Microsoft renames WinFX as .NET 3.0

Somasegar announce the change in his blog.

Those are welcome news to me. I don't want to say I told you, but I remember I suggested John Montgomery to stick to the .NET branding in a comment to his blog, back in November 2003. That was just after the PDC in which all these new technologies were announced.

The general consensus by then was that the.NET branding had been completely eroded by the various marketing mistakes Microsoft made (like adding the .NET moniker to products that did not carry the CLR).

But I told him that we developers were not that much confused and that we always got the story right.

It is nice to see that once more Microsoft does what I want ;)

Letter to David LaVallee

Ok, you don't know me, and I don't remember hearing from you before. But now that I found a few things about you, including your blog, I felt the need to write you this note, just to express my deepest envy for you:

• First, you are in a Guitar Craft right now! How can you?... Darn!
• The Guitar Craft is in Lunlunta, Mendoza, in that same house that gives me so many good memories of my teen years (even if I do not enjoy the company of the saints anymore). Thanks for the pics!
• You are so close to Mendoza city, where I was born and were most of my family and half of my friends live!
• You are part of the Windows Live Team! Darn, this one causes me the greatest pain!
• You helped invent Java! Ouch!
• Where you the one that convinced Steve Jobs of buying GarageBand? Wow!
• You obviously play the guitar better than me ;)
• And you are probably are a better programmer too ;)

Ok, ok. I do not really envy you. I just got amazed at all this, and wanted to wish you good luck and great success.

Do you like wine? Being in Mendoza, I hope you do! Enjoy the hospitality of the locals, and the delicious Malbecs. Anything you need, ok? I can recommend you a few good places to visit (You will find good people there too).

If you are bored, take the route, drive a few kilometers, and get a picture of you posing with a "Departamento de Lavalle" sign :)

An Apple in my future?

UPDATE: I have been reading the FAQs at BootCamp's Beta site, and I have changed my mind somewhat. They say they do not provide support for Windows running on a Mac. Not a brilliant way to get customers. Reading about the drivers they provide, I don’t get if they really want to get it right. Apparently they don't want to get their feet wet. They have still a long way to go in deciding whether they really want a good stake of the PC Business or not. They are so close, but I guess they are too arrogant or just used to the minority elite aura. I will wait and see if things improve. Anyway, I want my next computer to be a 64 bits dual core.

Sean Alexander reports that Windows Media Center Edition runs on his MacBook Pro.

I spent an hour last night talking with a friend that is a Mac fan. He almost convinced me. As I see it now, my next notebook computer could be an HP, a Sony or an Apple. There is a premium price for the Mac experience, but I think it is completely justified.

Now they have positioned themselves to get a significant stake of the PC business, the future of Apple looks brilliant.

The only thing I have against it is that as far as I know we won't get 64 bits mobile Intel Core Duos soon. Dual core AMD Turions seem to be closer. But Apple seems to be, like Dell, married to Intel.

We are Level 2 in CMMI

The company I work passed a CMMI Level 2 appraisal a couple of fridays ago, and we satisfied all the criteria for certification.

I seldom give names in this blog and have never mentioned the name of my employer, but this is such a good thing that I needed to do the show off and of course, also congratulate all my colleagues ;)

So congratulations to all, especially those that had the vision for it, those that worked so hard for it and those that supported it all: José, Melvin, Wendy, our Project Leaders, and many more.

Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 Training

Today I began taking an intensive 40 hours training course on Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005. I hope by the end of the week the coarsest holes in my knowledge will be filled with substance ;)

I had the pleasure of meeting Adolfo Wiernik, a Solid Quality Learning consultant that came from Costa Rica to impart the course.

I wouldn't have heard of Adolfo before if I hadn't listened to his webcast last Wednesday. He is, although, famous in the community and a Microsoft Regional Director.

I am indebted to my company for sending me (along with two mates) to take this course.

Tomorrow is ASP.NET 2.0 day, clearly the technology I have been using the most for the last 9 months. I think Adolfo will be sick of me by tomorrow 6 p.m. ;)

Atomik Circus

This is just to show that this blog is not dead.

