rest of the program was C. Here we used C for nearly everything including, of course, the complex data structures. Yes, lots of pointers.
So were the Scheme, C, and pointers necessary to help me become a developer of production-quality code? How often have I written a hash table for production? Rarely, but I’m way better at what I do because I know how to implement a hash table, and heinous balancing trees that I can’t even remember the names of, and how to debug at the machine level, and what a functional language is, etc.
That said, managed or scripted code is the way to go for 90% of the applications written today. Pointers aren’t so important and the data structures are covered by the frameworks. Clearly this kind of coding doesn’t demand the old-school Computer Science graduate. Merely great C#, Java, PHP, etc. developers run the gamut from important role-players, team members, to team leaders, etc.
I think the most important thing you can learn as a developer is to be flexible. Think outside of the constraints of the languages and tools that you use. If it helps you to learn a different language to enable this, do so. If it helps to go deeper into the runtime environment (e.g., deeper into the CLR or the Java runtime or the compiler / assembler, etc), do so.
Flexibility — that is the practical lesson of the Computer Science program.
Tags: c#, Computer_Science, Java, JavaSchools
January 24, 2006 at 8:41 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous blog changes:
- Updated my picture. I heard that I looked too clean-cut in the old one.
- Added the askimet plugin. My spam comment problem has gotten out of control. In the last few days I’ve gotten over 2000 spam comments. Cheers to Matt et. al. at Automattic for making this so easy.
- Added explicit About and Disclaimer links — these were there all along, just buried.
- A new, better, Digipede graphic.
If you wonder why I blog about these things: it is mostly so I can track changes in case a problem is introduced.
Tags: blog
January 23, 2006 at 11:43 am · Filed under .NET
The Digipede Network has been chosen as a finalist for the 2006 Codie Awards.
Thanks, SIIA judges!
Update: Dan has a more complete description of the awards, here.
Tags: Codie, Digipede, grid
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