Comment Feed for schrepfler

Re: Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort

schrepfler — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 07:09:45 GMT

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!

posted by schrepfler

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

schrepfler — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:41:49 GMT

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!

posted by schrepfler

Re: CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

schrepfler — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:09:46 GMT

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

posted by schrepfler

Re: CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

schrepfler — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:02:26 GMT

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?

posted by schrepfler

Re: CCR Programming - Jeffrey Richter and George Chrysanthakopoulos

schrepfler — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:47:55 GMT

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?)

posted by schrepfler

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

schrepfler — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 12:23:30 GMT

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.

posted by schrepfler

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

schrepfler — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 21:28:49 GMT

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!

posted by schrepfler

Re: Polita Paulus - BLINQ

schrepfler — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 11:57:35 GMT

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.

posted by schrepfler

Re: Chatting about LINQ and ADO.NET Entities

schrepfler — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:24:58 GMT

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.

posted by schrepfler

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

schrepfler — Tue, 30 May 2006 14:23:23 GMT

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.

posted by schrepfler

Re: Jim Hogg: Phoenix Framework

schrepfler — Fri, 05 May 2006 13:53:30 GMT

Let say there's some code in places optimized to assembly code but for the PowerPC platform. Could Phoenix help a conversion of the pieces of code that target the PowerPC instruction set to Intel instruction set? Theoreticly of course, there's no need for such a thing I'm sure.

posted by schrepfler

Re: IE7: CSS Support?

schrepfler — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:34:02 GMT

I'd have two more questions. First is wheter controls like the drop down still hover over div's and second is are you already writing code for CSS3 in order to support if from day one or will we have to wait years to adopt it (we'd love columns support and round borders as well)?

Also it'd be very nice to know the MS stance on supporting SVG integrated in the browser (just open this with latest firefox) and MathML support?

That said we'd like to see MathML support on the TabletPC power pack if anyone is listening. Ink + Math = Millions of students taking notes that have some meaning and that buy TabletPC's. Hello, is anyone listening?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Jim Hogg: Phoenix Framework

schrepfler — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:50:13 GMT

I've sent a letter about a year ago to join the program as a independent student but as a support from a professor was needed in the end my application wasn't approved (either Java oriented teachers that don't use .net or teachers that don't want to get exposed, or get messed up with the legal part of it, very frustrating all together). However I was very very pleasantly surprised when I saw that it's now open to download for everyone.
Thank very much to MS for allowing this to happen and I hope many great plugins for it come out.
Before I download it, as it was mentioned in the video this is a framework for the backend, does that mean support for stuff like parsers, lexers etc, that could help develop a whole new language are out of this Framework?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Windows Shell Architecture

schrepfler — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:12:25 GMT

I don't know to whom should I attribute blame, the shell guys or the BCL guys but one of the things that ticked me off (this was in the .net1.x timeframe, did something change since then?) when I tried to create a explorer type application was the inexistence of a nice wrapper to the SHGetFileInfo, SHGetImageList and related methods so that we could have some sort of a dynamic image list that we can associate to our Controls. Also as ImageList was sealed it was very difficult to extend it and the closest thing I found to enable this kind of capability was this library but it had the drawback that once you use it you can't add custom images to it (at least I didn't understand if its possible, my c++ foo is not that good). So the question is, will you guys give us a nice managed wrapper to this kind of functionallity (both dynamic access to icon images and extensibility with custom icons)?
Second thing I wanted to ask, will the limit of 14 overlay icons exist in Vista (I hope not, applications like TortoiseSVN are hitting that limit already)?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Open XML File Formats

schrepfler — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 01:51:43 GMT

Does MS intend to publish any Java library that could generate this kind of XML files? If not, does it intend to publish a .Net library that could generate this kinds of files? If no on both prior questions, does anyone knows some other party that intends to develop a open source library like that?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Learn how 10 was made

schrepfler — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:39:10 GMT

I'd have a question, when a user wants to log on he's presented with this cool looking form where everithing behind is darkened. Now, I thought that if a form is presented on a non-https connection an attack is possible because the possible attacker could change the form action target? Am I wrong on this?
Second question, why not use also Passport with it (like channel9)?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Karsten Januszewski: WPF

schrepfler — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:17:44 GMT

As far as ALT-TAB goes I think I prefer more Expose from MacOS then the rolodex, being able to see all windows at the same time looks more promising. Could that behaviour be changed and replaced after Vista ships?

