Almost four years ago I wrote an article entitled C# from a Java Developer's Perspective which is still one of the most popular comparisons of C# and Java on the Web. The article gets a couple thousand hits a month and I still get email about it from developers thanking me for writing it. Given the amount of changes in Java 1.5 5.0 and C# 2.0 I think the time has come to update this article. Below is my proposed table of contents for the new version. I'd appreciate comments on anything people thing is either missing or placed incorrectly.

1. The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same
   This section describes concepts and language features that are almost exactly the same in C# and Java.
1. We Are All Objects
2. Keyword Jumble
3. Of Virtual Machines and Language Runtimes
4. Heap Based Classes and Garbage Collection
5. Arrays Can Be Jagged
6. No Global Methods
7. Interfaces, Yes. Multiple Inheritance, No.
8. Strings Are Immutable
9. Unextendable Classes
10. Throwing and Catching Exceptions
11. Member Initialization at Definition and Static Constructors
12. Generics - new!!!
13. Boxing - new!!!
14. Variable Length Parameter Lists - new!!!
    
    
2. The Same But Different
   This section describes concepts and language features that differ either only in syntax or in some similarly minor manner between C# and Java.
   1. Main Method
   2. Inheritance Syntax
   3. Run Time Type Identification (is operator)
   4. Namespaces
   5. Constructors, Destructors and Finalizers
   6. Synchronizing Methods and Code Blocks
   7. Access Modifiers
   8. Reflection
   9. Declaring Constants
   10. Primitive Types
   11. Array Declarations
   12. Calling Base Class Constructors and Constructor Chaining
   13. For or is that foreach loops? - new!!!
   14. Metadata Annotations - new!!!
   15. Enumerations - new!!!
       
       
3. An Ever So Slight Feeling of Dj Vu
   This section describes concepts and language features that exist in C# that are similar to those that exist in Java but with a significant difference.
   1. Nested classes
   2. Threads and Volatile Members
   3. Operator Overloading
   4. switch Statement
   5. Assemblies
   6. Collections
   7. goto (no longer considered harmful)
   8. Virtual Methods (and final ones too)
   9. File I/O
   10. Object Serialization
   11. Documentation Generation from Source Code Comments
   12. Multiple Classes in a Single File
   13. Importing Libraries
   14. Events
   15. Cross Language Interoperability
       
       
4. Now For Something Completely Different
   This section describes language features and concepts that exist in C# and have no Java counterpart.
1. Deterministic Object Cleanup
2. Delegates - changed!!!
3. Value Types (Structs)
4. Run Time Type Identification (as operator)
5. Properties - changed!!!
6. Multidimensional Arrays
7. Indexers
8. Preprocessor Directives - changed!!!
9. Aliases
10. Runtime Code Generation
11. Pointers and Unsafe Code
12. Pass by Reference
13. Verbatim Strings
14. Overflow Detection
15. Explicit Interface Implementation
16. Friend Assemblies - new!!!
17. The Global Namespace Qualifier - new!!!
18. Continuations (Iterators) - new!!!
19. Partial Classes - new!!!
20. Anonymous Methods - new!!!
    
    
5. Wish You Were Here
   This section describes language features and concepts that exist in Java and have no C# counterpart.
   1. Checked Exceptions
   2. Cross Platform Portability (Write Once, Run Anywhere)
   3. Extensions
   4. strictfp
   5. Dynamic Class Loading
   6. Interfaces That Contain Fields
   7. Anonymous Inner Classes
   8. Static Imports - new!!!
      

Aaron Skopnnard has posted a response to my Contract-First XML Web Service Design is No Panacea blog post. In his post The virtue of contract-first Aaron Skonnard writes

I love being challenged on my opinions. I've been challenged extensively regarding my opinion on contract-first development, although mostly by folks at Microsoft like Don , Doug , and Dare . The funny thing is when I have the same discussions with folks in the field building systems today, it's a no-brainer.

 

So why the disconnect between vendors and the rest of the world?

 

I believe it's because most vendors don't see (or appreciate) the main virtue of the contract-first approach, which has more to do with collaboration than interoperability. The latter is a result of the former. Let me explain.

