I never noticed anything "funny" about wxWindows either....'cept the "now for something completely different" splash screen in wxPython, but I imagine this is just as funny on any platform. Actually now that I come to think of it wxBasic was pretty funny too (in a good way).
Hasn't one of the recent controversies on/. been that the Linux kernel does not use Open Source tools (like CVS) for version control, but rather uses BitKeeper instead?
I'm not sure if the.NET clisp is CLOS compliant....I'm guessing they called it clisp because it is written in C# (or because it targets the CLR), and I agree that it it is annoying the overloading of the clisp name. M$ has done this also with the CLI (in.NETspeak the Common Language Infrastructure, but for unix wonks the Command Line Interface). Anyhow...
Why is it that your typical slash-dotter is always a day late and a dollar short with their Microsoft jabs? There is a simple lisp compiler in the.NET SDK (called clisp). It should be located somewhere around $FrameworkSDK$\Tool Developers Guide\Samples\clisp. (from the clisp readme page) CLisp is a sample lisp compiler, which compiles to MSIL. CLisp is developed in C# and uses reflection emit to generate MSIL. It can also be adapted as an interpreter if the generated MSIL is executed dynamically instead of persisting to a PE file.
Also since M$ is so heavily pushing.NET at universities there are also a number of functional programming languages that target the CLR. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of.NET languages here http://www.jasonbock.net/dotnetlanguages.html
I heard very strictly "off the record" from someone who interned at M$, and via another source who works there about a projects code-named Glimmer and Avalon. Avalon was apparently an attempt to build a rich-client-in-the-browser similar to flashMX, that might replace windows forms in.NET (that sounded pretty un-likely to me, but you never know...). Glimmer was apparently a sub-set of that. The only URL which details any of this is this fluff piece from InfoWeek. If M$ are working on something like this then a possible purchase of Macromedia would be very interesting.....
As one other poster pointed out the customer may not really know what they want. They may have a vague idea, but haven't really thought about it thorougly enough. I see this sometimes when I'm talking to customers when you say "well what about X?" And this little light goes on inside their heads about some aspect of the system they'd never considered before, and reams of new requirements come spewing forth. If it is a time+materials project I try and work with them to fit the new requirements in to their budget, if it's fixed price they can sometimes get nasty and say they just "assumed it would be covered because Blah works that way" or some other nonsense when both of you are quite aware that up until 5 minutes ago they'd never even thought about it.
Another classic problem I've seen is when a "typical user" is chosen. Often this person is NOT a typical user of the system, they are the manager of a typical user, or a business analyst that "knows this area inside out". Politely listen to what this person has to say, and then go and find out what the _REAL_ users of the system think.
Another common defect is the "one line paradox specification". It goes a little something like this...."The new system should work exactly like the existing system, only better, and over the web".
Another common problem is the "user as frustrated interface desinger".. where a user will come up with very wild/unconventional/impossible ideas as to how items in the user interface should function. This is somewhat related to the "typical user" problem. This users crazy interface requirements might be possible, but you will end up building a system only they could like or even use.
Another problem is "users expectations completely out of synch with budget"..you have a budget for X hours, but the users have no idea of this and will run wild with features that will make their lives easier(if the project doesn't get canned beforehand), or playing amatuer graphic designer, screen layout games. Make not of all their suggestions but make sure you run by all the features they suggest with someone who is paying for what you are doing before you go and implement them.
Overall I would say that ineraction with users is great, but beware that the "user"
Has given as much thought as they can muster to all the aspects of the system before they talk to you...(this can be hard since some users seem totally incapable or unwilling from going beyond their abstract sketch of a system into something more concrete)
Are actually representative of the end users of the system
Is not an evil crazy user interface genius
Has a realistic understanding of the scope and budget of the project.
AFAIK COM+ AKA enterprise services aren't so much about interop with COM, but more about providing "enterprise services" like queing, transactional objects etc (more analogous to certain parts of J2EE)..NET interoperates with COM by way of a COM callable wrapper. In order for a.NET assembly to interoperate with a COM component (under normal circumstances, forgetting about remoting and DCOM for the minute) the COM component would have to be installed and run on the host OS. So I guess you could say we would probably see.NET/COM interop in MONO when we see COM for Linux (hey, isn't that what BONOBO is...).
