Daily Archives: November 23, 2007

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Another crack at the online office suite

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The creator of Hotmail is having a crack at the online office suite market with Live Documents.

I’ve signed up but not received an invite yet. Of course I’ll take a look, but two things caught my immediate interest:

1. Uses Flash and Flex:

Built using RIA technologies such as Flash and Flex, Live Documents allow users to view and edit documents within any common browser on any operating system from anywhere.

2. Connected Desktop Client:

Live Documents gives you continuous two-way syncing of your documents and edits; between your PCs and the web and vice versa.

Sync is a big deal and would make this more interesting to me than, say, Google Docs in its present incarnation.

There’s integration with Microsoft Office and (in preparation) Open Office.

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blogging, microsoft, software development

.NET history: Smack as well as Cool

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Microsoft’s Jason Zander comments on my piece on the early history of ASP.NET:

  • The CLR was actually built out of the COM+ team as an incubation starting in late 1996.  At first we called it the “Component Object Runtime” or COR.  That’s why several of the unmanaged DLL methods and environment variables in the CLR start with the Cor prefix.
  • There were several language projects underway at the start.  The C++ and languages teams both had ideas (Cool was one of them), and in the CLR we wrote Simple Managed C or SMC (pronounced ‘smack’).  We actually wrote the original BCL in SMC.

He says these are corrections though they seem more like supplementary information to me. I don’t have any inside knowledge of this history other than what people who should know say to me (though I do also have my own recollections of what was said publicly). He may be reacting to the idea that the CLR came out of the VB team, which Mark Anders kind-of implied.

One of the reasons I love blogging is that multiple authors can have a crack at getting the facts right. A great personal example is when I asked the question Who invented the wizard; and a good candidate came forward over a year later. If you see something inaccurate or misleadingly incomplete on this site, please do comment or let me know by email.

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internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

Microsoft vs Mozilla Javascript wars

My comment is here.

Note this debate is not only about the merits of different versions of Javascript/ECMAScript. It is also about power and responsibility. However you spin it, and however far Adobe and/or Microsoft succeed with Flash/Silverlight/AIR, I think we can agree that the browser has an important role for the foreseeable future. It is also likely (though less certain, I guess) that Internet Explorer will continue to have a large market share. The company does have a responsibility not to hold back the Web, and that surely includes not obstructing the evolution of a high-performance Javascript runtime.

It is disappointing that Microsoft says so little about IE8, presuming it exists. If the company sticks by its undertaking to leave no more than two years between IE releases, we should expect it no later than October 2008, less than one year away. It would help web developers to know more about what will be in it.