2007 March | Lazycoder

16Mar/071

Why does MS compete with the community?

Jeffrey Palermo [C# MVP] : Big News – MVC framework for ASP.NET in the works – level 300: “”

I was reading the comments to this post regarding some new functionality in ASP.NET v.Next:

“Sun doesn’t compete with the Java Community. Why does MS have to?”

It has to do with the mindset of Sun’s clients vs. the mindset of the majority of Microsofts clients.

Java clients are, more often than not, running OSS on their production servers. Why? The OSS version (JBoss, Spring, Struts, etc…) beat the crap out of the stuff Sun was putting out. Maybe after a few years of tools like MBUnit, NUnit, NHibernate, and MonoRail kicking the crap out of the MS tools, MS will have no choice but to promote them. I wouldn’t count on that though. Look at the history of the company.

I left a cynical comment over on Jeremy Millers blog:

“The FUD that is spun by MS-Marketing and all their minions is that OSS is evil and wants to keep you from making money by giving away your product for free. That’s the party line, that’s what keeps people firmly in the MS camp. “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft”. Besides, all that OSS crap is just made by hobby programmers right? It’s not stable.”

My point wasn’t to denigrate the people who choose MS technology, it was to point out the uphill battle we have when trying to get MS to *not* re-invent the wheel. A lot of people think that OSS will corrupt their software with some viral license that will cripple their ability to make money. Even if a better “3rd party” alternative exists, they will pick the crippled, buggy MS version because of “support” that they wouldn’t need if they used the other tool.

Honestly, I look at stuff like this and stuff like LINQ for Entities, the object factory in ADO.NET, mod_rewrite for IIS,per-directory configs for IIS and this new MVC pattern for ASP.NET and wonder why they aren’t included in the framework from the start. It’s not like MVC is new, Smalltalk used it in the 80′s. mod_rewrite is ancient. And hibernate has been around since Java practically. Even unit testing is old news. We used to write test harnesses and call them from batch files back when I did VB development. I know MS has done automated testing in the past, at least as far back as Visual studio 6. Why wasn’t that in the framework and tool from the start?

At least the future looks brighter. At least this stuff is getting in the framework now.

Filed under: General 1 Comment

15Mar/070

Persistence Ignorance in the Entity Framework – MSDN Forums

Persistence Ignorance in the Entity Framework – MSDN Forums: “Another question you asked is whether or not the DataContract attributes are necessary, and the answer is that they certainly are not. Our code generation layer supplies them just to make serialization with WCF easier/more automatic with the generated classes. “

I’ll interpret this using my patented Longtime Cynical Microsoft Framework User translator.

Provided you stay on the single, narrow, path we have defined for you when using EF with WCF, a’la ASP.NET and the Page life-cycle, your life will be great. Stray from that path and we will punish you with long, long nights of writing a bunch of baby-sitting code.

Tying it to a base class doesn’t annoy me as much as it does others. It does surprise me. It’s like the LINQ team has never taken a walk around in System.Reflection.

The event-driven dirty flag sounds awfully chatty.

Julia Lerman also has a great post about the different paths to data access in Orcas.
One part caught my eye.

“The second files describes the schema of the database, including pk/fk relationships.”

I’d like to be able to define these relationships even if they don’t exist in the database.

Filed under: .NET, General No Comments

14Mar/070

Adding metadata to files in OS X

Well, ask and ye shall receive. I found this application, TagBot, during my wanderings today. It allows you to pre-define tags and apply them to files in the Finder. I don’t see any means to mass-import tags though.