Trying to remember first contact with Microsoft  software.   But it was with the Trs 80, Altair, and IBM PC, might even have the Old PC dos books for DOS 1.01. 

Douglas

The one I am looking at is http://blog.paulbetts.org/index.php/2010/06/15/reactivexaml-a-compelling-combination-of-mvvm-and-reactive-extensions-rx/

Although, there have been several discussions on stackoverflow and general musings accross the net. 

D

Would like to see a unification of win phone 7 and desktop and wpf.  but beyond that I want to see it done right.  

D

D

Which imo is something that the Data team at MS should be looking at strongly.  It is a weakness within the sql relational database system (which is interesting given the name that the rdbms is given is that relations have the least most complicated implementation in a rdbms)

DouglasH

Bass said:

rhm said:

*snip*

How do you do WPF development in CRuby? You could with IronRuby. You could mix and match C# and Ruby code in your ASP.NET projects. You could have a no effort Ruby scripting API for your app. This kind of stuff is very difficult to do with the C runtime.

 

I don't really even see much of a reason to use CRuby. JRuby is a fairly complete Ruby implementation. But it has full Java interop. And get this, it actually runs Ruby _faster_ then the original implementation. IronRuby had a lot of potential. It could have been the premier Ruby implementation with just a little more effort on Microsoft's part. IMO.

 

Dropping these languages really detracts from the whole "one runtime to rule them all" mantra. Well maybe that mantra never really existed. Maybe at some point Microsoft will change CLR to stand for C# Language Runtime.

Isn't that true just from the codedom, samples released.  

Think the best statement I have heard for the state of the codedom,  it is the best platform for creating code as long as it is exactly C#,  even in the case of generating VB.net. 

My Gut feeling is that within 2 versions F# will no longer be a language available in VS.  Given the removal of Jscript, in the recent past. apparent removal of support of the Iron languages. 

The sad part is that there will have to be a fundamental change of the BCL (immutable types, Isolation, actor based passing? instead of tightly coupled method passing) to support the coming multiprocessor revolution.  (talking 12 core or more)   So I do see significant changes coming in the near futre to all the base languages.  

Douglas

exoteric said:

Charles said:

*snip*

He's reflecting on the fact that F# has a dynamic feel to it due to its strong support for type-inference.

And there are strong hints that we may see this in C# in the future.

I personally believe it is a huge waste of time to repeat twice when setting up a variable when Compilers have long

be efficient at inferring type in 90% of the cases.

Douglas

mstefan said:

turrican said:

*snip*

Nothing to do with the language per se, I just don't really like how functional programming "feels", if that makes sense. I guess it's the result of years of indoctination with procedural programming. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

is that because Functional programming feels like real math and less objecty?? but is largely more composable if the problem is broken down properly.

BTW, SQL is largely a functional language. as well as xslt. for that matter most query languages. 

It has been said that those that learn functional programming become better procedural programmers, namely because they become better in breaking up the problem in more composable patterns.,

D

ManipUni said:

xgamer said:

*snip*

Agreed.

I think nobody cares. They all use metrics like speed, CPU usage, and ACID[x] to test the "quality" of their browsers. That's why you haven't seen browser UI change very much and why quality of life features are never addressed. The only reason we got built in web-search boxes was the HUGE amount of money to be made.

Well how many actually print to dead trees these days??

Although that is a huge complaint I do have about HTML5. 

D

ZippyV said:

joechung said:

*snip*

Will HTML5 then be XML compliant?

the answer to that question is yes and no.

HTML5 is defineing both a xml and a html version of the standard.  If it is delivered as XML then it must be xml compatable and that is backwards compatable with HTML unfortantly they are also defineing a HTML version that is not XML compliant.

Clear as mud??

Douglas

exoteric said:

TommyCarlier said:

*snip*

There is the issue of self-canibalization: since Silverlight is now Microsofts pendant to Flash and these media engines support vector graphics, video, animation, etc., it becomes a question of whether to support both fronts equally (Silverlight and the browser) or let one stay ahead of the other. In a sense, if all browsers started supporting vector graphics and video, that might dampen the evolution of these plugged-in engines.

