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 Windows & .NET Watch
By Larry O'B rien
Thinking Outside the Aux
(Issue 116, December 15, 2004)
Microsoft has begun talking about auxiliary displays for laptops. My least-favorite explanation of these “aux” displays is a comparison to the time-telling LCDs that grace the outside of many clamshell-style cell phones and that provide all the inconvenience of a pocket watch and none of the style.… click for full story
Out of Sight, Out of a Job
(Issue 115, December 1, 2004)
The decades-long expectation of full employment for programmers is gone. The business press knows that offshore competition for programming jobs has exploded in the past few years. Within the trade, we also know that the competition takes place at all levels: The business press emphasizes the multimillion dollar projects, but as someone who picks up small jobs via Craig’s List, every time I’ve talked to a hiring manager in the past two years, they’ve received contacts from offshore concerns. Within the trade, we also know the absurdity of the platitudes offered to the displaced: Re-educate yourself, move up the value chain, sleep well in the knowledge that total global wealth is maximized… click for full story
A Study Doesn’t Make It So
(Issue 113, November 1, 2004)
A new study supports my belief that .NET is more productive than J2EE. Nevertheless, I don’t think you should make business decisions based on the study. click for full story
Only Nixon Could Go To China
(Issue 112, October 15, 2004)
And only Borland can go to the boardroom. For readers too young, or too busy tripping out to Led Zeppelin, to catch the early 1970s reference in the headline, it was said that only Richard Nixon had the anti-Communist credentials to negotiate a thaw in Cold War rivalries with China. click for full story
Dynamic Do-Over
(Issue 111, October 1, 2004)
I’ve previously talked about how “explicit versus implicit typing” is inserted too often into the entire debate over dynamic languages (“Ignoring the Scripts,” Feb. 1, page 29). In an explicitly typed language, the programmer must state that “foo is an integer” before assigning foo the value “2”; in an implicitly typed language, the programmer doesn’t. I’m boggled that people argue that implicit typing is a slam-dunk productivity advantage. click for full story
Flowcharting the Course for Whitehorse
(Issue 110, September 15, 2004)
When I was a kid, to prepare for our three-mile walk through snowdrifts—all uphill, of course—to get to the computing center, we used a powerful diagrammatic notation called “flowcharts.” These high-abstraction views into the system allowed all stakeholders to contribute their unique perspectives to the evolution of the system...or something like that. You put the statements in boxes and the decision points in diamonds, and then there were a bunch of other symbols that I guess some people used, but mostly it was boxes and diamonds. click for full story
Rebel Without a Code
(Issue 109, September 1, 2004)
I’m a rebel. There are times I don’t validate input data. I don’t always check my HRESULTs. I’ve written code that assumes a file exists. Yeah, I’m the coder your mother warned you about. click for full story
A Little Dose of Mono
(Issue 108, August 15, 2004)
The Mono project is a Novell-sponsored, open-source implementation of C# and the Common Language Infrastructure. It runs under a number of operating systems, most notably Linux, and after a good deal of scrutiny, my conclusion is that the recent 1.0 release is a viable option, not just for exploring C# or the infrastructure, but for delivering server-side applications and for administration- and form-based client programs.
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A First Glimpse at Tempting Tools
(Issue 107, August 1, 2004)
Microsoft has released the first public beta of its 2005 series of development tools, and what’s available is intended more to whet appetites than to shake out unknown bugs. That’s not to say the release is close to stable, but these tools introduce the biggest changes to date for the .NET languages and technologies, and many teams will be well advised to begin actively exploring the new capabilities
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Til the Fat Client Sings
(Issue 106, July 15, 2004)
Web-based deployment comes in and out of favor but often founders because of the conflation of HTML-using, browser-based and Web-deployment concerns. Additionally, many discussions of “fat client,” Web-deployed software get derailed by concerns about server-based “rental” fees or server-side resource consumption.
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Summer Reading List
(Issue 105, July 1, 2004)
Remember that scene in “American Beauty,” where a bag blows in the unseen and unknowable wind, never coming to rest? Now imagine an ant tied to the bag with coils of science-fiction-worthy unbreakable yet almost invisibly thin lines. Put the whole mess in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, and you’ll have a good idea of what learning to kiteboard is like. It’s like bull riding, but with more drowning and decapitation. click for full story
Microsoft’s Tablet Works Right Away
(Issue 104, June 15, 2004)
What’s so confounding about the Tablet PC is that Microsoft didn’t require three generations to get it right. No one expects Microsoft to create a vastly usable, powerful and essentially bug-free product on the first try. But, surprisingly, the company did. So why isn’t it being accepted by the market? click for full story
Microsoft Doesn't Hold All the Cards
(Issue 103, June 1, 2004)
Perhaps you’ve seen the show “World Poker Tour,” which every week shows the final table of a high-stakes poker tournament. It’s a great show that cleverly stokes the illusion that the viewer could outplay the best poker players in the world. It does this by showing the home viewer the hidden cards of all the players, which makes second-guessing the play just a tad easier. click for full story
Where's Java?
