I’m slowly getting through some good sessions from the Tech-Ed (US) DVD set, and making a few notes on the way (appologies to speakers if I’ve butchered their ides): Ingo Rammer - Scalability/Connected Systems Troubleshooting Talk - CSI 448 network profiling - DO THIS FIRST Tools - ethereal (my fave), tcptrace, fiddler, proxytrace Lessons Learned - Interactions: too many or too large - Latency vs. Bandwidth Bandwidth is improving quicker than latency (latency is constrained by speed of light) 1200 BPS modem to download 2 GB- “it’s quicker to walk” SQL Profiling - do this second Look for an appropriate number of statements given the “work“ that needs to be done. »
There was a new XQuery working draft released on September 15th - hopefully the last before it becomes a Recomendation, but it hardly caused a ripple in the .NET developer world. Microsoft had released an alternative Xml query technology - XLinq a few days earlier at the PDC. XLinq will provide “language-level” integration with C# and VB.NET and seems (at casual glance) to provide all the querying capabilites that XQuery provides. XLinq is un-encumbered by standardization efforts, while XQuery has been evolving since 2001 and has still not reached recomendation status. With Michael Brundage (who architected the XQuery implementation in .NET framework 2.0 before it was pulled) now working on the XBOX team (and without many nice things to say about his XQuery experiences) this leaves just the SQL team with any kind of stake in XQuery (SQL 2005 will ship with an implementation of an earlier XQuery working draft). This makes me wonder if we will ever see a .NET XQuery implementation from Microsoft.
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I finally got around to watching that Sparkle video on channel 9 (the video was done for the PDC). Initially I was pretty annoyed with scoble & co - the video was nearly 1GB in size! I guess its understandable when you’re showing flashy eye-candy, you want the high-res. I lost count of the number of times scoble said “so can you edit that from code?” (in reference to graphical objects added in the “Sparkle“ design surface). I think he missed the point that developers shouldn’t really be touching this stuff (in the same way that you don’t want graphic designers editing your WSDL). If the people signing the cheques can lose their infatuation with web applications then there will be a place for a designer using “Sparkle” on every team.
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SQL Server 2000 is one of my favourite Microsoft products - reiable, performs well. A solid bedrock that many other Microsoft server products rely on. Recently I’ve been thinking about the pros and cons of SQL Server hosting the CLR for the general .NET developer. On one hand I think its great for .NET developers that CLR 2.0 is now hosted inside SQL Server 2005. The reliability requiremed for the CLR to run inside the SQL Server process (SQL Server doesn’t have the luxury that IIS does of running . »
After Dominic’s code-camp presentation where he came down fairly strongly against being too “OO” I decided I’d design him a t-shirt to encapsulate his feelings on the matter. And thus was born from the jcooney.net paint + word-art labs the “OO Sucks” t-shirt. Dominic says he plans to wear it to New Employee Orientation in Redmond on Monday. The design features layers upon layers of UML transitioning to jackson-pollock-esque splattered paint, with the words “OO Sucks“ in big letters (as shown below). If you’ve ever opened up a UML diagram and thought “there must have been an explosion at the pattern factory“, or felt like playing “design pattern bingo” with the code you’re maintaining, or just feel like causing trouble at work maybe this is the shirt for you. 4 bytes per allocation - don’t pay the object tax - fight the power. high-res version for making your own t-shirt
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XLinq paper (via Bill McCarthy on ausdotnet) C#3.0 Language Wrap-Up (via Jim Webber) »
Two more new things announced in the last day or so at the PDC - Windows Workflow Foundation and a new suite of design tools collectively called Expression (Sparkle, Acrylic and Quartz). The workflow stuff is probably what interests me the most (installing now) especially seeing how the workflow stuff can be used in conjunction with messaging. None of this is going to be news to readers of my weblog, I just want somewhere permanent to record these links. »
Like every other self-respecting-live-on-the-bleeding-edge-I-want-the-bits-as-soon-as-they-compile .NET geek I’ve been particularly interested in the information released at the PDC including LINQ and ATLAS. Today I spent a sligtly-longer-than usual lunch break playing around with XLinq. My first impressions are as follows: Creating Xml is made much easier with the “compact“ syntax is nice. It seems like VB.NET gets to create “XML in-line“ like Cw does, but C# cannot. A whole “other“ Xml namespace - System. »
I’ve gone off coffee as of Saturday AM. It was somewhat un-intentional. I just sort of missed my usual afternoon coffee on Saturday, and decided I’d see how long I could go without another cup. It’s now Wednesday AM so I’m feeling pretty good about my will-power thus far. Apart from a few head-aches, weird pressure behind my eyes, a few aches and pains and general lethargy it hasn’t been too bad. Paracetamol has helped. Keep in mind that I’m going from 3 double-espressos a day to nothing. I fully intend to drink coffee again, I’m just trying to see how long I can hold out (and hopefully be more moderate when I do start drinking it again).
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I just had a look at Dominic’s F# screen-cast. Seeing some simple F# code “built up” from scratch made the F# syntax very approachable, and testing it from NUnit makes it pretty obvious how you would go and call F# code from regular C# code. Type inference makes me jealous. »
http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2005/12/19/505753.aspx
Just replace all instances of "XSLT 2.0" with "XQuery".
The thing is, I think XQuery’s too hard for hobbyists to implement fully, or with decent perf. Maybe if there’s money to made a company will implement it (like Saxon), but I’m skeptical XQuery’s going to go anywhere – in .NET or out of it.
If the W3C had finished it back in 2002 as first planned, maybe it would have gained more traction. As it is, it’s four years later and the world has figured out XML and SQL and moved on.
Just my $0.02.