Sam Ruby Meetup @
CrossRoads
It looks like we are going to end up with twenty or
more people if everyone who said they'd be there
actually shows up. The CrossRoads
food court is a good choice given their good mix of
"restaurants" which should satisfy the possibly
diverse tastes of the attendees. Peter
Drayton swung by my office last week and we
talked about an after dinner activity and he
suggested a movie which seems like a good idea if
no one minds getting home past ten. Crossroads has
a decent movie theater although I prefer the Regal
Bella Botega which is a short distance away. I'll
suggest
this to Sam.
Speaking of meetups this reminds me of last year's
meetup with Me, Joshua, Dr. GUI, Omri, Lee Fisher,
Sam and Miguel. It's funny looking back at the blog
entries from Sam, Joshua and myself when we barely
knew each other. It was my first month in the Belly
of the Beast, how assimilated I seem now looking
back at those posts. Below are our posts about last
year's dinner at
Palomino.
I can't find Miguel's post because his
activity log doesn't provide a mechanism for
reading old entries. He needs to fix that. :)
Speaking of Miguel, there is
a nice article about him and the Mono project in
Business 2.0. Good stuff.
#Black
Holocaust
A few weekend's ago I dashed off to the store to
pick up some groceries and since I hadn't done
laundry in a while threw on a shirt from my college
freshman days. While in line at the checkout
counter the cashier asks "what's that on your
shirt?". I said it represents the
Black Holocaust. She asks again, "What's the
Black Holocaust?" to which I responded "Slavery".
Talk about awkward silences...
For those curious about what the shirt looks like
it had an image similar to
this or
this with the words "Black Holocaust 1619 -
present" above the image and "Me and You, Yo' Mama
and Yo' Cousin Too" below it. Of course, words made
more sense when I attended a
black college but
seem out of place now when the readers of the
T-shirt would not be black 99% of the time.
My MLK Day thoughts a day late.
#Confused
Marketing Messages
Slashdot recently ran
a story about the fact that Microsoft dropped .NET
name from the next Windows server. It is
incredibly amusing reading post after post by
people claiming to know what .NET really means then
giving definitions that don't match anything our
marketing folks or execs say. Of course,
some Microsoft
folks are just as guilty of this.
If you look at
interviews
with Steve Ballmer or
with
Bill Gates when they talk about .NET they seem
to focus a lot on XML and Web Services. This is
reinforced by the
What is .NET? page on the Microsoft
website.
Of course, this causes confusion since most people
including fellow Microserfs tend to think of the
.NET Framework as being .NET which according to the
above is not necessarily the case. Here are some
zen like questions to get the brain jogging
If I use a C# application to parse my log files,
is that .NET? What if the log files are in
XML?
If I use a Windows
Forms application that uses
ADO.NET to connect to an Access database to
process my customer information, is that
.NET?
If I use a C++ or VB6 application that utilizes
the
SOAP toolkit to talk to Amazon and Google's
web service interfaces in combination with some
custom data to create a new web service, is that
.NET?
My answers to those questions given the
aformentioned links are No, No and Yes. Of course,
90% of the people on the Slashdot thread (or even
in the Belly of the Beast) would disagree. Aren't
confusing marketing messages fun?
#The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly about Working with Visual
Studio.NET and the .NET Framework
I found an article entitled the
Two Faces of .NET which is a fairly balanced
look at the pros and cons of development using
Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework. He
praises the good stuff and disses the bad then
points out some of the really ugly spots as well.
For those who don't have time to read it or want to
read it here are some highlights
GOOD- "ADO.Net's distributed data paradigm which is
a huge step up from ADO, and of course ASP.Net's
new Web Form metaphor which is changing the way
we think about Web development."
- "Stream usage for everything from strings to
files, XML data, to i/o ports and protocols is
another one that you use on a daily basis. This
reusability of skills learned once makes it
easier to implement applications quicker "
- "Then there's Visual Studio .Net, which as a
development environment is also impressive to
work with"
BAD- "Yes, the databinding mechanism is very
powerful with its ability to bind anything to
anything and the ability to page through data if
it uses enumerable interfaces. But it takes a lot
of hand written code to accomplish this."
UGLY- "I've had at least 5 forms 'blow up' on me
where the form designer all of a sudden decided
that all contained controls no longer exist. The
code is all still there, and the form compiles
and runs correctly, but the designer doesn't show
any of it." [This has happened to me while
working on RSS Bandit and I know have
workarounds]
- "The .Net documentation in MSDN is a major
issue as well, especially for more advanced
topics."
By the way, you may have noticed that even though
the article has .NET in the title he doesn't focus
on XML or web services. Yep, another victim of the
B0rg's confused marketing message.
#
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