What the... Hey!

Jon Galloway is afraid of DLINQ

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:44:40 GMT

In his Blog, Jon Galloway says that DLINQ scares him. He says that he’s afraid of code maintainability and people “abusing” the feature. He could make the same statement about UI development, or threading. Frankly, making it easier to do something increases the chances of abuse. That’s a given. Whether its queries integrated into the language, operator overloading, or even public attributes. This is where standards and discipline come in. Frankly, I think LINQ is ground breaking technology, and DLINQ is just what the doctor ordered for SQL Server queries.

PDC's over

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 22:47:16 GMT

Well, that’s it. PDC ‘05 is officially history. I can’t even get to the online site to post my evaluations of the sessions I saw today.

So, today I spent most of my time at panel discussions. It was great to have the bulk of the panels all day Friday. It made it a whole lot easier to figure out what to see. Which leads me to my central theme for this posting:

This was the best organized conference I’ve ever been to. Now, I’ve been going to development conferences for over 10 years. I’ve seen really big ones, like the year that Software Development was held with the first Java One conference, and I’ve been to really small ones, like the Software Development conference that coincided with the start of the Iraq war. And, yes, I’ve been to conferences other than Software Development too! But, let me reiterate: this was the best organized conference I’ve ever been to. Here are some of the things I think that others should be emulating:

1. Food: There was food available at all times. Easy to eat stuff that included both the typical “junk” food that so many developers run on as well as more “healthy” stuff like tons of fruit. Coffee was also always available in copious quantities. While lunch was also served, I neither partook of it or missed it. I never had to stop going to sessions in order to eat. Instead, I was picking all day long, while packing in the sessions.

2. Lounges: There were lounges set up in the Big Room, each of which was dedicated to a different track. People could hang out in the lounges and talk to experts in that particular field. Okay, so MS was mainly interested in using this venue to push its products. That’s always the case. The main thing was that this created yet another place were attendees could get together with each other as well as speakers they may have heard.

3. Computers: There were PC’s everywhere! In fact, all reviews were done online, so there weren’t the usual little pieces of paper you had to deal with at the end of each session. You could also use the PC’s to get up to date info on the conference as well as just do general Internet stuff, like checking your e-mail.

4. Network Connections: This leads to the next great thing. WiFi everywhere (nearly) and tons of tables set up with both power and wired connections. It was trivial to stay connected with both the conference and the outside world while here, thanks to the ubiquitous network connections available. In fact, I didn’t even attend Bill Gates’ keynote; I watched it on my laptop! No crowds, no lines. And I could read the news while listening.

5. BOF’s: There were tons of BOF sessions. And, these were real BOF’s, not just marketing opportunities for various consultants (or MS for that matter). My only real beef was that the sessions were always late at night (starting at 9:00), and since I wasn’t at a conference hotel, this made attending inconvenient.

6. Shuttles: All of the conference hotels (not mine, unfortunately) were on a shuttle route, with the shuttles running continuously. So, if you wanted to go back to your hotel for an hour or so, and then return you could do it (fairly) easily.

7: Panels: Lots of panel discussions. We tech heads love panel discussions. Get the experts on stage together and give us a chance to ask them the hard questions. And better yet, they reserved a day for these panels, so I didn’t have to give up some other activity to see them.

I don’t know how much money MS spent on this shindig (A lot, I think), and I don’t know how profitable another conference that offered these features would be. I do know that all of these things would attract tons more people than I’ve seen at other conferences recently.

The folks at SD Expo should especially take note.

PDC: LINQ and C# 3.0

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 02:12:02 GMT

Anders Hejlsberg is a genius. No, he’s a god! Okay, maybe LINQ isn’t really all his idea, so there’s praise to go around his team. However, all in all, this is massive! Not only does the LINQ project solve what has been a huge problem with general purpose programming languages for years, but it did it in a domain-generalized way. The result f which is a great addition of functionality to C#, and any other language that also provides for its capabilities.