 

Interoperability is the net result of a well-designed contract. By "well-designed" I mean a contract that experiences fewer interoperability issues when used across a variety of toolkits. Simply using contract-first does not guarantee a good contract. However, increased collaboration during contract does. This means getting all parties (everyone who will have to deal with the contract) involved early, during design, so you can identify what will and won't work in each implementation environment. This allows you to bring local expertise to the table early in the process before the implementation investment begins. This process influences the subset of XSD constructs that can be safely used given the identified limitations.

I mentioned in a recent post that I was considering writing an article entitled Using Javascript, XMLHttpRequest and RSS to create an MSN Spaces photo album browser. It actually took less work than I thought to build a webpage that allows you to browse the photo albums in a particular person's Space or from a randomly chosen Space. 

I haven't used Javascript in about 5 years but it didn't take much to put the page together thanks mostly to the wealth of information available on the Web.

You can find the page at http://www.25hoursaday.com/spaces/photobrowser.html 

The page requires Javascript and currently only works in Internet Explorer but I'm sure that some intrepid soul could make it work in Firefox in a couple of minutes. If you can, please send me whatever changes are necessary.  

The current issue of Seattle's favorite free weekly newspaper has an article entitled Microsoft Caves on Gay Rights which describes recent happenings in local politics about how Microsoft apparent withdrawal of support for a state bill that would prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians may have been key in preventing the law from passing.

I've tried to write down my feelings about the issue several times over the past few days but words have escaped me. In the meantime you should read some posts from others at Microsoft who've done a better job a capturing their disappointment with our employer than I seem able.

1. Robert Scoble: Steve Ballmer's memo posted, my reply
2. Cyrus Najmabadi: Gay Rights (part 2)
3. Adam Barr: Microsoft and the Anti-Discrimination Bill

I also strongly disagree with Vic Gundotra's post in his response Responding to Scoble. Corporations should not be amoral entities that only exist to generate money. They employee members of a community, they exist as part of community and their actions affect both local and global communities. Sometimes the greatest sins are acts of omission instead of commission.

I hope this feeling of disappointment will soon pass.

Every once in a while I see articles like Aaron Skonnard's Contract-First Service Development which make me shake my head in sorrow. His intentions are good but quite often advising people to design their XML Web services starting from an XSD/WSDL file instead of a more restricted model leads to more problems than what some have labelled the "code-first" approach.

For example, take this recent post to the XML-DEV mailing list entitled incompatible uses of XML Schema

I just got a call from a bespoke client (the XML guru in a large bank)
asking whether I knew of any XML Schema refactoring tools.

His problem is that one of their systems (from a big company)
does not handle recursive elements.  Another one of their
systems (from another big company) does not handle substitution
groups (or, at least, dynamic use of xsi:type.) Another of their
systems (from a third big company) does not handle wildcards.
(Some departments also used another tool that generated ambiguous
schemas.)

This is causing them a major headache: they are having to
refactor 7,000 element schemas by hand to munge them into
forms suited for each system.

Their schema-centricism has basically stuffed up the ready
interoperability they thought they were buying into with XML,
on a practical level. This is obviously a trap: moving to a
services-oriented architecture means that the providers can
say "we provide XML with a schema" and the pointy-headed bosses
can say "you service-user: this tool accepts XML with a schema
so you must use that!" and the service-user has little recourse.

This is one of the problems of contract first development that many of the consultants, vendors and pundits who are extolling its virtues fail to mention. A core fact of building XML Web services that use WSDL/XSD as the contract is that most people will use object<->XML mapping technologies to either create or consume the web services. However there are fundamental impedance mismatches between the W3C XML Schema Definition (XSD) Language and objects in a traditional object oriented programming language that ensure that these mappings will be problematic. I have written about these impedance mismatches several times over the past few years including posts such as The Impedence Mismatch between W3C XML Schema and the CLR.

Every XML Web Service toolkit that consumes WSDL/XSD and generates objects has different parts of the XSD spec that they either fail to handle or handle inadequately. Many of the folks encouraging contract first development are refusing to acknowledge that if developers  build schemas by hand for use in XML Web Services, it is likely they will end up using capabilities of XSD that are not supported by one or more of their consuming applications. The post from XML-DEV is just one example of this happening. When I was the program manager for XML Schema technologies in the .NET Framework I regularly had to help customers who had to deal with the interoperability problems they encountered because they'd read some article extolling the virtues of schema first design which failed to acknowledge the realities of the XML Web Service landscape.

