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Another crazy story about ScottHu.
Sun buys MySQL - compared to other recent acquisitions, 1 billion seems kinda cheap
CodeMash podcast are up - Go now
The Five Browser Shortcuts Everyone Should Know
NBC to use SilverLight for Olympics Coverage
Written by Tim on January 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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Although I have never done any mobile programming I went to the Google Android Developer session at CodeMash anyway. I wanted to get a peek on how the big Goog was going to market and sell to developers.
I was not disappointed, this was the most educational session I was at. First of all Android is java based like EJB. I do not do Java and have no real idea what EJB is. That being said, this is what I took away from Android.
Again, I haven’t done any mobile program so correct me if I’m wrong here, but Android seems to function differently then any other mobile OS. For one, Android programs (including programs you write for Android) never really die. So when a user clicks close on an application, it still exists, running in the background. That’s why when you click on the same application it is instantly there, no startup wait or anything. I know on my Blackberry 8830, programs take a second or two to start up so they can’t be running in the background like Android does. This makes things much more fluid to the end user. Android deals with all these applications running by systematically killing applications that haven’t been used in a while and or "learns" the end users tendencies from what apps they use. Brilliant. When an app is killed by the OS, the program can see this event happening and can store its current state, file or on SQL Lite, so that when the end user fires this app back up, no data is lost. One thing is that programmers must put this logic in their app. Google isn’t Microsoft, they don’t seem to want to hand hold developers thru this.
Another feature Android is pushing is a new messaging system to replace SMS, although SMS will still be included. SMS is limited to the number of character able to be sent. This new protocol will have infinite character length. The reason is Google wants to be able to push XML to the device, similar to how Blackberrys work. This XML can have specific commands tied to specific applications that can be fired off. There is a lot of possibility here.
Although I’m certainly not a Java guy (we do have one in the family), Android is something I have to make room in my schedule to whip something together.
Written by Tim on January 15th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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The session I went to next was LinqTo<T> IQuery Provider. I was really looking forward to this talk, having started to use linq to sql recently with great success. I’m a huge fan of linq, the easiest ORM I’ve used. However this talk was about IQuery Provider not IEnumerable (not SQL Server). Bill Wagner was speaking how to use IQueryProvider it would take hours to get something up and running and was just going to show a quick view. I bailed out, too much for me with other sessions going on that I wanted to view.
So I headed over to a session about DOJO, a javascript framework. Kevin Dangoor was giving the talk and did a really good job. I’ve used JQuery & MooTools in the past and had some likes and dislikes for both. I’ve run across DOJO before and after seeing this talk and DIJIT I’m sold. It comes with a sweet unit test harness that can be used against any javascript. Also, creating templates widgets seems very easy.
More to come…
Written by Tim on January 11th, 2008 with no comments.
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Session 2 was all about Sharepoint 3.0 & MOSS 2007. This was completely from a programming standpoint and not so much from a configuration view. The speaker Leon Gersing did not pull any punches, which is a good thing. Sharepont 2.0 was horrible apparently and 3.0 is better but not the be all it could be. It will do 80% of things really well, right out of the box. But for 20% it can be a pain but achievable. The thing I don’t get is Microsoft whose best quality is ease of tools & deployment made custom sharepoint push outs really difficult.
After lunch, we had our 2nd keynote, the one and only Scott Hanselman. Seriously his first 10 minutes were insanely funny. The guy is great presenter. I hope I’m not showing a man crush here ;). The rest of his talk focused on IIS7 and PHP. I was super impressed with IIS7 features, including FastCGI, Caching, and config files. Yes, that right IIS now has a httpd.conf version. Performance wise IIS is beating what I’ve seen from Apache. I think I’m ready to start using PHP/IIS, in the past I’ve been against it because 1) PHP CGI Module for IIS was slow and 2) PHP ISAPI was unstable.
More to come…
Written by Tim on January 10th, 2008 with 1 comment.
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I’m in session #2 right now, here is recap of today so far:
Keynote: Neil Ford - Thoughtworks guy and ruby man.
We’ll he kinda dissed Java for an half an hour. Not much a fan of strongly typed languages (funny he use to be a c# guy), but now prefers Ruby. Overall a great talk, compared software engineering to "real" engineer. Basically came away with this: Compared to "real" engineering, we are in the 1800’s timeframe. JVM & .NET are fundamentally frameworks and we should use dynamic languages on top of these not the strongly named types they were original intended for. Also that unit testing, and testing in general is what is the most important - obviously a TDD guy.
First session, focused on SIlverlight. Obviously this was a beginners talk more about the basics of Silverlight. I didn’t come away with much besides I like Silverlight better then Flash because silverlight was developed with developer more in focus. XML based configuration, not a binary like swf.
More to come…
Written by Tim on January 10th, 2008 with no comments.
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In search of a nice tab navigation solution. I’ve used Microsoft AJAX Toolkit Tab control in the past, but that forces things to live in the same page, I needed a solution to produce a new page request. - No Ajax needed for this.
Flexible Navigation Example - Very nice, simple li used, css very clean.
Yahoo! Navigation Tabs - the learning curve is higher then it should be.
CSS Navigation Techniques - 37 examples
explodingBoy - 11 free downloadable examples, very nice
Written by Tim on January 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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So the holidays are over and you can expect more "daily" daily finds to start appearing.
Active Directory & Leopard - I was pleasantly surprised when I got AD to work with our Leopard server and left it alone, Grant had other ideas.
Spell Check 2.1 released - VS Plugin for spell check updated
Change RSS feed on VS start Page - via Jason Haley
Nothing but the Net in 2008 by JP Morgan - Good news for anyone with a Internet related job, like me 
- via Jason Haley
Google Gears Future API - This is where web applications are going, Microsoft better come out with something soon or they are going to be far behind… via Steen
Written by Tim on January 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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