Monday, December 22, 2008
“VS 2008 Kicks Off” and “The Road Ahead” make Visual Studio Magazine’s Top 5 Articles for 2008
My “Visual Studio 2008 Kicks Off” cover story for the January 2008 issue of Visual Studio Magazine hit second place in the Top 5 Articles for 2008 and “The Road Ahead” in the same issue made #4, according to Redmond Media Group’s .NET Insight newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 75 of December 18, 2008.
Both stories covered Microsoft’s release to manufacturing (RTM) of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 on November 19, 2007. “VS 2008: The MIA Features,” my third story in that issue, described technologies that didn’t make the RTM cut. VS 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 included many formely MIA features.
Following are decks for the three stories:
Visual Studio 2008 Kicks Off: Visual Studio 2008 is all about integrating new .NET Framework 3.x Web and smart-client technology, increasing developer productivity, and managing the application lifecycle. Find out how VS 2008's greatly expanded feature set and new .NET Fx 3.5 namespaces can boost your career as a professional developer and add to your programming enjoyment.
VS 2008: The Road Ahead: Microsoft was already well on its way to creating the next version of Visual Studio (code-named "Hawaii") when it released VS 2008. Learn what the future holds for .NET developers.
VS 2008: The MIA Features: Visual Studio 2008 is an ambitious new release and it includes a slew of new language features and tools that were required to get LINQ up and running by itself and with SQL Server 200x. Of course, not everything planned made it into the product. Here's a description of the elements that were pared back and what their status is now.
The other three stories in the top five were:
#1: Create a Data-Driven Messaging System by Paul D. Sheriff (October 2008)
Hard-coded messages don't scale well, and .NET's inherent error messages are user-unfriendly. Learn how to create a more scalable and user-friendly data-driven messaging system.
#3: Ask Kathleen: Understand Your Code Better by Kathleen Dollard (October 2008)
Visual Studio Team System's Code Metrics feature isn't perfect, but if you understand what it's measuring and how, you can use it to gain insight into your apps' overall complexity and to spot potential problem areas.
#5: On VB: Add Distinction to Your Code by Bill McCarthy (November 2008)
Learn how LINQ, extension methods, and lambda functions can help you add a bit of distinction, simplicity, and robustness to your code.
Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 11:47 AM 0 comments
Labels: Extension Methods, LINQ, VB 9, Visual Basic 9, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Magazine, VS 2008
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Reports from the Lang.NET 2006 Symposium
As mentioned in this earlier OakLeaf post, the Lang.NET 2006 Programming Languages and Compilers Symposium was held on July 31 through August 2, 2006 at the Microsoft Redmond campus. The organizers describe the symposium as a "forum for discussion on programming languages, managed execution environments, compilers, multi-language libraries, and integrated development environments. The event followed July's O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Oregon. Jason Bock's .NET Languages blog delivers a blow-by-blow account of each day's presentations. According to Jason, the symposium attracted about 80 attendees. Following are links to Jason's pages with presenter names and abbreviated topics: Monday, July 31, 2006
- Anders Hejlsberg: LINQ Keynote
- John Gough: Ruby on the CLR (eWeek coverage)
- Christopher Diggins : Cat, an Optimization Framework for the MSIL (slides)
- Mark and Paul Cooper: PageXML
- Jim Hugunin: IronPython
- Markus Lumpe: Integrating the Classbox Concept with .NET
- Susan Eisenbach: Versioning in the 21st Century
- William Cook: AppleScript and Latency
- Mike Barnett: Language Contracts and Spec#
- Gilad Bracha : Dynamically typed languages on the JVM (eWeek coverage)
- Gary Flake : The "imminent Internet singularity".
- James Lapalme : Modeling hardware and software systems
- Markus Lorez: Hydra (a.k.a., H#)
- Bradley Millington: Blinq (Polita Paulus video demo)
- Shriram Krishnamurthi : Programming and Verifying Interactive Web Applications (FlapJax)
- Paul Vick : VB: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?*
- Miguel de Icaza: Mono
- Cory Ondrejka: Second Life
- Don Syme : Type-Safe, Scalable, Efficient Scripting on .NET and Beyond (with F# )
- Andy Ayers: Phoenix
- John Lam : Getting Ruby to work with the CLR
- Danny Thorpe: Paradoxes in Web Application Development
- Bruce Payette: Windows PowerShell.
Technorati Tags: Lang.NET, Lang.NET 2006,.NET, Microsoft .NET, .NET Framework, Mono, Blinq, LINQ, DLinq, XLinq, C# 3.0, VB 9, Visual Basic 9, Orcas, Erik Meijer F#, Spec#, PowerShell, Monad, Linus TorvaldsI don’t think we’ll see a "big jump". We’ve seen a lot of tools to help make all the everyday drudgery easier - with high-level languages and perhaps the integration of simple databases into the language being the main ones. But most of the buzz-words have been of pretty limited use.
For example, I personally believe that Visual Basic did more for programming than "Object-Oriented Languages" did. Yet people laugh at VB and say it’s a bad language, and they’ve been talking about OO languages for decades. And no, Visual Basic wasn’t a great language, but I think the easy DB interfaces in VB were fundamentally more important than object orientation is, for example. So I think there will be a lot of incremental improvements, and the hardware improvements will make programming easier, but I don’t expect any huge productivity help or revolutions in how people do things. At least not until you start approaching real AI, and I don’t think real AI is going to be anything you will ever "program."
Posted by Roger Jennings (--rj) at 10:30 AM 0 comments
Labels: .NET Framework, Anders Hejlsberg, Blinq, C# 3.0, DLinq, Erik Meijer F#, Lang.NET, Lang.NET 2006, LINQ, Linus Torvalds, Microsoft .NET, Monad, Mono, Orcas, PowerShell, Spec#, VB 9, Visual Basic 9, XLinq