rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
December 11, 2006 at 9:29 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
If you are in Redmond and want to learn about Digipede (from John):
Digipede Evangelist Kim Greenlee will give a presentation on Concurrent Software Development at the .NET Developers Association meeting on Monday, December 11. The meeting is on the Microsoft campus – in Building 40, the Steptoe Room (#1450). She blogs about it here; be sure to bring this meeting announcement with you, or Microsoft security may stop you.
Come early for the free pizza — stay for the demo of the Digipede Network.
[tags].NET, GRid, digipede, Excel[/tags]
Tags: .NET, Digipede, Excel, grid
December 3, 2006 at 9:10 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
One of the things I thought I’d get to this weekend is to upgrade my laptop to Vista again. It is a pretty easy background task and with Norton Ghost is quickly reversable if need be (as it was the last time I tried).
Unlike some (e.g., J. LeRoy who thinks XP is adequate), I really want the new UX and (the promise of) faster power state transitions, among other things.
But, before the installation I need to be sure of two things:
- Support for the VPN at Digipede (and the networking software required on my laptop). This is no longer reported as incompatibile in the Vista Upgrade Advisor. So, this is worth a shot anyway.
- Support for Visual Studio 2005 (not to mention 2003 which I still use occasionaly). I looked into this more today and while Vista may support VS2005, it won’t support the coming SP1. I really want the fixes in SP1 so I have to choose between sticking with XP or sticking with the pre-SP1 VS2005. A blocker.
Of course, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 trumps Vista, but I’m not happy about it.
J. LeRoy (AKA, Cousin Jim) recently posted on What Color is your Vista? with a terrific quote:
So when Microsoft says that they “deliver the right balance”, that’s not your balance they are talking about.
Exactly (and I know I’m taking his point completely out of context).
[tags]Vista, VS2005, VS2003, Visual Studio, Microsoft, .NET, VS2005 SP1[/tags]
Tags: .NET, Microsoft, Vista, Visual-Studio, VS2003, vs2005, VS2005-SP1
November 17, 2006 at 4:46 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing, Web 2.0
[tags]Salesforce, Benioff, Gillmor Gang, Gillmor, SAAS, ApEx, .NET[/tags]
Marc Benioff was special guest in the recent Gillmor Gang (VIdeo Gang Parts I and II). After getting through the initial discussion on SalesForce.com earnings we moved on to talk about the SaaS business and their application platform.
Mike Vizard led off the questions about ApEx with a good one: how will SalesForce get developer traction for their language / environment / form? Marc enumerated several things they are doing about that. Most of this is kind of “business as usual” for those building a developer community, though I do think that one of their strategies is pretty innovative: rent out cubicles to developers in a building devoted to ApEx development (this is happening in old offices of Siebel — this would be ironic if it weren’t intentional). These developers get everything they need to build apps on the SalesForce platform.
This may turn out to be of great value to those who are already interested in the platform. Of course, the drive for developers to build applications on ApEx will come down to one thing: is there a viable marketplace for the applications they build?
Clearly Marc and SalesForce understand this fully. They are not pushing the “build it and they will come” mantra; instead, they have built an application exchange (i.e., the AppExchange) to enable a viable marketplace.
On a slightly different tack, I asked Marc to talk a little about their hosting capabilities for third party applications sold through the AppExchange. Without getting into too much detail about the different kinds of applications that support the ApEx (native, client, hybrid, etc.) there is a class of applications that requires external hosting. These applications take advantage of the SalesForce.com APIs yet are not built on the ApEx platform. As a result, these applications are not hosted by SalesForce.com.
I grok why they choose not to post these hybrid applications. Doing so requires a different hosting model: one that is application-specific possibly supporting different hardware requirements, different OSes, different staff, etc. I can only guess that they have made the decision not to do this in favor of their “pure” ApEx strategy. Certainly the “pure” strategy is a lot cleaner, more focused, more repeatable, more like an “product sale” instead of an implementation sale . . .
However, lets go back to the earlier point of developer adoption. Wouldn’t it be easier to get developers to adopt ApEx and AppExchange and the whole concept of SaaS if you were able to provide a hybrid hosting solution?
This reminds me a little bit of .NET. One of the key features of .NET is support for COM. If users had to throw out their legacy code to begin to adopt .NET in their organization, .NET would have had a much slower adoption rate. They don’t.
It sound likes an ApEx developer who wants to take advantage of the AppExchange has to either start everything from scratch or provide their own hosting solution.
So I wonder, would SalesForce be able to ramp up developer adoption rates with a hybrid hosting strategy?
Tags: .NET, ApEx, Benioff, Gillmor, Gillmor-Gang, SaaS, Salesforce
November 6, 2006 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Office 2007 RTM’ed this morning so I’ve been looking throughout the day for news on .NET 3.0.
And, yes, it came out too. Here.
I got what I wanted: the release of .NET 3.0 has been decoupled from Vista. Of course, Vista is in escrow and will RTM within a few weeks so it isn’t that decoupled.
Anyway, congratulations to the teams for getting this done!
[tags].NET, .NET3.0, Office2007, Office, Vista, RTM, Microsoft[/tags]
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Microsoft, office, Office2007, RTM, Vista
October 30, 2006 at 4:04 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Yesterday Jamie released TestDriven.NET 2.0. A cool product, it looks like it just keeps getting cooler. Check it out here http://www.testdriven.net.