LINQ is big, big, big. Not only the query language itself, which is marvelous itself, but also the concept of Extensions to existing classes, and the various other features being added to C# 3.0. I agree with Anders’ point that it allows for the kind of ease of development found only in dynamic languages without the messiness that typelessness adds. Bravo to all! This technology seems pretty new to me, so I don’t know where it’ll eventually go (I suspect that Sun will be making changes to their road map for Java soon ), but I think this could be bigger than Aspect Oriented programming.

PDC: Monad

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:45:03 GMT

How could two developers take a compelling concept like shell scripting for Windows and turn it into a barely tolerable presentation? Well, these guys did it. They introduced themselves as developers, but they acted all the world like marketing shills. I nearly walked out of the presentation several times.

However, Monad really is compelling stuff. It’s kind of like the Perl for Windows, providing a combination of capabilities and rules for allowing someone to tie just about any technology into the command line and Monad’s scripting engine. I’ll be downloading the (now available) Monad beta and giving it a try. It’s too bad it won’t be shipping with Vista, though the shills were hoping that decision may change. I’d think that was a possibility, now that both are in beta.

PDC: Writing a Dynamic Language Compiler

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 16:40:08 GMT

Back to the PDC: Yesterday I saw a presentation on writing a dynamic language compiler using .NET.

It was very good. They glossed over a lot of the fundamental issues (using code snippers in VS 2005), but gave a good explanation of the features in .NET to support code generation. Especially, the new features added to provide better support for dynamic languages, where code is compiled, executed, and thrown away.

I’ve had a long standing interested in domain specific languages, and so it was interesting to see these guys do their thing in .NET.

Now, if I could just figure out how to do an official evaluation of the session… The PDC site keeps changing…

What's working (well)

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:37:55 GMT

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out those tidbits that are are really working well at the PDC.

First of all, the networking. Between the near-ubiquitous WiFi to the abundant wired connections (along with power!), networking at the PDC raises personal connectedness to a new level. I can’t imagine anyone doing a technical conference in the future without at least some of this capability (you hear this, Software Development?). It’s fantastic.

The Big Room: What a concept. I just took a quick tour of the room. It’s fantastic. There’s a store in there selling books and tons of Microsoft identity swag. Whod’ve thought that you could actually sell swag? It sure makes it easy to pick up those “souvenirs” for the guys who couldn’t make it to the conference. Also, they have “lounges” set up for different topics, seeded with various MS personnel to “guide” the talks. Okay, this is really just Marketing, but it’s good Marketing. They’ve made it easy to do or not do. Then, there’s the guided tutorial room: rows and rows of computers all hooked up and ready to guide folks though the paces. This is really the way to do things. It keeps people involved.

The Game Area. I’d be more impressed with the gaming area if there were a way for me to log into WoW from here. After all, for the MMORPG crowd, that’s gaming today, not this other tournament stuff. I suppose there has to be some room for improvement into the future.

All in all, these are things that should be going on at all tech conferences. This should be what it’s all about.

PDC: The first (real) day

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 18:15:20 GMT

Today’s the first official day of the PDC, since the previous two days were officially “pre-conference” days. Big Bill did his speech at the opening. I watched over the Internet instead of dealing with the crowds in the hall. It was a wise decision, if I do say so myself. I could go through my morning news reading while Bill talked in the background. As usual, Bill just gave the party line, the one leading up to Longhorn, I mean Vista. Microsoft has been spamming us with so much Vista stuff over the years, that Billl’s stuff was a yawner. Yeah, it looks nice, and the Sidebar feature will probably be a nice addition. I already feel like I have way too much real estate on my desktop with 2 21 inch flat panels on my desk. Being able to put part of that desktop to better use via the Sidebar will be nice. Of course, I seriously doubt that I’ll be upgrading to Vista. There just isn’t any compelling technology there to cause my company to make the (huge) investment necessary to upgrade everybody.

The Office 12 was another story. I thought that Office 2003 was nice; better than the previous though (once again) not different enough to warrant an upgrade (heck, we’re still using Office XP at work). However, Office 12 looks very nice. I’m looking forward to test driving the real product when its out. Once again, I don’t know if I’d upgrade my current system, though. While it would be nice, it’s hard to justify the cost.