posted by schrepfler

Re: “Developers are my life; I love them.” OK, how can you not want to find out more about who said tha

schrepfler — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:07:47 GMT

Hi,
When you guys say dependencies are you talking about library dependencies or do you use some other conotation?
As I have to use Java in my professional life, I'm using a tool called maven2 that seems to be doing some really slick stuff with project management, dependency management, reporting, testing etc.
If for Java in the begining there was Ant, later Maven and now Maven2 and Ivy, and if we do the same analogy with .net where there was first nant and now msbuild, I really haven't seen any alternative for a project management tool like maven (PS there's even a plugin for it to compile c# 1.0 code, very plugin-oriented framework) that's command line oriented. I mean I like Team System and all but as I'm not in it's target audience I belive it'd be nice if there's some kind of a open source counterpart to maven2.

posted by schrepfler

Re: Jenny Lam - Designing Experiences at Microsoft

schrepfler — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 03:19:19 GMT

My desire is that Vista would support SVG icons. Also, locking people to a hand few of formats to customize the user experience is really frustrating (why not allow mp3's for user sounds or vector formats for desktop background?), I could have understood that in the windows 1.0 - XP timeframe but Vista should allow more leverage with that kind of stuff.

posted by schrepfler

Re: Michael Kaplan - Bringing Windows Vista to International markets

schrepfler — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:42:09 GMT

If I wasn't clear please mail me individually. Also the US (and more than 100 other countries) officially recognized the Republic of Macedonia with it's constitutional name and not the FYROM acronim so that might be a good reason to change it.

posted by schrepfler

Re: Michael Kaplan - Bringing Windows Vista to International markets

schrepfler — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:24:26 GMT

The thing is that macedonian has both и and е as accented letters yet there is no shortcut to write them as there is no keyboard that has these letters so a shortcut would be nice (for instance if I have a us keyboard and my language switching bar I set it to international I can use the backtick and e o a and it'll write me those letters accented. This is something that is broken in the NT/XP lifecycle and I am hoping will be fixed in Vista.
Tell me more about the name issue just be carefull not to inflame the forum )

posted by schrepfler

Re: Michael Kaplan - Bringing Windows Vista to International markets

schrepfler — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 05:10:23 GMT

If don't remember wrongly whenever I used the macedonian (virtual as there are no hardware ones on sale, thank god : ) keyboard (I hope you won't write FYROM anyomore) there was an issue with a letter (I think it was accented è and/or accented и but I'm not shure).
I can't be sure as I'm writing this on a Italian keyboard but I wasn't able to find accented и or e. I wrote è using the italian e grave.
One nice feature when using a US keyboard is that if I press the tick or backtick I can have è or é in italian, could we have the same thing on a macedonian keyboard?

posted by schrepfler

Re: Concurrency and Coordination Runtime

schrepfler — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 15:33:33 GMT

What about licencing? Will it be an open souce library like WiX or something in the lines of the SharedSource initiative?
Thx, and let's hope it'll come out during the month of December

posted by schrepfler

Re: Concurrency and Coordination Runtime

schrepfler — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 14:16:19 GMT

Hi,
I think this library could be very helpfull, however I can't see the SDK download is it out yet? Also could you elaborate into more details (perhaps with some code or UML) on the futures/ActiveObject pattern?
Thanks and keep up the great work!

posted by schrepfler

Re: Alex Kipman - Inside a MS Build Bug Triage meeting

schrepfler — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 02:00:49 GMT

Hi,

I must say that I got interested in command line tools in the build process quite recently after having worked for the past 5 months on a j2ee project living and dogfooding latest eclipse wtp builds (I'm a .net-first-person, don't worry). There were things that just simply weren't in the IDE and it seemed natural to automate things outside the IDE. As ant was already integrated inside eclipse I decided I'd give it a go and although some results were easy to do other were obscure and strange, also the whole extension model to me is still incompehensive, why not choosing namespaces and a schema is a mistery to me.

Anyhow I had this thing in my faculty to use maven and as I'm one of those get-on-the-bandwagon-first people I decided to go with maven 2 that just got released. Wow, an eye-opener. Although still rough around the edges it gives a plugin-oriented way to manage the whole project lifecycle, all from a command line.

This brings me to my question. In the begining people were saying msbuild is like ant for .net, is it so or does it cover/will it ever cover aspects that maven/2 handles or will that be entering too much into VSTS terrytory?
thx

posted by schrepfler