News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Nov

22

As everyone is probably aware now, Visual Studio 2008, codenamed Orcas, has now gone to manufacture and can be downloaded by MSDN subscribers from the MSDN website.

BetaNews have a good report on some of the software included in the release while ScottGu, of course, has a full roundup of all the new features and links to his extensive posts on the subject over the last few months.

The new features that I am most interested in are LINQ, Workflow, Javascript development and development for PDAs, as well as new controls for Windows forms etc.

I will probably play around with the CTP for a while before upgrading as I still have lots of pending code development to do in Visual Studio 2005 for my ordersofbattle website.

At some point in the New Year, I will restart my MSDN subscription so I can get the Professional Version of 2008 and the new versions of SQL Server and Windows Server.

Nov

21

The good people at Logic Supply have now shipped the components for my next Mini-ITX home-build project which I am planning to attack once I return home in a few weeks.

A while back, I wrote an article about building a Mini-ITX for development work that I could take with me abroad as a substitute to buying a more powerful laptop.

Well, I have decided to put the theory into practise and build one!

The machine will have a Intel Core Duo 1.66 with 2 GB of RAM, a 120GB SATA drive, a DVD drive on a Jetway J9F2 Mini-ITX board using the popular Morex 3699 case. I had originally intended to get a MSI 945 GM2 motherboard but that was out of stock and Logic Supply were not sure that the MSI 945 GM1 would fit in the case.

I will use WiFi, either PCI or USB, to access the machine when on the road.

Once built, I intend to use the machine for all my devlopment work as well as setting up virtual machines for testing new development environments and languages such as Phalanger, Visual F#, Visual Studio 2008 etc.

My current laptop, the extremely portable Fujitsu P1510, will act as the display and keypad for the machine via Virtual Desktop.

The total price was about $840 which is a heck of a lot cheaper than a similarly-specified laptop.

22/11/2007 - Updated with picture of the Jetway J9F2-KHDE motherboard and corrected title

Nov

20

Although the VIA Pico-ITX motherboard has not yet arrived for sale at Logic Supply, they are now advertising the first case designed around the tiny motherboard, the Serener GS-L08 Case, which is only 5.77 inchs x 1.97 inchs x 4.29 inchs which is pretty small really.

While the case does not have a slot for a DVD drive, it does have space for a 2.5 inch hard drive and four USB slots along with VGA and Ethernet connectors. The case is very quiet as it is fanless and is cooled through chassis fins and a heat sink/heat pipe combination.

It is expected to be available in mid-December.

For more information, checkout the product page at Logic Supply here.

NOTE: The VIA EPIA PX10000G Pico-ITX motherboard is expected to be available at the end of November.¼/p>

Nov

20

The Redmond Developer News have a good article on Visual F# and its significance.

Functional programming languages, like F#, seek to reduce the problem by restructuring the way developers create programs. Programs are composed of functions that take a set of inputs and return a set of outputs, and reduce or eliminate the ability of a function to have “side effects” — that is, to modify the global state of the program. By doing this, functional languages make it much easier to distribute a program’s workload across multiple processing units. In fact, these exact same techniques are at the heart of Google’s massively parallel search engine.

Once I have built my new development box, I am definitely going to start investigating Visual F# and some of the new .NET DLR languages that are now emerging.

Source: Redmond Developer News

Nov

20

The .NET Framework Community page which is run by Microsoft have published a number of new whitepapers on .NET 3.5 which can be accesssed here.

There are whitepapers on the following subjects:

  1. Introduction to the .Net Framework 3.5
  2. Introduction to the Windows Communication Foundation
  3. Introduction to the Windows Workflow Foundation
  4. Understanding WCF Communication Options in .Net Framework 3.5

Nov

15

PDA Thoughts - The SQL

November 15, 2007 | 2 Comments

Sorry about the rather bad pun, but I couldn’t resist.

Hard of the heals of my earlier post a few weeks ago about the lack of an HTC Touch that suited my requirements, comes news of a new HTC Touch, the HTC Touch Cruise which was formerly codenamed the Polaris.

All I can say is that HTC must be readers of this website!

Well, this one meets and then exceeds all my requirements; it has the same amount of memory as the TYTN II and the Touch Dual, it has WiFi, it is smaller and thinner than the TYTN II and does not have a keyboard. It also has a 3 megapixel camera with zoom, a FM Radio and GPS! And of course it has every phone and wireless technology going.