Side note: I heard the marketroids at M$ were thinking about calling.NET COM+ 2, now wouldn't _THAT_ have been a good name.
Just because your employer is moving to.NET doesn't mean you can't do some development on Linux using MONO. It seems ironic to me that in may ways.NET un-shackles windows developers from the windows platform more than previous Microsoft development technologies did.
Also, why not try and affect change from within your own company, rather than going somewhere else? If there is an existing open equivalent to something you're thinking of using then make the case for that. Also investigate languages like Java, Python and Perl which can run on multiple platforms. They all have large developer communities and mature libraries for doing lots of different things.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own post but....I check microsoft's site after posting my previous comment just to make sure. I had previously thought that MCSA was a super-set of MCSE (like MCSD is a super-set of MCAD) but now I am not so sure....here is a link for anyone that cares to check... http://www.microsoft.com/traincert/mcp/m csa/mcsa_mcse.asp
Focus Group? If I'm writing code for FUN in my OWN TIME then I think that I should be able to determine what I write, not some focus group. I don't tell others how to spend their free time, why should they be able to tell me. If the focus group want feature X then they can code it themselves....
Its not entirely clear to me from the articles that the performance gap is very large, or if it exists, or if it does, who is in the lead
How can you even _SAY_ that? I'm not trying to be troll here, but did you read the MiddleWare article? the.NET PetStore beat the optimized J2EE PetStore in every benchmark. Sometimes by a factor of 2 or more. I agree with a lot of things other posters have said, that maintainability, developer productivity etc. are often more important than raw performance, but the J2EE PetStore got killed there too. 14KLOC vs 3~4KLOC. Maybe the J2EEs exception handling is a little verbose (I haven't looked), possibly there were some optimisations that could have been made that weren't (J2EE is evolving pretty quickly, and you don't whip together a benchmark like this over a week-end) but is it equally possible that for each of these gripes on the J2EE side there is some.NET developer out there shaking his head going "Y'know they really could have done THAT better". I don't think pretending there is no difference helps.
Perhaps it's just that I can't think "outside the square" or something, but I can't really think of ANY application I've worked on where you couldn't make a good case for storing the data in a database. In some cases I've used XML files (when there was only a very small amount of data to be stored) but anything bigger than that I've always stored in a database. Perhaps under some circumstances (that I can't think of right now) you _might_ want to roll your own storage system....but I think these sort of projects would be the exception (handled of course!) rather than the rule.
I can personally say they improve my productivity a great deal. As a developer I'm often working on something but needing to refer to something else at the same time. Writing code against a particular database schema, designing a form while looking at the output, coding while browsing the on-line help.....for all these things a second monitor is great. Now 3 monitors...that is new teritory I intend to explore soon...
I'm not a Java Bigot (tm) - I'm not even a Java developer actually, but I am interested in what technologes you (or other/.ers) consider equivalent to J2EE. The only one I know of that offers similar services is MTS err... COM+...sorry Enterprise Services from M$ (when will those marketting guys ever make up their minds).
Newton was just a guy who could look at the natural world and derive laws that seemed to cover what he saw (oh, and co-invent calculus too). I'm not putting Carmack up with these guys, but it's pretty easy to diminish someone's accomplishments by saying they're "just a" something....
I've had a few problems setting up SAP-DB. For some reason every time I downloaded one of the TGZ files some of the files it contained did not match the correct MD5 checksum, or were missing. I couldn't really figure out why because I was on a very fast and extremely reliable connection. After I'd downloaded about 3 or 4 copies I was able to stitch together a frankenstein install, but it happens EVERY time I download the latest release. Apart from those problems SAP-DB seems great. An OLEDB provider, or managed provider for.NET would be cool.
As a Microsoft developer I find this very disturbing. I think Windows 2000 is a very capable operating system for desktop use and small servers. My brief experiences with XP are that it is a little flakey(er?) than 2K, and all that WPA-invasion-of-privacy Gestapo crap makes me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I use both Win2K and Linux at home (primarily Win2K) but I can see the day where the devide between my "home" computing life and my "work" computing life (which is all M$) will become like night and day. What about Win2K server?.NET server hasn't even hit the shelves yet AFAIK (or if it has it is still VERY new and unproved). Time to learn Java.