I have just seen Atomik Circus on TV, and it was hilarious. I simply did not know that you could do a movie like this. I mean, it seems impossible to try something like this and not to spoil it completely.

Everybody was sleeping at home, so I was not able to enjoy the music, but I think it must be good (I turned volume up a little and put my ear close to the speakers, just to get an idea).

So, I have to see the movie from the beginning again. Atomik Circus Part II anyone? :)

The New Live.com

I have been following this people work for some time (they make my browser's home page). I think the new version is looking more brilliant than ever.

Nothing very deep to say. It has been working here since 10 minutes ago.

The new style looks great on grey, but of course I would like to have more choice of styles (including "clasic") or even better to ability to skin it.

Multiple pages are very wellcome. The new speed is wonderful... I like it a lot!

Congratulations, and I hope you will have a nice party! And Sanaz, remember to avoid the car until you get a spare!

Please Microsoft, buy Delphi

So, now Borland plans to sell its languages and IDE business. Since I first read about the news yesterday, I have talked quite a lot about it at my office.

I feel Microsoft is one of the few chances for Delphi to stay relevant. Even more, perhaps Delphi could flourish under Visual Studio, together with C#, VB, C++ and other languages Microsoft has in the works (Python and F#?). So I hope Microsoft will buy Borland's IDE business (everything but JBuilder I guess). Of course, I only want this to happen if this is what the employees want.

If Microsoft does not buy Delphi, my office mates are crossing their fingers. They don't want IBM to buy it (the company I work for used to be an Informix shop, and there is still a big number of Rational fans among us).

Visual Studio 2005 Award for Customer Excellence (aka The ACE Cube)

I received my cube at home on Friday. I plan to post pictures in the next days. Overall, a nice gift. My thanks go to Somasegar and whoever else decided I should have had the award.

IBM 100% Pure Open AJAX?

I heard about Open AJAX today for the first time while reading the Dr. Dobbs Journal. So, I don't know a lot about it. Only that I am interested in any tool that provides decent JavaScript debugging.

However, reading what they say about it, makes me think it is probably just a piece of "religion-ware":

Eclipse itself is open-source code, so IBM's donated software for running Ajax code is likely to be held as the standard environment in which the output from an Ajax tool must be able to run. If Open Ajax reaches that status, the industry will have a way of measuring departures from standard Ajax and guarding against the possibility of Ajax being implemented in a proprietary or Windows-specific way.

Microsoft has a set of interactive Web technologies, including Ajax, bundled together into what it calls Atlas. "They build it [Atlas] using their own extensions" rather than sticking to strictly Ajax conventions, says David Boloker, IBM's CTO of emerging technology.

By giving Ajax "a common tooling," or Eclipse test platform where different Ajax code can be tested in one runtime environment, IBM is offering a workbench where proprietary extensions will stick out as not working with other people's Ajax.

So, now I am pondering what gives IBM & co. the special gleam to arbitrate on a technology that is in constant flux, with a myriad of ideas and toolkits seeing the light each month, and also a technology that was created by Microsoft seven or eight years ago?

Of course the objective meassure will be how many will find Open AJAX useful and will use it. But I am still interested in knowing how many will buy into this idea that theirs is propper AJAX while Microsoft's is evil AJAX.

We will see... But, right now I don't even feel in the mood to link to them from here.

Visual Studio 2005: Our list of annoyances

UPDATE 3/1/2006: The hotfix is officialy out for the Visual Basic background compiler crash. Thanks to Lisa, Margaret, and the VB Team.

UPDATE 2/12/2006: All I can say for now is that we have seen great progress with the bugs we reported to MSDN Feedback (Ladybug). I feel remorse because after the honor of having Scott answer to this post, most of the bugs I was able to detail were not related with ASP.NET (by far the piece of technology I use and abuse more nowadays). Anyway, we have reported a few other bugs that were not in the original annoyances list and while sometimes the answer is "we cannot repro, please attach a sample", when we have done that the response has been very satisfactory. Special thanks to Lisa and all the VB Team.

