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.

• My Perspective
• Sam's Perspective
• Joshua's Perspective

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.



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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.

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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?

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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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Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.