It's probably fair to say that Microsoft prefers the Silverlight architechture to the W3C jigsaw puzzle, otherwise I'd expect them to fully support SVG, SMIL, etc. There's another reason for this preference and that's the natural glide path from Silverlight into WPF with Visual Studio and Expression Blend being the premier development tools for these APIs.

On the other hand it's probably also fair to say that a certain lesson has been learned in that it is not wise to lag too far behind other browsers. So there will be some form of co-evolution, probably - with Silverlight being the clear priority...

In fairness, IE supports or supported native vector graphics via VML and? HTML+TIME - although maybe not in the IE8 engine; I heard CSS expressions (I forget the precise name) were also phased out - but they were proprietary anyway.

I see plugins as a playground for new developments that can be rapidly deployed to the Web (depending on the update experience of the particular plugin).

I believe you state the specific weakness of the w3 specs.

HTML 4.0x xhtml 1.0, plus mathml plus svg plus smil do not work together.

SVG and HTML are top level languages (which in some instances can become sub languages.)

The issue becomes how does the browser interact with all of those specs? on the same page in the multiple domains. 

Opera so far has gone the furtherst in implementing a browser that handles it.  But the primary browser needs to be XML engine that handles the poorly speced 4.0x. if it starts as a html page. or handle html and mathml islands if it starts as svg.

Since css hasn't been completed let to work in that domain it gets more interesting.

That said I believe that the more correct approach would be to define the underlying browser technologies. that handle any language to implement on it.

IOW xHTML, SVG MATHML would all sub class under a super canvas class. But I doubt we wil ever see such a beast coming from the highly political design by committee world of w3.

IMO HTML 5 is already a failure although it will take us closer to actually defining the browser and its fallbacks.

DouglasH

AndyC said:

joechung said:

*snip*

And both of those are a fantastic example of exactly why Microsoft should omit support for unfinished standards from IE, because every web developer who ever dealt with IE6 should know just how painful it can be when something was implemented based on a half finished version of a spec that subsequently changed.

in that MS has already failed then. since they have already implemented some of the more stable parts of HTML 5 in IE 8.  primarily the database features of HTML 5.

joechung said:

I like HTML 5, but I think HTML 4.01 is just fine.  CSS needs fixing more than HTML does.

hmm, I about cringed on the statement that html 4.0x is fine that css needs more fixing.

I will just state it this way, (and the html working group agrees) there isn't a single browser that fully implements html 4.0x, and there will never be any that can because there are several areas in the spec that contridict each other. There is also many areas that are left to interpetation. there is no set rules for error handleing and error fall back. etc etc.

HTML 4.0x and the long line of underspecified specs before it are the Primary reason for the html 5 spec and its wider definition of how a browser should handle different aspects. and has been Jokenly stated that it will release in 2020.

DouglasH

ManipUni said:

wkempf said:

*snip*

The word "Google" means nothing. Just like "Kumo" means nothing. While "Bing" does already have a meaning...

Kumo means "spider" or "cloud" from Japanese.

And Virtual Earth is the first announced to move to the Bing Brand,  Bing Maps for Enterprise.

Codedom which is primarily used in conjunction with the visual designers. 

T4 is being used by EF, MVC and a few other teams.  T4 seems to be less language dependant.

Luke Hoban gave a talk at lang.net about the productization of F# and one of the reasons of not implementing designers at least in v4 was the Codedom

some to the effect that Codedom is design to accept any language that is exactly C# and makes assumptions in the platform to that effect.

The questions I would have is are there any plans to make codedom and/or t4 more language agnostic so that code generation can target more languages easier??

the second is tooling support for t4, although there are free tools out there that work with .tt files

and open the floor for any other questions. but it would be an interesting discussion from the code generation standpoint from the various designers implemented in VS. from Cider, EF, etc etc.

Thanks Douglas

Charles said:

Sven Groot said:

*snip*

Yes. The editor is broken. Let me manually fix it...

C

EDIT: Duncan has been informed. Apparently, the editor creates relative path strings out of URL input data: removes the protocol and domain from the URL...

Thanks Charles that was an interesting interview.  Abstract? interfaces sound very interesting. sort of a poor mans mixin??. But something that is sorely needed in OO either way as Interfaces versioning currently is a Pain.

Isolation and message passing will be interesting in how it is integrated into the current languages.  I know Axum is playing with it in a non class based way, haven't started playing with it yet. Been playing more with F#.