Re:Katz is even more pathetic than usual
on
The Empire Stumbles
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· Score: 2
Perhaps I saw a different spiderman to everyone else, but I thought the acting in it was absolute CRAP. My wife and I were joking afterwards just how bad it was. It hasn't opened in my country yet but I'm glad I didn't pay to see it. I thought Peter Parker's awkwardness was just too Awkward! I thought Kirsten Dunst's delivery was pretty bad too, especially at the funeral at the end. The movie had a number of other flaws like the lack of character development, the transparent plot etc. And any time I hear voice-overs it sets of warning lights in my head and a little voice says "the acting couldn't get the point across, we'll have to drive it home with a voice-over". I saw spiderman the night before last and AOTC for the second time last night and you couldn't compare the two. I'd happily fork out money to see AOTC again, but I doubt I'll ever watch spiderman again.
As a fellow Queenslander I'm VERY pleased to hear this. Can you post more details (like where you are, and what other schools (if any) have followed similar policies) without getting in to trouble? As a concerned tax-payer and parent who should I be writing to to applaud this innitiative, and encourage other schools to follow suit?
Linux cluster is 30 Athlon 850MHz PCs and up to 350 recently refurbished PCs that are Pentium 166 or better I sure hope the 850 MHz Athlons weren't donated by anyone....until this week my main home machine has been an PII 300. If the Athlons were rescued from landfill that makes me feel _really_ inadequate.
There was an article on SOAP security in the MSDN recently where they advocated turning off the HTTP-Get and HTTP-Post protocols for production web services and rely on SOAP instead. It hardly seems like enough. Now every developer is going to have to be responsible for ensuring their web-services can only accpet valid parameters, and can only be accessed by those who should be able to access them. I can see that security for web-services as being a key issue for developers in the near future. I know my local MSDN users group is getting a discussion from a technical evangelist from M$ on this topic very soon.
From what I saw of the screen-shots the case shown was not small, and could have been easily upgraded. It was made from scratch, you're not exactly 'locked in' to anything with that are you?
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators: If you look at the parent it is very much on-topic
I never noticed anything "funny" about wxWindows either....'cept the "now for something completely different" splash screen in wxPython, but I imagine this is just as funny on any platform. Actually now that I come to think of it wxBasic was pretty funny too (in a good way).
Hasn't one of the recent controversies on /. been that the Linux kernel does not use Open Source tools (like CVS) for version control, but rather uses BitKeeper instead?
I'm not sure if the .NET clisp is CLOS compliant....I'm guessing they called it clisp because it is written in C# (or because it targets the CLR), and I agree that it it is annoying the overloading of the clisp name. M$ has done this also with the CLI (in .NETspeak the Common Language Infrastructure, but for unix wonks the Command Line Interface). Anyhow...
Why is it that your typical slash-dotter is always a day late and a dollar short with their Microsoft jabs? There is a simple lisp compiler in the .NET SDK (called clisp). It should be located somewhere around
.NET at universities there are also a number of functional programming languages that target the CLR. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of .NET languages here http://www.jasonbock.net/dotnetlanguages.html
$FrameworkSDK$\Tool Developers Guide\Samples\clisp.
(from the clisp readme page)
CLisp is a sample lisp compiler, which compiles to MSIL. CLisp is developed in C# and uses reflection emit to generate MSIL. It can also be adapted as an interpreter if the generated MSIL is executed dynamically instead of persisting to a PE file.
Also since M$ is so heavily pushing
I heard very strictly "off the record" from someone who interned at M$, and via another source who works there about a projects code-named Glimmer and Avalon. Avalon was apparently an attempt to build a rich-client-in-the-browser similar to flashMX, that might replace windows forms in .NET (that sounded pretty un-likely to me, but you never know...). Glimmer was apparently a sub-set of that. The only URL which details any of this is this fluff piece from InfoWeek. If M$ are working on something like this then a possible purchase of Macromedia would be very interesting.....
