News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Oct

29

Visual F# is apparently going to enter the mainstream .NET world and be rewarded with inclusion in the Visual Studio suite of languages according to some recent announcements on the web.

What is Visual F# you ask? Never heard of it!

F# began its life as a Microsoft Research project to demonstrate the efficacy of .NET as a platform for mixing multiple distinct programming paradigms. F# is heavily inspired by the OCaml programming language, and a subset of F# and OCaml are largely compatible. F# offers developers many valuable and compelling features without sacrificing much runtime efficiency. F# supports type inference, pattern matching, high-order functions, and currying. F# also supports interactive execution, which means that F# programs can be run like scripts or inputted in an interactive top-level environment similar to the Python shell or Ruby’s IRB. F# also has full access to the .NET APIs and components written in other .NET languages.

So far, Visual F# and other functional languages such as Lisp and ML have remained firmly in the realms of mathematical academia, but now things are changing it seems as the .NET family of languages continues to grow.

So, what is Functional Programming?

Unlike imperative or procedural programming languages, in which computation is typically performed by altering program state, functional programming languages operate on the principles of mathematical evaluation and reduction. Such programming languages are deeply rooted in formal mathematical logic and computational theory. Functional programming languages are largely based on the system of lambda calculus devised by Alonzo Church, in which numerical values, sequences, data structures, basic mathematical computations, and even recursion can be expressed entirely with nested functions.

Outside of the academic world, functional programming idioms are valued because they are often far more expressive than imperative or procedural equivalents. Modern dynamic scripting languages like Python and Ruby, for instance, offer first-class functions in order to boost developer productivity. Even C# offers some features—like LINQ—that are heavily based on functional programming concepts. The ability to mix F# and C# in .NET applications makes it far easier for software developers to use the programming paradigms that are best suited for each individual task.

For more information, check out the F# page at Microsoft Research here

Source: Ars Technica

Oct

24

Computing SA have a timely article on the durability and longevity of COBOL in the real world.

While the mainframe environment certainly does not have the attraction of .Net or Java, the reality is that behind the scenes, Cobol continues to be the most important programming language in the world today.

Why? Because Cobol applications account for 60% of all the applications that are currently in operation, and around 85% of all the transactions (globally) that are processed (Database and Network Journal). The Aberdeen Group estimates that $2 trillion has been invested in mainframe applications in corporations that house approximately 70% of all critical business logic and data, while Gartner says Cobol code accounts for 65% (200bn lines of code) of the total software in use.

At the Cobol Future 2007 event in Rotterdam earlier this year, it was stated that more than 60% of all company information accessible through the Internet is stored on mainframes, with 83% of all transactions and 95% of all financial and insurance data being processed by Cobol mainframes.

I have fond memories of COBOL as I started my IT career as a COBOL programmer on VAX Minicomputers in 1986 having previous been taught to program the language on a floppy-disk equipped PC using Wordstar as a text editor!

For about 10 years, COBOL was my bread and butter and I wrote a lot of PRO*COBOL whereby Oracle SQL was precompiled into COBOL statements used in batch programs running against Oracle. I also used COBOL with a DEC Network database called VAX DBMS.

As a language, COBOL is easy to learn and can turn its hand to a lot of tasks; you can if you really want to write UI applications in COBOL, although that would probably not be something I would recommend!

I have not done much COBOL in the last 10 years, but it still has some relevance even in the .NET world; Fujitsu have a version for .Net called NetCOBOL.

Here is a case study of a Stockholm Housing Company and the migration of their COBOL code from an IBM Mainframe environment to Windows Server 2003.

Oct

18

PDA Thoughts

October 18, 2007 | 4 Comments

HTC Touch + 1GB microSD (Unlocked) | MobilePlanet Code: 150045HTC Touch Dual (Unlocked) | MobilePlanet Code: 156006I have not mentioned this much on this site, but I am a big fan of PDAs and their potential although I have not used one for a while.

I used to use a Qtek 2020 (built by HTC) as both my PDA and my cell phone and it was very useful, although its limitations could be a bit frustrating. Its main limitation was memory and it would grind to a halt and nothing short of a hard reset with the stylus could get it going again once it was frozen. The synchronisation with MS Outlook also caused problems from time to time as well.

That said, it was a very useful device, both as a phone and for its media and file capabilities; who needs an IPOD when you can listen to music on a PDA? Sure, it does not have the disk space of an Ipod, but I didn’t have a huge online music collection anyway. I also found it useful to read documents while I was travelling. It did not have built-in WIFI which was a pain, but I could use a WiFi SD card which of course meant that I lost the use of the additional storage.