Exoteric, that may be the case, I know IronRuby have implemented mixins.  But is that because of DLR, I know there was a talk at last years Lang.net where mixins were implemented also for C# but they were asking for language support.  Mixins solve a lot of the multiple inheritance issues without alot of the issues.  (Ruby is a single inheritance language also).

Continuations??

thanks Douglas

can we revisit this topic from 2004??

since that was way back before whidbey was released.  now what is missing from the CLR updated to 2010 would be an interesting revisit.

Continuations, and Mixins would be a good discussion. 

Thanks Douglas

Evil SEO said:

"No more so than your "it doesn't on work on my machine; wait actually it's not my machine, I have this friend... ok I admit it I read it on the Internet" nonsense."

It's widely known that many companies didn't release 64bit drivers for their hardware and that the older drivers for XP x64 have hard times working on Vista x64 because Microsoft requires signed certificates while on Vista 32bit you can run most XP drivers, including video and sound drivers without issues because no certificates are required, no need to ask to friends or look on teh interwebs, everybody knows that a lot of older hardware doesn't work on 64bit windows systems because hardware companies couldn't care less to port, test, and pay for WHQL certification for discontinued hardware, knowing that if they did then you'd have no reasons to buy newer hardware from them.

"Yes, there is short term grief to be had with going off the deep and supporting 64 bit properly. Apple will have to pay that price sometime down the road. And honestly, if you want to blame people for buggy or missing 64 bit drivers, blame the people who write those drivers, not MS."

Hardware makers aren't supposed to support their products forever so no need to blame them unless they're Logitech, Creative, Canon or Dlink that discontinue their products way too quickly. On OS X you can run 64bit applications and use the extra memory without being forced to install 64bit drivers so there are no hardware backward compatibility issues, Apple is already requiring hardware makers to release driver packages with both 32bit and 64bit drivers inside so when Apple will permanently drop the 32bit kernel in a few years you'll probably have all your 64bit drivers already there (and already tested by people who tried using Leopard x64) without having to desperately go looking for modded drivers or drivers for similar hardware that could work like you have to do on Windows. It's a much better approach than Microsoft's that moved everything to 64bit caring only about applications but not about drivers and killed backward compatibility with XP 64bit drivers by accepting only signed drivers, on OS X you get all of the 64bit advantages without being required to dump any of your older incompatible hardware.

Sven Groot said:

Evil SEO said:

*snip*

Fair enough. On my system, most games suffer about a 20-40% loss in performance in DX10 mode compared to DX9 mode, but this is likely due to my video card.

It's true that pure 64 bit mode isn't going to help straight computation much. Sure, the extra registers will make some difference, but you won't see it except in some very specific situations.

However, Paolo's original assertion was that 32/64 bit context switches on MacOS X causes overhead. I don't really see how comparing 64 bit and 32 bit Windows to each other has any relevance to that at all.

OnlyJack said:

Yggdrasil said:

*snip*

I wish I knew before that posts titles can't be edited since this one was my first post. I had to cut&paste the post and rewrite the title at least four times because I was keeping getting a nice "The server method AddPost failed." msgbox all the time.

I think the issue is in the videocard itself, I've read of some people flashing other video bioses to stop the issue however if all you need to make it stop is specify through msconfig boot options how much RAM and how many processors/cores your CPU has it's definitely either a driver issue or the OS reporting wrong values to the video driver. What is known is that it's not just me having the issue, there are at least 40 pages about the problem on AMD forums (that I linked in my 2nd post) and also tweaked Catalyst drivers like DNA's are including a patch for the issue.

That said, it's still nonsense for the windows setup to lack an option to disable third-party drivers loading during the install because Microsoft cannot ensure that all the included OEM drivers in the windows install disc will work correctly on any PC configuration. For instance, when I installed vista for the first time, the install was BSODding too due to the broken JMicron driver included in the disc and I wasn't the only one with that issue, just look at some of the titles of these google results. In that case I could get rid of the BSOD by selecting IDE mode (not available on all BIOSes) or by loading a newer JMicron the driver from the setup but as said this can't be done with all drivers because only few hardware manufacturers give you those pretty ZIP files with just the "naked" driver inside requiring no extra useless software or setups to work that can be loaded in the windows setup.