From my experience "contract first" design is actually more likely to lead to interoperability problems than "code first" design. The only time this isn't the case is when the schema designer actually pays attention to use a minimal subset of XSD as opposed to using its full capabilities. This is one of the reasons I have tried to provide some guidance on what XSD features to avoid in my XML Schema Design guidelines series on XML.com.

However it is far easier to avoid these missteps if one starts from objects instead of XSD/WSDL since the expressiveness of objects is less than that of XSD which automatically means the web service contracts are less complicated. I remember getting this insight from Don Box and Doug Purdy a couple of months ago and rejecting it at the time since it seemed anti-XML but now I realize that it is actually the most practical thing to do.

Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal recently tried out MSN Spaces and has a review in today's issue. His review Microsoft Service Lets You Create A Nice Blog, But Limits Tweaking contains the following excerpts

If you think that only techies can launch a blog, or Web log, to share their views with friends, family or the whole Internet -- think again. Numerous online services make it dead simple for anyone to create a blog, at no cost, with no technical knowledge whatsoever.
...
Google got a big jump when it bought a service called Blogger (blogger.com). Today, the company hosts an estimated eight million blogs. Yahoo is developing an elaborate service called Yahoo 360 (360.yahoo.com), which offers blogging and other features designed to connect people. It's currently in a test phase, open only by invitation.

Microsoft has just launched its own blogging service, called MSN Spaces (spaces.msn.com). Because it's the newest of the giants' offerings to complete its test phase, I decided to try it out. Microsoft says it already has more than seven million blogs in Spaces, and is adding new ones at a rate of over 100,000 a day.

My verdict: MSN Spaces is very well done. It makes it easy to create a simple, attractive blog with text, links and photos, and to customize the blog in interesting ways

The review was quite favorable which is great news for us because it means we've done a good job at hitting our target demographic. This is awesome given that this is just the first version. 

A number of the criticisms in the article related to limited customizability are things we are aware about and plan to address in future releases. Y'all should nag Karen with your ideas. :)

As for the number of spaces created so far, that isn't a typo. We've added over 2.5 million spaces since it came out of beta two weeks ago. 100,000 new spaces a day is actually a conservative number, we were seeing multiples of that number shortly after launch but I assume our current adoption rate will hover at that number for now.

I recently stumbled on a post entitled The end of the quest for the perfect RSS reader which made my day. The author wrote

RSS readers have lately been appearing all over the place, however, until recently I wasn’t able to find the perfect one. My needs are not huge. I want a reader which can synchronize feeds and read posts between several PCs, have a useful and selectable notification mechanism so I don’t miss important news, but still don’t get bothered with less important ones, display feeds in a tree without favicons, be robust and fairly fast, provide descent search functionality and saved searches, flag news items for easy follow up and review.

I have tried most of the existing Windows and web based aggregators, and each one had some of these missing. I recently checked the new version of RSS Bandit and my quest for the perfect RSS reader seems to have come to an end. RSS Bandit features all I need and provides even more nice goodies like integrated Feedster and Google searches.

If you are not completely satisfied with your reader, give RSS Bandit a spin. You won’t regret it.

It's really good to see people getting so much use of my favorite RSS reader. Of course, there is still a lot of interesting stuff we'd like to add to make it even better. Check out the roadmap for the Nightcrawler release to see where we plan to go in the next release.

If you currently aren't an RSS Bandit user but would like to try it out, download the latest version from here.

Exhibit A: From The Submarine by Paul Graham

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

Exhibit B: From My Dinner With Microsoft's Jim Allchin in Thomas Hawk's weblog

Last night I had a unique opportunity to sit down with Jim Allchin, Microsoft’s Group Vice President for Platforms, for dinner along with a group of other bloggers and technologists and discuss the future development of Longhorn as well as see an early demo of the Longhorn technology firsthand.

Exhibit C: From A comment on Slashdot by Thomas Hawk about the dinner

I do feel that there is room in the world of journalism for hard news, op/ed and yes, openly biased writing where the blogger places him or her self as a participant in the news itself.

Was I thrilled to be having dinner with Allchin? Of course. I'm a huge Microsoft enthusiast. I have been an advocate of the digital home for many years and I think that Microsoft may represent our best chance possible of making the digital home of the future a reality.