I also like the fact that the range of software for these devices is quite wide and that you can program them easily using Visual Studio.NET.

Things have changed a bit in the last couple of years, HTC now market their own phones and Imate now have their own range of devices. HP seem to have fallen by the wayside and we now have devices from UBiQUiO and E-ten.

The current range of HTC devices, the TOUCH, are attractive but I still cannot find one that is quite right for me.

The TOUCH looks great, but it only has 128MB + 64 MB of memory while the TYTN II has 256 MB + 128 MB. Both have decent WiFI among other things.

My objection to the TOUCH is that it does not have enough memory given my problems with the Qtek 2020 while the TYTN II has a lot more memory, but costs almost double and I do not want the sliding keyboard.

The latest release from HTC is the TOUCH DUAL which has the same memory as the TYTN II but does not have WiFi!!

I would have been a definite customer for the DUAL, but I want to have WiFi which is a lot cheaper means of internet access (where you can find a hotspot) than relying on a data package from a phone company. WiFi also means you can use Skype tp talk instead of using expensive phone minutes.

Therefore, at this point, I am going to wait for the original TOUCH to get a memory boost or for the TOUCH DUAL to get WIFI or for the TYTN II to come down in price or for something else decent to come out.

Oct

15

A new SQL Server Community has been launched by Microsoft SQL Server specialists and can be found at http://www.sqlcommunity.com/ .

It looks like a pretty useful resource and I have added it to my blogroll.

Source: dotnetguts

Oct

11

The big news of the day is that German software giant SAP is to buy business intelligence and query software specialist Business Objects for a whopping $6.7 billion.

According to Redmond Developer News, Business Objects will operate as a “stand-alone” business unit of SAP. SAP will merge its NetWeaver BI offering with Business Objects’ BI toolset. Business Objects will continue to support its current target software environments.

“We will see the industry’s most comprehensive portfolio of business performance and optimization solutions in the market and we will offer these for companies of all sizes in all geographies and over time for industries,” said Henning Kagermann, CEO of SAP.

NetWeaver BI, has never compared favorably to competitive BI platforms, wrote Forrester analyst Boris Evelson, in a blog posting. The acquisition of Business Objects, he wrote, gives SAP “best of breed set of BI tools with full BI stack capabilities, everything from data integration tools like ETL and data quality to reporting, OLAP, dashboards, text analytics and many others,” he wrote.

This is pretty big news all round and comes hot on the heels of Oracle’s recent acquisition of BI specialist Hyperion and Microsoft’s recent moves in the BI arena.

This begs the obvious question of course …. who will snap up Ottawa-based BI vendor Cognos?

It seems inevitable that someone will buy Cognos soon and complete the process by which all the independent BI companies have been absorbed by the big IT players.

Source: Redmond Developer News

Oct

4

The big news yesterday was that apparently Microsoft has plans to make the .NET Framework source code available to everyone for reference, but not modification.

This will be quite interesting as I have lots count of the number of times that a Windows product has hit an exception and opened Visual Studio and dumped me into the compiled code of a product. It would be nice to actually see the code that is screwing me around!

Some speculate that this is the first step to the .NET Framework going open-source all the way.

Scott Guthrie, as always, has all the news on this which can be found here.

Source: Redmond Developer News

Oct

4

Redmond Developer News has a useful summary (or cheat sheet) on the various versions of .NET and their associated versions of Visual Studio.NET which can be found here.

The article does not cover the Compact Framework.

It can basically be summarised as follows:

  1. .NET 1.0 - No longer supported by Microsoft; do not go there!
  2. .NET 1.1 - Used with Visual Studio 2003 - You shouldn’t be using this anymore either!
  3. .NET 2.0 - Used with Visual Studio 2005 - The current standard, has a huge number of improvements over .NET 1.1 (Most people are still using this one, including me!)
  4. .NET 3.0 - Used with Visual Studio 2005 - Really is four extra frameworks (WCF, WWF, WPF and Card Space) on top of the .NET 2.0 CLR
  5. .NET 3.5 - Used with Visual Studio 2008 - Currently in Beta 2 - Huge number of changes including LINQ and JavaScript Intellisense. VS 2008 supports multiple .NET versions. Due to be released in February 2008.

There you have it in a nutshell.

I have been thinking of upgrading to VS 2008 and .NET 3.5, but my current laptop does not have enough memory, so I am holding off for the present.

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