Category Archives: software development

Gyrating AJAX model excites Tech-Ed

Microsoft’s Eric Rudder kicked off Tech-Ed Europe with a keynote extolling the virtues of Vista, Office 2007 (which has just been released to manufacturing), and Exchange 2007. This Tech-Ed, it appears, won’t be characterised by major new announcements; it is more about long-awaited technology finally getting released.

Rudder presented some interesting stuff around enterprise portals built on Sharepoint and Windows Workflow Foundation, using the fictional Fabrikam clothing company as an example.

An eye-catching feature of Fabrikam’s online store aroused attention: a gyrating AJAX-driven model with drag-and-drop clothing. Boo.com lives again.

A more geeky highlight came at the end of the keynote, when Anders Hejlsberg demonstrated LINQ (Language Integrated Query) in C# 3.0 (not to be confused with .NET Framework 3.0, which is the old stuff). I’m already familiar with LINQ, but one thing I hadn’t seen before is a feature of Orcas, the next Visual Studio. Hejlsberg called it “paste XML as the code with creates that XML”, and that’s exactly what it does. Copy some XML to the clipboard, paste it into your code, and it appears as C# code manipulating XElement and XAttribute to build that XML as output. You can then adapt the code to generate more XML according to the same schema. Neat.

Microsoft urges FoxPro, Delphi developers to move to .NET

Here at Microsoft’s Tech-Ed in Barcelona two forthcoming sessions caught my eye. Tomorrow afternoon there is a discussion on “Moving from Visual FoxPro to .NET”. From the abstract:

Looking forward to Vista, .NET is a pragmatic necessity for VFP developers. How will you deal with Vista clients? What will you do? How long can you remain in VFP? How can you move to .NET with the least impact?

On Wednesday it’s Delphi developers who get told there is no future in their programming platform, in “Moving from Delphi to .NET”:

Even if you are not considering .NET now, at some point you will have to move to .NET with new code, or to port existing code. Staying with Win32 may be viable in the short term, but not the long term.

By accident or design, the session conflicts with one from the  father of Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, on C# 3.0, the next generation of Microsoft’s home-grown programming language.

I’d like to attend both events, if only to discover whether there are really a bunch of FoxPro and Delphi pros here at Tech-Ed, puzzling over how to migrate to .NET. Alternatively, maybe some of them could mount a robust defence of these older tools. After all, there’s no sign of Win32 or COM going away any time soon, though .NET refuseniks may have a bit of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) envy. Then again, look what language is riding high in the Computer Language Shootout Scorecard.

Patent threat lifted from Mono

Regular readers of this blog will know of my interest in Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

A common objection to Mono is its fuzzy legal position. Although parts of .NET are ECMA standards open for anyone to implement, other parts (including ASP.NET) are not. Mono implements ASP.NET as well as other non-ECMA class libraries. The worry has been: if Mono gets successful enough to threaten Microsoft, will there be legal problems?

I say “has been”, because it appears that the just-announced agreement with Novell covers Mono. See Miguel de Icaza’s post where he says:

…today we have secured a peace of mind for Novell customers that might have been worried about possible patent infringements open source deployments. This matters in particular for Mono, because for a long time its been the favorite conversation starter for folks that find dates on Slashdot.

This is big news for anyone with an interest in cross-platform .NET. However, note that the agreement refers to Novell’s customers. I am not a lawyer; but it is not clear to me whether this deal provides comfort to Mono users not using Novell’s SUSE Linux. For example, what about those using Mono on the Mac, one of its more interesting applications? I hope to discover more next week at Tech-Ed, where there will be an out-of-hours presentation on Mono.

Update

See the comments below for more. It seems this falls short of a promise not to sue over patent breaches in Mono, if they exist, except in certain defined circumstances (Novell customers or non-commercial). I guess that is not surprising.

Technorati tags: , , , ,

Free final Vista and Office 2007 for UK developers

Here’s a blog you might want to subscribe to if you are a developer based in the UK. Ian Moulster says you can have a free copy of the final release of both Vista and Office 2007 if you:

take part in our UK developer online launch event on January 19th and 20th (yes, I know the 20th is a Saturday).

No, I don’t know what “take part” means; but there are 1000 freebies on offer so I doubt it is too arduous.

Microsoft still recognizes the key role of developers in technology adoption.

Technorati tags: ,

Developers quick to adopt .NET 2.0, slow to leave Visual C++ 6.0

The Code Project is a popular resource site for Windows developers. It has polled its users on what programming language they use; see here for the details. Three points to note:

  • Visual C++ 6.0 still has high usage – nearly on a par with Visual C++ 2003 and 2005 combined. 19.78% vs 20.34% at the time of writing. I wonder if C runtime issues are a factor here. Visual C++ 6.0 is the last version that links to the standard mscvrt.dll; see Visual Studio 2005 DLL Hell for more details. That’s why I still have it installed on my machine. If that’s not it, I’d be interested to know why so many are still using this old product.
  • By contrast, there has been rapid C# 2.0 adoption. 18.93% C# 1.x versus 44.32% C# 2.0. I can understand this; .NET 2.0 is considerably improved over 1.x and there is little reason not to switch.
  • Finally, there is a decent showing for Delphi at 24.54%. No surprise here; it’s a fantastic tool for Win32 coding. I guess the problem for Borland is that many are still using Delphi 7.x or earlier versions.

Note that the percentages add to more than 100% because programmes use mulitple tools; and that this is not a reliable snapshot of anything other than Code Project’s community.

On deceptive error messages

If error messages told you what was really wrong, developer and admin productivity would soar.

I lost hours of my life over a problem with ntbackup. The error message was “C is not a valid drive or you do not have access”. Three different Microsoft support engineers gave it their attention, but we never identified the true problem. The drive was valid, of course, and the user had full local admin rights.

More recently I was working on my Common Feed List blogreader and hit this unusual error:

Hmm, “Listbox has too many items” – yet the error fired on the 8th item being added. After scratching my head for a few minutes, I figured out the problem: a blog with items that have an empty title element. It’s an atom feed, and the XML looks like this:

<title mode="escaped" type="text/html"/>

The IE7 RSS Platform API converts this to a null value in the item’s Title property. I was trying to render this as a string in the list box. Poof.

Digression: should the RSS Platform treat the empty element as null, or as an empty string? XML is not good at making this distinction. Since the title element in this case is present, but empty, I tend to the view that it should be an empty string; but others more expert may disagree.

So I fixed the code to check for null and convert it to an empty string and all was well. No thanks to the error message.

Technorati tags: , ,

Amazon S3 Delphi sample

I’ve upated my Delphi sample for using Amazon S3; this time I’ve put the exe up for download so anyone can try it (if you have an S3 account).

If there is interest I might work this up into a more user-friendly utility; or perhaps someone would like to help with this.

It does many of the essentials: file upload and download, progress report with cancel option, create, delete and list buckets and items.

http://www.itwriting.com/s3.php

Tim

Technorati tags: , ,

Searchability the key to usability

Joe Morel blogs about users of MSDN Forums, the official discussion groups for Windows developers. He has stats which show that 98.5% of the forum’s users are lurkers (they read but do not post), that nobody like logging in and only do so when forced (because they want to post), and that most people find the content through Google rather than because they are consciously participating in an online community.

This is more or less what I noted back in August, but it’s good to see the confirming stats.

Google helps; but many sites still have not learned the principles which Morel outlines.

Technorati tags: ,