[tags]TestDriven.NET, .NET[/tags]
Tags: .NET, TestDriven.NET
October 15, 2006 at 7:19 pm · Filed under .NET
After I posted WinFx is Dead, I’ve gotten two kinds of comments:
Didn’t you hear that WinFx has been renamed .NET 3.0? What rock have you been hiding under?
Well, yes, I have heard that — my point wasn’t that the name WinFx is dead, it is that the concept of WinFx is dead.
Really, Microsoft has killed the managed Windows API?
What, am I psychic?
I have no idea if Microsoft has killed the managed Windows API. It appears to me that they have. The stated reason for the name change was to clear up confusion in the marketplace. The common belief seems to be that this confusion was that developers didn’t understand how WinFx related to .NET. I believe that the actual confusion was that developers didn’t understand how WinFx (as composed of WCF, WPF, WF, etc.) had anything to do with a managed Windows API.
I am guessing that this name change away from WinFx is indicates that the managed Windows API is dead. John goes further in comment on this post (full comment here):
. . . Microsoft continues to vacilate on this issue. I hear Microsoft execs stand up and proclaim that everything is .NET. Then I see product teams create products without the slightest nod to .NET, using a patchwork of unmanaged code and interfaces dating back to the (early) COM days.
So, Microsoft: you may think that the name change cleared up some confusion. Maybe it did. But as a Microsoft ISV, Gold certified partner, developer, I’ll tell you that I’m confused about how .NET actually fits into the overall product plans.
[tags].NET, .NET3.0, WinFx, Windows, Microsoft[/tags]
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Microsoft, Windows, WinFx
October 12, 2006 at 11:21 am · Filed under .NET
IE7 is coming out very soon (some say any day). One thing to be aware of: if you need to keep using IE6, don’t install IE7. This isn’t just an issue in the IE7 installer (i.e., IE7 upgrades IE6), but they cannot both be installed on the same machine.
I trust (and Microsoft really hopes) that this doesn’t affect users in a negative way.
My guess is that the only people who really care about the side-by-side issue are developers. Of course, IT managers will care too, but they can keep IE7 from being auto-updated.
My guess is that this due to COM (because IE programmability is all through COM).
Side-by-side COM is anywhere from hard to impossible. One more benefit for a browser built on managed.
Tags: .NET, IE, IE6, IE7, Microsoft
October 9, 2006 at 8:24 am · Filed under .NET
From mdavey: Longhorn “Server Core” doesn’t have .NET? No managed code.
From the referenced article, Server Core Program Manager
(Andrew) Mason says his development team wants to add the .NET Framework to Server Core, but they first need the Framework team to modularize the code so they can add just the essentials.
Another example of the left-hand not being coordinated with the right. I know I’m mixing metaphors, but it has continued to baffle me that it is taking Microsoft so long to adopt managed code.
Now I think I understand why. And the WinFx to .NET 3.0 name change illustrates the point well:
- WinFx was purported to be the new Windows API. This claim, while supported by various parts of Microsoft was never internalized by the product teams.
- This is actually the message that was confusing people. Customers / developers were not asking “what is WinFx?”, as much as they were asking, “where is the new managed Windows API, WinFx?”.
- But there is no managed Windows API. Managed code is not a core part of the OS (and may never be).
- So, to avoid the topic, WinFx gets killed. Not just the name, but the entire idea of a managed Windows API. Sure, the components of WinFx get shifted to .NET 3.0.
I have posted before that I am OK with the name change. I am, but I am not OK with the death of the managed Windows API.
Now (of course) this blog is all my own opinion, but I want to point out that this is purely an outsiders view of what is going on at Microsoft. As far as I know I am completely mistaken and next week Microsoft will announce some new effort to provide a fully managed API. Or not.
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Microsoft, Windows, WinFx
October 7, 2006 at 7:03 am · Filed under .NET
It appears that IE7 has been decoupled from Vista. According to the IEBlog, the final release will be in “a few weeks”.
On a couple of occasions, I have requested that IE7 and .NET 3.0 be released when ready (post here) — presumably before Vista. I guess I have gotten part of my wish, though it is really the RTM of .NET 3.0 that I would like to see released.
On a side note: the last I checked IE7 is not dependent on .NET. Unfortunate to say the least. I would like to see managed Browser Helper Objects (BHOs) being easy without requiring COM — that could have gotten IE7 much closer to the Firefox extension model. What will ever drive .NET installs onto XP so that it is, in fact, ubiquitous?
Tags: .NET, .NET3.0, Firefox, IE, IE7, Vista, WinFx
September 26, 2006 at 9:36 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
John says:
Digipede Evangelista Kim Greenlee will present at the Bay Area .NET User Group on Thursday, September 28. The show starts at 6:30, at 1 Market Street (the “Landmark Building”) in San Francisco. (Yes, that’s Microsoft’s office — go to the second floor, and score some free pizza.) It’s an easy BART ride from wherever you are (in the Bay Area), and it’s well worth the trip. She’s talking about concurrency, a topic near and dear to the hearts of architects and developers everywhere. Multi-threading, grid computing, clusters, grid objects — if you’re thinking about scalability and concurrency, this talk’s for you. Details and registration — go here.
Check it out!
Tags: .NET, Digipede, grid
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