As one other poster pointed out the customer may not really know what they want. They may have a vague idea, but haven't really thought about it thorougly enough. I see this sometimes when I'm talking to customers when you say "well what about X?" And this little light goes on inside their heads about some aspect of the system they'd never considered before, and reams of new requirements come spewing forth. If it is a time+materials project I try and work with them to fit the new requirements in to their budget, if it's fixed price they can sometimes get nasty and say they just "assumed it would be covered because Blah works that way" or some other nonsense when both of you are quite aware that up until 5 minutes ago they'd never even thought about it.
Another classic problem I've seen is when a "typical user" is chosen. Often this person is NOT a typical user of the system, they are the manager of a typical user, or a business analyst that "knows this area inside out". Politely listen to what this person has to say, and then go and find out what the _REAL_ users of the system think.
Another common defect is the "one line paradox specification". It goes a little something like this...."The new system should work exactly like the existing system, only better, and over the web".
Another common problem is the "user as frustrated interface desinger".. where a user will come up with very wild/unconventional/impossible ideas as to how items in the user interface should function. This is somewhat related to the "typical user" problem. This users crazy interface requirements might be possible, but you will end up building a system only they could like or even use.
Another problem is "users expectations completely out of synch with budget"..you have a budget for X hours, but the users have no idea of this and will run wild with features that will make their lives easier(if the project doesn't get canned beforehand), or playing amatuer graphic designer, screen layout games. Make not of all their suggestions but make sure you run by all the features they suggest with someone who is paying for what you are doing before you go and implement them.
Overall I would say that ineraction with users is great, but beware that the "user"
AFAIK COM+ AKA enterprise services aren't so much about interop with COM, but more about providing "enterprise services" like queing, transactional objects etc (more analogous to certain parts of J2EE). .NET interoperates with COM by way of a COM callable wrapper. In order for a .NET assembly to interoperate with a COM component (under normal circumstances, forgetting about remoting and DCOM for the minute) the COM component would have to be installed and run on the host OS. So I guess you could say we would probably see .NET/COM interop in MONO when we see COM for Linux (hey, isn't that what BONOBO is...).
.NET COM+ 2, now wouldn't _THAT_ have been a good name.
Side note: I heard the marketroids at M$ were thinking about calling
Just because your employer is moving to .NET doesn't mean you can't do some development on Linux using MONO. It seems ironic to me that in may ways .NET un-shackles windows developers from the windows platform more than previous Microsoft development technologies did.
Also, why not try and affect change from within your own company, rather than going somewhere else? If there is an existing open equivalent to something you're thinking of using then make the case for that. Also investigate languages like Java, Python and Perl which can run on multiple platforms. They all have large developer communities and mature libraries for doing lots of different things.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own post but....I check microsoft's site after posting my previous comment just to make sure. I had previously thought that MCSA was a super-set of MCSE (like MCSD is a super-set of MCAD) but now I am not so sure....here is a link for anyone that cares to check...m csa/mcsa_mcse.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/traincert/mcp/
I'm not quite sure what to make of this comment
It's MCSE, and I don't think MCSA was a typo.
but there is a microsoft certification called MCSA (like MCSE but harder apparently...).
Focus Group? If I'm writing code for FUN in my OWN TIME then I think that I should be able to determine what I write, not some focus group. I don't tell others how to spend their free time, why should they be able to tell me. If the focus group want feature X then they can code it themselves....
Its not entirely clear to me from the articles that the performance gap is very large, or if it exists, or if it does, who is in the lead
.NET PetStore beat the optimized J2EE PetStore in every benchmark. Sometimes by a factor of 2 or more. I agree with a lot of things other posters have said, that maintainability, developer productivity etc. are often more important than raw performance, but the J2EE PetStore got killed there too. 14KLOC vs 3~4KLOC. Maybe the J2EEs exception handling is a little verbose (I haven't looked), possibly there were some optimisations that could have been made that weren't (J2EE is evolving pretty quickly, and you don't whip together a benchmark like this over a week-end) but is it equally possible that for each of these gripes on the J2EE side there is some .NET developer out there shaking his head going "Y'know they really could have done THAT better". I don't think pretending there is no difference helps.
