January 23, 2008 at 7:10 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
We just received our certification for Windows Server 2008. Or we are about to — it probably isn’t “official” yet. Anyway, congratulations to the Digipede team and thanks to everyone at Microsoft and Veritest who helped us through the process.
Getting the logo was arduous. This has less to do with the technical logo requirements and more to do with the complexities of the process itself. Some of the complexity is inherent in such a process, but much was due to the program itself being a sort of “work in process”. But hey, that’s why we early certifiers got the testing fees waived. I think those who begin the process now will find the test requirements and tools are better written and more robust.
As I said, passing the technical requirements was not arduous for us (we were already very close), but passing the tests did require some minor improvements to the Digipede Network that were motivated by the test:
- Support for User Account Control (UAC).
- More useful logging on the Digipede Server and during installations.
- Improved user messaging and event logging during error conditions between server components and the database.
- Improvements to the Installation Guide including new sections on Custom Actions, installation artifacts, and more.
Some of these changes have already made their way into the shipping product, though others won’t be available until the Digipede Network 2.1 (which, while a minor upgrade, contains many features beyond the improvements mentioned above — I think the feature set will be announced soon).
So now we’re ready for the big launch of Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27th. If you are going to be there, come see us at the Partner Pavilion. I’m pushing for some kind of Digipede swag — but I’m not in marketing ;).
[tags]Server 2008, VS2008, SQL, Certified, Digipede[/tags]
Tags: Certified, Digipede, Server 2008, sql, VS2008
December 8, 2005 at 2:14 pm · Filed under .NET
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
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