(Issue 102, May 15, 2004)
Of Microsoft’s legal trials and tribulations, the Sun-Microsoft squabble has been the most significant to software developers. Without rehashing eight years of drama or assigning blame, though, I’ll simply say that the current no compromise “.NET or J2EE” decision does not serve the best interests of the greater software development community. click for full story
Disgrace Under Pressure
(Issue 101, May 1, 2004)
In my 692nd hour of scuba diving, my life was threatened by a computer malfunction. One minute I was admiring the ghostly beauty of Monterey’s plumose anemones (Metridium senile), the next I was looking at my dive computer and thinking, “That’s not a correct reading,” and the next I was staring at the grayness that only a dead LCD can achieve. click for full story
Slippery When .NET
(Issue 100, April 15, 2004)
The “Whidbey” version of Visual Studio .NET has officially slipped its delivery from the second half of 2004 to the first half of 2005. A new beta cycle will be inserted between now and the final release, making it hard to be optimistic that “first half of 2005” will mean anything in the first quarter. The product is too far down the chute for any amount of whining to make a difference in schedule, and companies making public comments about the delay have stoically denied anything more than mild disappointment. Well, I’ll admit to being ticked off. click for full story
Amateur Programming Action
(Issue 099, April 1, 2004)
There are 7 million hobbyist programmers in the United States. So sayeth John Montgomery, program manager of Microsoft’s Developer Division. That’s a staggering number, absolutely dwarfing the number of shrink-wrap developers (about half a million in the U.S.) and comparable to the total number of professional developers in the world. The number doesn’t count professionals who tinker with their own blog engine on the weekends, either—the Microsoft study that developed that number wasn’t multiple choice. As surprising as that figure may be, what does it have to do with your job and the professionals who read SD Times? A lot. click for full story
The Rest is Salient
(Issue 098, March 15, 2004)
The “three pillars of Longhorn” are a new display stack, a service-oriented messaging model and a metadata-oriented data store. Individually known as “Avalon,” “Indigo” and “WinFS,” and together as “WinFX,” these technologies have a common theme: increasing the interplay between processes and applications. click for full story
Standard Issue
(Issue 097, March 1, 2004)
I’d never attended a standards meeting before, so naturally I was struck by how stupid I was compared with everyone else in the room. Of course, that hardly distinguishes the ECMA Working Groups for the standardization of C# and for C++ bindings for the CLI from, say, the early-bird-special crowd at Country Kitchen. click for full story
Return of the Thing
(Issue 096, February 15, 2004)
Yea, it has come to pass that the Age of Objects is in sunset. A darkness has fallen upon the lands of programming. The people know not where to place their parameters and an ill wind plagues their interfaces. They are besotted with XML and squander their bits most ingraciously. But, lo! A fellowship rides forth, bearing tidings of hope and productivity…. Oops, my editors have just instant-messaged me that the phrase “epic fantasy” is already applied too often to my column and that it’s 800 words I get, not 800 pages. click for full story
Ignoring the Scripts
(Issue 095, February 1, 2004)
Why have dynamic languages failed to achieve any kind of traction under .NET? At .NET’s launch two years ago, the separation of platform and language was heralded by some, including myself, as .NET’s greatest strategic advantage. The ability to use languages as diverse and interesting as Python and Haskell with the sweeping functionality of the Base Class Library (BCL) seemed to open the floodgates for a revitalized interest in alternative languages. But today, the use of dynamic languages to power an ASP.NET Web site is practically unheard of. click for full story
.Netting Office, VSTO-Style
(Issue 094, January 15, 2004)
Visual Studio Tools for Office is an add-on for Microsoft Visual Studio that allows you to program Word and Excel in C# or Visual Basic .NET. While it doesn’t make these powerful applications seamless software components able to consume and provide services for arbitrary .NET classes, it does bring considerable power to document processing solutions. click for full story
Dramatic Changes
(Issue 093, January 1, 2004)
The first releases of the .NET Framework emphasized the similarities of languages adhering to the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). The ease with which one could move between programming in the 1.x versions of Visual Basic .NET and C# was startling. On more than one occasion, I’ve opened some sample code or misclicked in the “New Project” dialog, and found myself using a language different from the one I expected, but just shrugged and got on with the task at hand. In the “Whidbey” release of the .NET SDK, now in the hands of Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference attendees and MSDN subscribers, the theme is language divergence. click for full story
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