I think that this is Microsoft’s biggest problem going forward. Not Linux, and certainly not Java. Their biggest problem is market. Too much of the market is already “satisfied” with what they have. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Microsoft’s future lies in subscriptions / services. I’d pay a (reasonable) annual fee to keep my Microsoft software up to date, especially if it also included some level of tech support. I think Microsoft understands this too. What they’re groping with is how to get their existing customers to switch. I think it’s going to take cold turkey. They just have to stop offering their products any other way. Of course, for this to work, their update technology is going to have to improve dramatically. Can you imagine going from Windows XP to Windows Vista via an update? Now, wouldn’t that be cool? Or would it just be a headache for Microsoft…

Lights Out

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:22:30 GMT

So, I was sitting in my hotel room getting a bit of work done, when the electricity suddenly went off. It didn’t bother me since I’ve got battery, and its daylight. Since there’s heavy construction going on right outside my window, I figured that someone hit a power line nearby.

It wasn’t until the power came back on in an hour or so that I found out that the whole city had lost power (it made the national news!). At least, how the rest of the world defines “whole city”, since I was sitting in a hotel room in LA watching a national newscast telling the world that all of LA was without power! I guess it’s like those national weather forecasts that always show rain in the Northwest…

At least, this vindicated my not being at PDC today. all those guys were sitting in the dark.

Free Day

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 03:18:41 GMT

Well, today was a free day for me. Microsoft (in their infinite wisdom) decided to handle pre-conference registration by handing out those colored bands that get used for conferences. To compound things, they handed out the bands first, then (in another room) handed out the bags. So, as a result, my band for today went into my pocket. Well sometime between registration and this morning when I put my pants on, the band disappeared.

So, how does Microsoft handle this? they want me to pay another $600 to attend a rather questionable session on Visual Studio Extension. I laughed, and gave myself a “free day”. Sometimes I wonder just who is running the show at Microsoft. sheesh.

At the PDC

blog@rapozab.org (Bill Rapoza) — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:39:10 GMT

It’s Sunday, and I’m at the first pre-conference PDC session. Actually, it’s lunch time and I’m sitting at a table outside of the session room. My first session is on C# 2.0. So far, just one real surprise: Thanks to Generics, foreach has gone from the iterating loop of choice to “not so great”. Because, as when templates were added to C++, it’s much faster/cheaper to just add iteration directly to your generic collection classes than deal with the inefficiencies of Enumerators. It turns out that there are still reasons to use Enumerators in C# 2.0, but it’s a whole lot less clear, and frankly, much more esoteric. Unless something changes, look to see foreach getting deprecated as a general looping mechanism in C#.

A word on what I’m doing and where I’m at: This is being brought to you via wireless access at the LA Convention Center, thanks to our host, Microsoft. They even have facilities here for the “great unwashed” that don’t have WiFi capability: wires for direct connects and even Internet Terminals for those who really travelled light.

This as been my first real opportunity to post to the blog. PDX advertises WiFi at the airport, but I couldn’t connect via my laptop. I would’ve suspected the machinations of my IT department, but the WiFi connection at my home worked like a charm. I don’t know what the problem at PDX was, especially since my Palm LifeDrive had no trouble hooking up (note to self: investigate blogging sw for the Palm). My next opportunity was my hotel room at the Radisson Midtown LA. It turns out that this is the weekend that they’re switching over from wired access (piggy backing on USC’s connection) to their own WiFi solution. So, while there’s no connection this weekend, I should have WiFi capability tomorrow (Monday) morning. We’ll see…

As a result of no Internet prior to the conference, I had to scoot here when I got up this morning, since I’d forgotten to print out my pre-conference itinerary. The good news was that my session didn’t start for 2 hours. The bad news was that I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, and there are no real breakfast facilities near the Convention Center. However, I did have 2 hours, and I saw a Holiday Inn at the outskirts of the downtown LA area, so I hoofed it over there and had a nice, if expensive (hotel prices) breakfast there before hoofing it back to the Convention Center. I still ended up back with an hour to spare .

Today’s the short day. It doesn’t look like anything after the pre-conference session, so I can just head back to my room for the evening. Tomorrow I can take my time getting to the Convention Center.