The support for using dynamic languages such as Ruby or Python to code ASP.NET pages was announced for future versions of ASP.NET in the ASP.NET futures.
Unless I am mistaken, it means that we eventually will be able to write control event handlers in Python or even Ruby - which is certainly more fun than in VB.NET or even in C#, but is it really so important ?
What would be *really* cool if the whole ASP.NET become more agile and more "rail-ish". To make overall architecture more flexible - such as departure from not very flexible page-centric architecture towards MVC and routing. Maybe some version of ActiveRecord ? Or even multiple (and pluggable) template languages ? That would be really something.
A brief look at my Google Reader subscription list made me aware that I have added to my reading list a loooot of blogs, newslist and so on. Unfortunately, they are not organized very well and should be properly placed into folders. In a process of doing that, I will put some of the interesting blogs here.
For today, it is Frans Bouma's blog - focusing on .NET and Microsoft technology platforms. From the most recent good articles, look at why API's should not be designed by scientists - discussing and comparing various ways how the database level paging is handled in various databases (MySQL, PostgreSql, DB2, Oracle, SS2005), or read Frans' comments on Entity Framework being cut from .NET 3.5 - which is sad, but IMHO fairly accurate summary of the recent development. See for yourself.
I found a handy T-SQL trick that helped to solve the following problem: during datawarehouse creation, we needed to consolidate multiple data sources from databases belonging to two generations of system: older one using int identity keys, the newer one, designed for replication and distributed data scenarios using GUID's as primary keys.
In the consolidated database, we needed to create single representation that would allow to store both new GUID based identities as well as old int-based keys. Direct conversion between UNIQUEIDENTIFIER type and int is not allowed. The following one liner will do the trick:
After Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun has addes own version of scriptable, interactive platform named JavaFX. Unlike the previous three (Flash included), this is going to be Open Sourced - under the Microsoft's most hated license - GPL.
Now the race to replace Flash really becomes really interesting ...
I am working on the BI modules for automotive data-analytics application these days. Which means that I am doing quite a bit coding and using T-SQL and in addition to Visual Studio 2005, I use quite often the Sql Server Management Studio for SQL Server 2005. In theory, both tools should be based on the Visual Studio IDE code base. Which is maybe true, but there are many quite annoying differences.
Since I got through "Rails immersion", I keep seeing the implementations of the same idea everywhere. Latest find is Subsonic, which implements Active Records in .NET space. Rather than writing more, see this screencast.
Imagine if somebody got copyright on a number 32. You could not say any more on a Web page that you use 32 bit OS because you were not allowed to use the number. You could not even write thirty two, or 0x20... Could not send a card for 32nd birthday. Sounds crazy, right ?
But exactly this is happening. Somebody is trying to claim exclusive ownership of one number and sending take-down letters, law threats to those you have it posted on their web sites or blogs.
I had again the not-so infrequent pleasure of setting up fresh copy of Windows development stack. We were moving few machines between projects and to make sure that no forgotten source files are left on the harddisk, we reformatted and reinstalled Windows from scratch. It is usually good idea anyway, because developers like to install strange tools and utilities and generally customize machines to their own taste, which tend to be unique and is seldom shared.
at least as the programming language languages are concerned. One of the things that will be presented on the MIX07 is Dynamic Language Runtime, a new platform suitable to host high level, dynamic languages such as Python and Ruby. For Python, there is already pretty decent .NET implementation - namely IronPython. What is coming now is IronPython 2.0 based on the DLR as well as - yesss - IronRuby.
It is great that this is happening. In Java world, JRuby is very close to being full implementation of the language. The speed of the JRuby is still not quite in the proximity of the C implementation, but the large selling point of JRuby is its capability of deploying Ruby application (or even a Rails application) inside Tomcat or any other Java Web container. This removes largest obstacle of using Ruby in enterprise environment - namely being "new" and not approved platform. When the .NET runtime will be able to host Ruby code, acceptance in enterprise space will be even higher.
The natural gravity of our environment keeps pulling me out of scripting and Ruby world back to .Net zone :-). Out of curiosity, I looked into how easy or hard is it to access other database from Ruby, than the default MySQL which dominates all books, samples and tutorials.
I have found three ways (at least), one likely platform independent and two Windows only. The platform independent requires module ADO.rb and works with the DBI interface. This sounds very similar to the way how Perl used to access databases, so I put this at the end of the list (some details are here). First Windows only methods used ODBC - no, thanks. Configuring machine specific data sources is not the way I wanted.