Was I really enthused about Longhorn? Absolutely. From what I saw it was really was amazing. I spend hundreds of hours every year organizing digital media in front of all five of my Windows PCs. The technology that I saw will save me hundreds of hours of work going forward. This is really exciting to me at a personal level.

It looks like I didn't get an Extreme XML column out last month. Work's been hectic but I think I should be able to start on a column by the end of the week and get it done before the end of the month. I have a couple of ideas I'd like to write about but as usual I'm curious as to what folks would be interested in reading about. Below are three article ideas in order of preference. 

1. Using Javascript, XMLHttpRequest and RSS to create an MSN Spaces photo album browser: The RSS feed for a space on MSN Spaces contains information about the most recent updates to a user's blog, photo album and lists. RSS items containing lists are indicated by using the msn:type element with the value "photoalbum". It is possible to build a photo album browser for various spaces by using a combination of Javascript for dynamic display and XMLHttpRequest for consuming the RSS feed. Of course, my code sample will be nowhere near as cool as the Flickr related tag browser.

2. Fun with operator overloading and XML: This would be a follow up piece to my Overview of Cω article. This article explores how one could simulate adding XML specific language extensions by overloading various operators on the System.Xml.XmlNode class.

3. Processing XML in the Real World: 10 Things To Worry About When Processing RSS feeds on the Web: This will be an attempt to distill the various things I've learned over the 2 years I've been working on RSS Bandit. It will cover things like how to properly use the System.Xml.XmlReader class for processing RSS feeds in a streaming fashion, bandwidth saving tips from GZip encoding to sending If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match headers in the request, dealing with proxy servers and authentication.

Which ones would you like to see and/or what is your order of preference?

Lenn Pryor who until quite recently was the Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft has left the company for greener pastures. If you don't know of Lenn you should read the notes on Lenn Pryor from Robert Scoble's book blog. Lenn was the guy who came up with Channel 9 and was instrumental in Microsoft hiring Robert Scoble. Particularly interesting is the following description from Robert Scoble's book blog about Lenn's day job

Much of Pryor's job is to serve as a bridge between Scoble and other company elements, such as PR where he has worked to help each to see the other's value and respect each other's turf.

So one might wonder why a guy who was probably been most responsible for the increased corporate transparency at Microsoft would want to leave the company. The answer is in his blog post Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Skype where he writes

I have a lot to say about both companies right now. Microsoft lost me for many reasons, Skype gained me for many reasons. I will let you draw your own conclusions rather than disparage my Microsoft colleagues or over hype my new colleagues and company. I don't believe in writing diatribes and manifestos when moving on from a job so I will spare you the soapboxing. Microsoft has its challenges, we all know what they are, they are more than apparent these days. Skype has its opportunties we all know what they are, who wouldn't like to see the communication and collaboration technologies in their lives get much much smarter and cheaper?

I decided to swap problem sets from one that I am not passionate about any more to one that I AM deeply passionate about. I just couldn't go on being an evangelist for a gospel that I don't believe I can sing. I am returning to focus on what I enjoy most, building amazing things that make people happy, change lives, and make money. In this case Skype was a better place for me to do this and one that shares my core values and beliefs in how the future of both software and business will unfold.

I know lots of people at Microsoft who have voiced the same sentiments that Lenn has. Some like the Mini-Microsoft blogger are anonymous voices in the wilderness begging for change, some like Mark Lucovsky [and Lenn Pryor] leave for other companies that they feel can still make a difference while others have tried to find somewhere at Microsoft that isn't overwhelmed by the current malaise that has smothered main campus. I'd count myself in the latter camp.

At least once a week I want to post a blog entry about how much my job rocks. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to do this that doesn't paint a negative picture of other parts of the company. Our VPs get it and are very open to communication, the product teams have a vision of what they want to build and they want to build it as quickly as possible, and we literally have millions of happy users who are excited about our products. In the places where we are lagging, we have lots of efforts under way to reverse the trend.

I didn't get that feeling when I worked on main campus nor do I see it the few times a month I have to go down there to meet with various folks. However unlike the Mini-Microsoft blogger I don't think Microsoft is Better Off Without Ballmer but I do think something should be done about the company's current funk and it definitely should involve some executive heads rolling.

I hope it doesn't take the stock hitting $10 before some action is taken.