I did consider the Imate Ultimate 8150, which has a very similar spec, but does not have GPS and is a $100 more, but in the end it was hard to reject the Touch Cruise.

The product was only announced a few days ago, but Mobile Planet in the States told me that they have already sold 300 units!

The product should start shipping in early December, so I can’t wait to see what people think of it.

You can learn more about the HTC family at HTC’s website here. Expansys/Mobile Planet are selling them here.

The Imate Ultimate 8150 can be found here. Expansys/Mobile Planet have their page for the 8150 here.

Nov

14

The big news that I missed commenting on last week was that Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 are expected to be available at the end of November which is not exactly far away!

At the TechEd conference in Barcelona earlier this morning European time, Microsoft developer division corporate vice president S. Somasegar told attendees to expect the final Visual Studio 2008 to be shipped sometime in late November 2007.

What has been called Microsoft’s answer to Google Gears will also be shipping as part of VS 2008: Microsoft Sync Framework is being described as an engine for synchronizing databases across disparate platforms, such as from local networks to mobile devices. The idea is to help enterprise developers build more robust, data-driven applications with the added comfort of built-in portability.

As Microsoft describes it, the Sync Framework enables a network application to take on one of the roles of a server app, becoming what it calls a “synchronization provider.” Once equipped with the provider component code, the application becomes capable of presenting replica data in varying scales of formats, including the old familiar ADO.NET but incorporating RSS and Atom as well.

What’s interesting about this is that it conceivably divorces network applications from direct reliance upon Microsoft server platforms. In so doing, it has those applications swallow a little bit of those platforms unto themselves.

Needless to say, I will probably be renewing my MSDN subscription in the next month or two to take advantage of all the new software coming available in the near future!

Source: BetaNews

Information Week has more on this.

Nov

14

The CTP Download of SQL Server 2008 (aka Katmai) is now available on MSDN here.

RedmondMag.com have a useful overview of some of the new features here.

I am pretty sure that I will download and install the CTP in the near future and will be able to give you my personal impressions on the product.

I expect to be building a new development PC over Christmas so I will probably install it on a Virtual PC on that machine once it is ready.

In general, I am a pretty big fan of SQL Server, I first started using the product when it was version 6.5 and all my prior database experience was in Oracle and Access. Coming from Oracle, I found SQL Server to be a lot easier to setup, run and administer than Oracle was and that still remains true for me today.

As a database, Oracle is still far more flexible and tunable than SQL Server is, and Oracle still is, of course, heavily used by the vast majority of corporations in the world; however SQL Server has gone from being something of a joke in the database world, fit only for small departmental databases, to being able to compete with Oracle in a large number of situations and be used as the main corporate database for quite a few major corporations. SQL Server is far easier than Oracle to run and often requires little day to day effort to keep in ticking along.

As a Siebel consultant, I almost always end up doing Siebel on either Oracle or SQL Server, it is very rare that I have to implement Siebel on DB2 or Sybase for example (OK how about never!). My current Siebel 7.8 project in Sweden is on SQL Server 2005.

I will confess that I still miss PL/SQL as opposed to T-SQL in some ways, especially the complete lack of the powerful decode function in T-SQL; but that aside, SQL Server is my personal favourite in every way and I use it extensively.

Nov

12

Having previously speculated that perhaps Cognos might be the next BI specialist to be swallowed up by an IT behemoth, the following news today came as no surprise!

Canada’s largest software company, Cognos Inc., said Monday it has agreed to a $5-billion US friendly takeover by IBM.

The U.S. computing giant will pay $58 US per share in cash for Cognos.

Based in Ottawa, Cognos produces business software and employs about 4,000 people around the world.

Speculation of a takeover of Cognos increased after its larger rival, Business Objects, agreed to be acquired by SAP, the German software giant, for nearly $7 billion US over Thanksgiving weekend.

In March, Oracle bought another Cognos competitor, Hyperion Solutions Corp., for $3.3 billion US.

Analysts had pegged IBM, Microsoft and Oracle as possible buyers of Cognos.

Source: CBC

Update:

Needless to say, this story has been quite widely commented on, Business Week have a good article on the subject here.

On a personal note, I will be sad to see Cognos disappear as a company as I have had a few dealings with them over the years - a few years ago they flew me from Copenhagen to Ottawa for an interview and then flew me back that evening. They then went and changed the job description on me!!

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