Microsoft is holding a mini-Mix in London, September 11-12. It appears to be focused on Silverlight, Expression and Windows Live, and speakers include Scott Guthrie of ASP.NET fame (but now with wider responsibilities) and Danny Thorpe of Delphi fame (but now at Microsoft and working on Windows Live APIs).

Windows Vista and Office 2007 may have under-delivered, but this stuff is pretty interesting; worth a look if you can make it. Of course I’m particularly interested in the Day 2 session called “Sneek peeks”.

It’s a while after Mix in Vegas earlier this year, but Microsoft’s Daniel Moth says there will be new content.

I’ve just completed an article for Hardcopy magazine on database APIs – it’s for a forthcoming issue so the piece is not online yet. I interviewed Mark Troester, senior manager of product marketing at DataDirect, and he gave me some interesting comments on LINQ (Language Integrated Query), Microsoft’s new database extensions for the .NET Framework.

There’s a lot of confusion out there because there is LINQ to SQL and LINQ to the entity model, and the LINQ to SQL stuff that has just got released in beta is specific to SQL Server, so Microsoft needs to do some work in terms of getting things better organized. I think their argument would be that they need a lot of flexibility, but from what we see when we talk to customers, people are just massively confused.

As I continued my research I could see what he meant. What I think is the official home page has plenty of resources, but it’s a bit of a mess. If you click the link to the FAQ – actually a forum post – you find it dates from March 2006 and talks about DLINQ, which is now an obsolete term (I think). The project overview is pretty good, but gets you deep into Lambda Expressions and Extension Methods without mentioning important practical issues like the fact that LINQ to SQL seems to be exclusive to SQL Server. This unfortunate fact is confirmed by Microsoft here:

Q: It was mentioned that there is currently no LINQ to SQL support for Oracle or MySQL databases.  Will it be possible for developers to implement their own SqlProvider implementations for these database engines?
A: We don’t really have a provider model or provider writers’ SDK in this release (Orcas). So it is possible to build a LINQ provider similar to LINQ to SQL; but unfortunately, in this release, we won’t be able to offer much to make that as simple as we would like.

Of course you could still use LINQ to DataSet with Oracle or MySQL data … see why it gets confusing?

By contrast, I like Granville Barnett’s Introducing LINQ series (though not the pop-up ads), which takes a hands-on approach, as does Scott Guthrie’s LINQ to SQL series (the link is to part 5, but it references the other articles).

I also highly recommend Matt Warren’s blog post on The Origin of LINQ to SQL and the interesting comments.

LINQ looks compelling; I hope Microsoft manages to improve the clarity of its LINQ information soon.

Ryan Stewart blogs about Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong.

I don’t agree with everything he says, especially this one:

AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn’t been done before.

I suppose there might be a way to define “web apps” that excludes everything prior to AIR, but it would be difficult. I’m composing this blog post in Windows Live Writer – I consider this to be a desktop web app, especially the latest version which synchronizes the local copy of a post with what is on the web. Many of the widgets and gadgets in Vista or Yahoo! Widgets or the Mac Dashboard are web apps. Apple’s iTunes is a hybrid web/desktop application; it includes an online store that runs outside the browser. Any Java or .NET application which retrieves data from the internet via web services is a web app. Even running HTML applications on the desktop has been done before, for example with Microsoft’s HTML Application model. If you exclude anything that is not cross-platform then the list is shorter – but you still have Java and Mono; iTunes is cross-platform; and even AIR won’t do Linux in its first release.

That said, I agree that there is a far amount of confusion out there. Half the problem is that the terms are overloaded. As I understand it, Adobe’s use of the term Rich Internet Applications includes almost any web application beyond HTML, whether or not it is running in the browser – though usually what Adobe really means is “any application that uses the Flash runtime”.

I often see Silverlight and AIR treated as close competitors, yet Silverlight is for browser applications, and AIR is for desktop applications.

Some assume that Silverlight is Windows-only, but it is not, it runs on Intel Mac and Mono is doing amazing work with Moonlight – Silverlight for Linux.

Another wrong assumption is that because AIR applications run on the desktop, they can do anything a native code desktop application can do. In reality they have no access to native code libraries.

Adobe had us all thinking that it was somehow adopting Google’s Gears – I was fooled by this – but it is not at all; it just happens to have the same open source database engine in its own project.

So the other reason tech journalists “get it wrong” is because the whole “beyond HTML” story is complex and hard to put across in a few words. That is what we are meant to be good at, but there is always a danger of over-simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.

Technorati tags: adobe, microsoft, silverlight, google gears, ria, rich internet application