UPDATE (a few days later): I finally begun detailing these bugs on the product feedback site. I have been busy trying to finish some critical use cases at work.
The background compiler bug is here: FDBK42191

Sumedh, of the MSBuild Team, asks me why should I bother to rebuild project dependencies every other week. The answer is, in a very positive tone, that we do it because of too many bugs.

I admit beforehand that we deal with MSBuild and Visual Studio 2005 project files as black boxes. The less we get involved with them, the better, as we already have other complexities to deal with. However, I have spent sometime comparing different versions of project files for troubleshooting.

We are only a couple of developers working on an ASP.NET application making use of 11-12 separate components. Here is a short list of some problems we have experienced. Many of them are not related to MSBuild, I think, but in the end, the aggregate result leads us to rebuild our references from time to time:

• Many times a day the Visual Basic background compiler crashes on our project. Once it has crashed once, it will crashing every two seconds. So, we need to quickly kill the devenv.exe process to get rid of the never stopping Watson window.
• After one of those crashes, most times Visual Studio will refuse to reload our solution. Instead it will kill itself and vanish of the desktop, not even bothering to summon Watson. We have learned a couple of tricks for that. First trick it is to create a new VB Windows Forms project and then restart the IDE (DonÂ’t ask me why, but this is sometimes enough). When the first trick fails, we usually go and delete the .SUO file. After that we usually get Visual Studio to load the solution without a glitch.
• For simplicity we have chosen to use a single solution file both for development/debugging and for integration. Within the solution, we organize our projects using solution folders and we use project level references among the different assemblies. But in order to get a streamlined development environment, we usually hide and unload project groups selectively (solution folders are very handy for that). Then, when we need to reload and modify a project, we sometimes get in trouble. It seems that the in-process build system in Visual Studio gets something wrong with dependencies or whatever, and we end up receiving very bizarre errors messages (like missing members in standard System.Web classes or in our own classes). So, the usual workaround is to clean the solution and make a complete rebuild. Of course this takes time and make us wonder why do we need a sophisticated build system in the first place.
• We have been lately looking for ways to improve the time of our build process. We found that each build was writing around 150 files to disk, so we started by sending all external assemblies to the GAC and turning “copy to local” off on every project. The front end project is a Web Site, so this is the only project that needs every assembly in its “bin” folder. These measures improved things.
• Maybe because of the crashes, because of us deleting the .SUO file or because of a bad interaction with our Version Manager (we use PVCS VM and Tracker add-in, which I figure is not ideal), sometimes things go really bad. Some times we loose information in our solutions, like which projects are meant to be built or some project level references. Other times we get error messages while the IDE loads the solution, saying that it cannot load the version manager add-in.
• When things go too bad, what we do is start from a new solution file from scratch, and then is when we have to rebuild our dependencies. I think this happens approximately once every two weeks. I know we could save a working copy for this. But due to the few things that change (added and removed projects) and with all our configuration management practices in place (but failing to deliver), we usually think like: "I don't remember what changed, lets rebuild the whole thing".
• Web site projects have proven more troublesome that regular projects. For instance, we have found that we cannot have a Web site two folder levels down the solution file. For instance if we have the solution file in a folder called “\System” that contains a Web site located in a folder called “System\UI\Web” we cannot get this to work correctly. Eventually (we still need to catch it in the act), the web site is copied to “System\Web\”. Conversely, when we tried to fix this by deleting the site located in “System\Web” and trying to re-add the site located in “System\UI\Web” we usually get a message saying that “the site located at “System\UI\Web” has been deleted or moved. It says that, but it is clearly trying to find it at “System\Web”.
• Also, with Web Sites, there seem to be some ambiguity that confuses us a lot regarding what is a reference and what is just an assembly copied in the “bin” folder. For instance, when we try to add a project level reference to a web site (one that is not showing in the reference list) it will say it cannot add a reference if the assembly has already been copied by other means.

All this said, we still got to do significant work with Visual Studio in a few months. We like a lot how our ASP.NET 2.0 application runs, and we are not looking back. If we get those annoyances solved soon, Visual Studio 2005 will be, without a doubt the most productive environment I have ever used.

I intend to search and submit every one of these problems to MSDN Feedback when I have enough time.