schrepfler

• Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort

  Aug 31, 2006 at 12:09 AM

  I really liked this interview. The guy is awesome and his stories too. Wargames on a Timewarp OS, "drop everything and focus on Kuwait", and the story about the credit card id's used to track customers and the demise of a superior security system to a focused economic interest were all just great pearls and there were many many more.
  Why can't we use Timewarp simulations to help feed the hungry with the surplus of food that the developed world has, or to better optimize the resources that we have, why do we spend zillions in simulating war insted of simulating stuff that can help our ailing planet to cope with the 6 billion people that live on it? Wouldn't have that been a great idea for the ImagineCup...
  Kudos Charles!
  

• CodePlex: Shared Source coupled with Agility == Happy Team

  Aug 17, 2006 at 11:41 AM

  I would like to congratulate MS on this move. The .Net framework can do much more in regards of evangelizing its use to the open source developers and these communities are fundamental as we can see from sourceforge, tigris, berlios, etc.
  You could gain more projects if you offer some sort of conversion of cvs/subversion/... repositories and issue trackers like bugzilla/trac/jira... to team system.
  That said I try to stay away from TS as I basicly like to have the flexibility of running my own servers... for free, on any OS. I know TS is much more integrated but you can go a long way with a combination of subversion, continuum and track (jira is commercial so I snob that one too).
  Remembering the guy that was talking about the economics behind TS I believe he was (and still is) right on the target market but simply put, there is a too strong competition that is pushing these features to commodity levels (and more things like continuus integration, code coverage, etc).
  I believe that MS should make a low lever TS server that can run on XP and that has certain limitations (on number of developers or concurrent users or limiting just for open source projects like jira) but that can be free with every Visual Studio kit. Why?
  Because we must grab as many developers of the other platforms. And with the other camp offering these tools for free we are loosing developers. I believe the .net framework would benefit far more from more developers that develop with it even though TS as a product might be less profitable (and even that is questionable, as the people would push it to the offices).
  Keep up the good work!
  

• CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

  Jul 29, 2006 at 5:09 PM

  Would it be difficult to create a sequence diagram for this flow (for those of us that think visually)?
  

• CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

  Jul 27, 2006 at 11:02 AM

  Thanks, it makes much more sense now. I'll be definitely check your library out and I hope it'll be moved to the BCL soon just like java  decided to integrate concurrent package in their base libs under java.util.concurrent. If you are aware of it, can you comment of differences between your aproach and theirs?
  I must say that the two demos that have been shown on C9 were quite a thrill but my objection is that the model you've managed to pull off is so radical that I'm having problems digesting it. When I look a demo on java.util.concurrent it makes sense as the higher level concepts are the same tackled for years, while CCR tackles stuff in a seemingly different way so I can't do a apples to apples comparison (that said, it's also the most interesting way of using iterators I've seen yet, .net 2.0 rocks).
  Can you for instance do some demo code where you present traditional concept like the Future pattern or some comparison between java.util.concurrent and CCR (two colums, one java solution, other CCR).
  Also they introduced some new collection types with finer lock granularity, will CCR or BCL try to tackle that as well in the future?
  

• CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

  Jul 27, 2006 at 6:47 AM

  Althought I don't pretend that I understand this library I somehow feel  a event-like syntax would be perhaps more intuitive. For example we could use the += instead of Arbiter.Choice (or would that be counter-intuitive or would complicate the c# syntax?)
  

• ADO.NET Entity Framework: What. How. Why.

  Jul 23, 2006 at 5:23 AM

  Well, although I like the xml approach (it's least invading) I can't help but notice that the java world passed from xml to annotations (which might be also a limitation, java doesn't have partial classes so there can be one view to a model or else they'd need to copy the code that would lead to more mantainence). As far as the exceptions model the only concrete example I know of is in the spring framework where they have their own exception hieararchy and they provide a way to translate the concrete vendor's exception (and it's amazing how many orm's they support).
  Although this might get outside the scope of this discussion spring also offers some interesting things like wrapping the DAO's in a proxy and declaratively assigning transaction poincuts using xml and their AOP magic. I'm just experimenting with this right now and seems very powerfull. On one side I can test my code outside of my container but I'm loosing my exceptions so I'll have to explore more these concepts.
  Anyhow, I don't wan't to be misunderstood. I love .net and if I mention these stuff is because I'd like it to have best of both worlds not because I love java more.
  

• ADO.NET Entity Framework: What. How. Why.

  Jul 22, 2006 at 2:28 PM

  I really like the direction that ADO.Net seems to be taking. I find it much more natural way of blending data access and object oriented design together. I've had a year of dabbling with Hibernate3 and now the new JPA frameworks and personally I'm interested in some issues. First, you always show cases where the DB exists before the app. Instead of this data driven approach will there be a clear model/domain driven approach where we write our entities ourselves? If so what will the ways to express these relationships be, attributes, xml, reflection, other? How are transactions handled? Will there be a rich exception model? Can entities be lazily fetched and how to reattach them to fetch children if it's in another domain? Can we generate and update the schema directly from the model?
  As another reader mentioned it would be nice to do a comparison with these developments in ADO.Net and Hibernate3/JPA/Gentile.net etc.
  I really really like the LINQ integration, I want it yesterday!
  

• Polita Paulus - BLINQ

  Jul 22, 2006 at 4:57 AM

  Looks very promising, what I object is that it's still data driven. You generate a new set of classes that abstract a database (which might be usefull), but why generate new classes if you already have your own set of the domain in question? I believe a coherent Model Driven solution should also exist and I guess with entities the true ORM nature should allow us to use our domain objects directly. At this point we can see a convergence between the approaches of both Java and .Net on persistence and object-relational mapping except that .Net integrates the queries directly in the language.
  

• Chatting about LINQ and ADO.NET Entities

  Jun 15, 2006 at 5:24 PM

  How would one confront to "classic" OR mapping like hibernate/ejb3 and LINQ? Can a OR mapping layer be built on top of it and is IQueryable the gate to it? Are we going to see also some batch operations stuff, db management etc?....
  I should have waited until the end. Nice stuff, I hope to see more on this.
  

• Iain McDonald and Andrew Mason show off the new Windows Server OS

  May 30, 2006 at 7:23 AM

  I'm really amazed how no one on the forum asked why not use Monad as the default shell for the Core Server. On the other hand that would require the .net runtime. Also there was a mention of MMC snap-ins. I believe one of Monad's goals was to provide an easy way to expose a service through the MMC. The attack surface might get a bit bigger but I believe it might be well worth it (or you could make it optional).
  I'm just static about monad but aside it as the engine what it needs is some sort of auto completion (have you seen stuff bash autocompletion does? it's not anymore about simple path completion and admin's digg that very very well).
  If MS plans to ship IIS 7.0 on Core (please do) I think this would become a no-brainer.
  

See more comments…