Discussions

If you look at your windows forms toolbox, there is a myriad of controls that are essentially managed win32 wrappers. Think TreeView, ListView, menu control, notify control -yada, yada yada.

Is there any reason why a managed wrapper was not made available for the Vista List view control for both windows forms and WPF? Both would be utilising the systems controls and lead to the promotion of the platform via applications that use it. We all know how long it takes to procure controls and emphasis on Vista via Microsoft is mysterious. It has just dawned upon me, that most of visual studio is geared towards XP type controls, everything else you have to do it yourself.

If managed wrappers had been made available for both winforms and wpf, application developers would be acres and acres ahead, and they wouldn't have needed to worry about performance because the last couple of years have shown that the controls work.

Yes WPF is the new kid on the block, but previous technologies will not dissapear. It frustrates me that I have to go to third parties who are re-inventing the same wheel, when I have the wheel in the same room, except it is in a cage and I can't access it. What a waste.

More Base Class Library stuff, especially the MEF going really deep - what does it mean, what is it for? More from Meijers, Beckman, the Spec# team and MSR Academics. Maybe even the interns in MSR as they are never visible.

Patterns and practices and application architecture, not enough people know or concentrate enough on architecture (myself included).

I also feel you need to switch from developers to designers and possibly show the steps Microsoft envisage for design, because this is a central tenet to windows 7 and the Internet going forward. I mean look at Telerik's Silverlight controls. This isn't just C# or VB code but some real creativity. There must be a David Tietlebaum for Silverlight coz these guys are nothing but talent.

If you are a database oriented developer, there is a myriad of choice nowadays. Do you still use stored procedures or do you see Linq and the ADO.NET Entity Framework as they way to go?

Yes, it is true that one can access stored procedures from both Linq and EF, but do you prefer the flexibility they give as a "trade off" over supposed performance and or code separation?

matthews said:

Bass said:

*snip*

If I read the blog post correctly, 40 is roughly the number of people per feature team on average. N is then the number of devs in that feature team, which is usually equivalent to the number of testers. Then there are usually about 0.5N PMs to go with those. Follow the numbers, and you'd have 16 devs, 16 testers, and 8 pms on an average feature team.

Don't forget the Solicitors

Pace said:

vesuvius said:

*snip*

Lets see if you still feel that Vista has little business value when you enter somewhere and realise that no-one has heard of disk cleanup. I swear if you have a machine that hasnt had it run recently or in many cases, never at all you will know what im talking about.

Vista disk cleanup on the other hand is a god send. As is the search. Easy to view author tags etc on docs. Its the little things in Vista that make it better for business and its the big bang things like aero and animations to please the home users.

I actually find it easier to keep the Vista box's in a better state of running from a maintenance point of view than the XP ones. In my case.

edit: Search not seach

That is not my view, but that of who I work for, i.e. "who pays the bills". I have had to go into meetings to justify "enabling visual styles" on XP and I've still not been able to convince them - it is a real battle.

If you walk into a call centre or a warehouse/factory or even a GP surgery you will find that they all work from an application called x-y-z, which isn't even multi-threaded (some big supermarkets included). In big places central (proprietary) software is usually virtualised and using Internet Explorer 6.

Unless you have a new start-up or a slick upmarket image conscious company, then you will find the wheels of XP spinning around and around. Vista is only found at a bank, when you go meet your bank manager becuase they have to look good (to embezzle you). The back end machines will be XP. Only other places are advertising/publishing and arty-farty type places. Of course there are always exceptions but you are living in dreamland if you think corporations just upgrade OS's willy-nilly. Government department are even worse.

There is a misuse of the word downgrading. I know a company that are replacing their old windows 2000 and XP machines, but not purchasing new Vista Licences and using their previous licences (cheapskates).

I know it has been said and said again, but Vista is of very little business value (so is the Mac for that matter) for 90% of modern data input and windows forms based applications. A significant amount of companies have their proprietary software that runs the same on Win2K, XP or Vista, and the costs of upgrading and retraining staff for no return on investment are what dictates this tardigrade uptake of vista in the enterprise.

Programming MUMPS and feeling frustrated because I wanted to be programming Delphi instead, but ended up learning C++ - and have not looked back.
It is rather strange now I think of it coming from a high performing DOS based environment where the data and the programming language are one and the same. this may account for my rather strange take on things sometimes (All those routines and $ calls - prehistoric, but still in wide use)

That also probably explains why I never joined '9 till quite late, because I will still pre-windows back then (coding wise).

brian.shapiro said:

littleguru said:

*snip*

Speaking of which, I think even if we have vector icons, we should still  have the same basic icon sizes, small, medium and large. Because mostly, what will happen is that they'll be displayed the same physical size on the screen but at different depth (resolution). We want the pictures to both have the right amount of detail for the right physical size, and also for the context of the UI. Plus, obviously, if the image is shrunk to a small pixel area, a vector designed for that size will look better.

Anyway one reason why vector icons would also be cool is that applications could also transform them... like, creating wireframes.

Ditto!

At some point, you have to eat humble pie and just accept that you are not, and will not be the administrator of the network. Were the network administrator to supply you with administrative privileges, then they'd be talking themselves out of a job. Why would they bother coming to work if everybody has admin access and can do as they please?

In Britain, the Prime Minister reserves the right to re-shuffle his cabinet (bad example I know - politics 'n all). What happens when he or she supplies other cabinet members the right to re-shuffle whoever they want at a whim?

Disaster, that's what happens.

This is by no means and isolated request. In any IT company, whether it is support or development, you always have advanced users (I know you are much more advanced than advanced) who require a little more control, but in my experience it has always been an opportunity for person x-y-z to show me who is boss.

The ADO.NET Entity Framework is the latest Active Database Object paradigm from Microsoft. This is based on Dr Peter Chen's Entity Relationship Model.

This months MSDN Magazine had a great write up about it. What I am distinctly disappointed about, is that like Linq, there is no disconnected model, i.e. as soon as you break connection to the database then change tracking is lost. This is not an omission, but by design. Yes you can implement your own change tracking like Linq, but that again is workaround territory.

This in effect relegates it, insofar as disconnected datasets in smart client development. If you are writing an occasionally connected enterprise application, or you want a very high performing application using SQL 2008 change tracking and synchronisation services to SQL compact, the choice is a no brainer. If you are writing a web application without a need for a security layer (SOAP) then the REST (full) natute of the entity Framework becomes advantageous. This is also the advantage over datasets insofar as the EF (being based on HTTP REST) being able to be used across data stacks including Oracle etc, datasets are strictly .NET so a web service using them must be to .NET clients.

It is important to be cognisant of this new paradigm when designing your data access layer, because the Entity Framework is not going to suddenly replace previous ADO.NET stacks overnight. Indeed some of them are immediately more appropriate for different scenarios.