How can you even _SAY_ that? I'm not trying to be troll here, but did you read the MiddleWare article? the
Perhaps it's just that I can't think "outside the square" or something, but I can't really think of ANY application I've worked on where you couldn't make a good case for storing the data in a database. In some cases I've used XML files (when there was only a very small amount of data to be stored) but anything bigger than that I've always stored in a database. Perhaps under some circumstances (that I can't think of right now) you _might_ want to roll your own storage system....but I think these sort of projects would be the exception (handled of course!) rather than the rule.
I can personally say they improve my productivity a great deal. As a developer I'm often working on something but needing to refer to something else at the same time. Writing code against a particular database schema, designing a form while looking at the output, coding while browsing the on-line help.....for all these things a second monitor is great. Now 3 monitors...that is new teritory I intend to explore soon...
I'm not a Java Bigot (tm) - I'm not even a Java developer actually, but I am interested in what technologes you (or other /.ers) consider equivalent to J2EE. The only one I know of that offers similar services is MTS err... COM+...sorry Enterprise Services from M$ (when will those marketting guys ever make up their minds).
Mozart was just some guy that wrote songs..
Newton was just a guy who could look at the natural world and derive laws that seemed to cover what he saw (oh, and co-invent calculus too). I'm not putting Carmack up with these guys, but it's pretty easy to diminish someone's accomplishments by saying they're "just a" something....
I've had a few problems setting up SAP-DB. For some reason every time I downloaded one of the TGZ files some of the files it contained did not match the correct MD5 checksum, or were missing. I couldn't really figure out why because I was on a very fast and extremely reliable connection. After I'd downloaded about 3 or 4 copies I was able to stitch together a frankenstein install, but it happens EVERY time I download the latest release. Apart from those problems SAP-DB seems great. An OLEDB provider, or managed provider for .NET would be cool.
As a Microsoft developer I find this very disturbing. I think Windows 2000 is a very capable operating system for desktop use and small servers. My brief experiences with XP are that it is a little flakey(er?) than 2K, and all that WPA-invasion-of-privacy Gestapo crap makes me feel sick in the pit of my stomach. I use both Win2K and Linux at home (primarily Win2K) but I can see the day where the devide between my "home" computing life and my "work" computing life (which is all M$) will become like night and day. What about Win2K server? .NET server hasn't even hit the shelves yet AFAIK (or if it has it is still VERY new and unproved). Time to learn Java.
Perhaps I saw a different spiderman to everyone else, but I thought the acting in it was absolute CRAP. My wife and I were joking afterwards just how bad it was. It hasn't opened in my country yet but I'm glad I didn't pay to see it. I thought Peter Parker's awkwardness was just too Awkward! I thought Kirsten Dunst's delivery was pretty bad too, especially at the funeral at the end. The movie had a number of other flaws like the lack of character development, the transparent plot etc. And any time I hear voice-overs it sets of warning lights in my head and a little voice says "the acting couldn't get the point across, we'll have to drive it home with a voice-over". I saw spiderman the night before last and AOTC for the second time last night and you couldn't compare the two. I'd happily fork out money to see AOTC again, but I doubt I'll ever watch spiderman again.
As a fellow Queenslander I'm VERY pleased to hear this. Can you post more details (like where you are, and what other schools (if any) have followed similar policies) without getting in to trouble? As a concerned tax-payer and parent who should I be writing to to applaud this innitiative, and encourage other schools to follow suit?
as does my inability to close italics properly :)
Linux cluster is 30 Athlon 850MHz PCs and up to 350 recently refurbished PCs that are Pentium 166 or better
I sure hope the 850 MHz Athlons weren't donated by anyone....until this week my main home machine has been an PII 300. If the Athlons were rescued from landfill that makes me feel _really_ inadequate.
There was an article on SOAP security in the MSDN recently where they advocated turning off the HTTP-Get and HTTP-Post protocols for production web services and rely on SOAP instead. It hardly seems like enough. Now every developer is going to have to be responsible for ensuring their web-services can only accpet valid parameters, and can only be accessed by those who should be able to access them. I can see that security for web-services as being a key issue for developers in the near future. I know my local MSDN users group is getting a discussion from a technical evangelist from M$ on this topic very soon.
From what I saw of the screen-shots the case shown was not small, and could have been easily upgraded. It was made from scratch, you're not exactly 'locked in' to anything with that are you?