The future is here.... again....

I found this really cool tech thing. It's a "computer table" from Microsoft called Surface. Check it out here. Surface is a interactive table.

You must check out the three videos presented on the web page above.

Robert Scoble has met the team and got some answers for his questions about Surface.

If your in Sheraton Hotel in New York City or in San Diego you can check this out live.

In this webcast you can see more about Surface.

Update: Check out this webcast by Larry Larsen on10 about Surface. This webcast shows the couple of applications made for Surface.

I really like Surface. It's so cool. I want one at home.

New cell phone?

I got a SonyEricsson W750 who is about to go home any day now.... Some days I can't call out and some days noone can call me. Thats no good feature for a cell phone. I have always been a SonyEricson guy but now I'm not sure... I really like the new Nokia N95. It's got a ok size. Mp3. Video. GPS. 5 megapixel camera.

Defining the direction of LINQ to EDM

I totally agre of the suggestions Roger Jennings have for LINQ to EDM. He writes "Following are what I consider the more important actions required to make the Entity Framework, Entity Design Model, Entity Client, and LINQ to Entities a competitive object/relational mapping (O/RM) tool"

Read all suggestions here.

XML Features in the February CTP of Visual Studio “Orcas”

I found this post from the Microsoft XML Team's WebLog about the new XML features in Orcas.

There are three major areas in which you will see improved XML functionality in Orcas:

• XSLT compiler and debugger
• XML editor
• LINQ to XML

Har djurgården bytt färger???

Jag läste DN ikväll och blev mycket förvånad. Först kollar jag på AIKs tifo. Det står att "AIK:arna växlade färg till svart-vitt"....


...så lång allting som vanligt. Sedan kollar jag på Djurgårdens tifo och ser då....

... att Djurgården har bytt färger. Snurrigt....

ADO.NET Synchronisation Services

I read Mike Taulty's blog and found a post about ADO.NET Synchronisation Services. This seems like a really interesting technology if you are working with slow and unpredictable internet connections. Read more here. When I read more about this technology I became more sceptical. It seems to be very mush code for this synchronisation stuff.

I think there is a better solution to let the SQL Server do all the synchronisation/replication work instead. Read about “Integrating Data from Multiple Sites (Server)“ and “Integrating Data from Multiple Sites (Client)”.

SearchDotNet

When you search the internet for information you always got millions of hits. Google has a new service that you can do you own search engines. I got one on my blog. Check it out here or on my blog. You can do a search and only got results from .NET and development resources.

Dan Appleman has also done one called SearchDotNet. Check it out here.

[Word of the day]: REST

It seems that the word of the day is REST or REpresentational State Transfer. More or less all articles and posts is about REST. I think the boost came when Microsoft presented Astoria which is a REST technology. The term REST is created by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. paper when he should describe an architecture style for networked systems.



His explanation of what REST is:
"Representational State Transfer is intended to evoke an image of how a well-designed Web application behaves: a network of web pages (a virtual state-machine), where the user progresses through an application by selecting links (state transitions), resulting in the next page (representing the next state of the application) being transferred to the user and rendered for their use."



Read a more reader friendly description here.

Microsoft Popfly

I found this really cool tool from Microsoft called Popfly. The description from the webpage about Popfly is "Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications". Check it out here.

Enterprise Library 3.1 - May 2007

Now is Enterprise Library 3.1 avalible for download here. You can read what news the release includes in Tom Hollanders blog here.

Free book from the Patterns & Practices Team

On the patterns & practices Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server project site you can download the beta 11 version of the book "patterns & practices Team Development with TFS Guide" here.

GAT - Guidance Automation Toolkit

The last couple of days I've been looking into GAT (Guidance Automation Toolkit). It's a really cool and useful technique to create foundations for a project, with code generation and stuff to help the developers. It's a bit tricky to get a grip on the development environment. Most code is XML in different files like template files and project files. There is a Hands-on-lab out there but I think that one is really crappy. Take a look at this tutorial instead. It's a guy called Jelle Druyts that made a really great post series about how to begin you GAT experience.

Microsoft ESB

Microsoft is now releasing the previous partner only ESB Guidance read more on the CodePlex site.

Help.... we're doing it again

Help!!! We are doing the same mistake all over again.... A couple of years ago most companies didn't offer developers a good career possibility. There was a profession called developer, system developer or programmer and that's it. The companies I worked for had a maximum salary a developer could get and many colleagues reached that limit before they were 30 years old. To do a career or to make more money they had to switch career. They had to take a position as leader (with responsibility over personnel) or become project manager. Hmmm. That sounds good. They got a new administrative job because they were a really good developer. That makes sense. They got a passionate interest in writing code but now they writing word documents and attend meetings all day.

And now we’re doing the same mistake again. All good developers should become architects. Good developers (many of them with just experience of one or a couple of projects and no architecture training…) should suddenly become architects because they are good developers…. Most architects stops writing code. Why? How will they be able to be experts in developer- and technical issues and take decisions about these questions if they don’t know the technique? What architecture should we use for this project? How should we implement this? How does this work? Should we use.... Etc. The technique they once knew would be obsolete one day. You must keep up the learning. One architecture will be the best or even function for all projects. The non coding architects would be obsolete pretty soon them self. Sure you can read articles, read blog posts and attend Microsoft Live once a year to keep your knowledge up to date. But to be able to really build good IT-systems you need more and deeper knowledge then you can get from articles.

No, create possible careers opportunities for developers, senior developer, expert etc.
We need good developers and not just architects in the projects. One project I participated in had three architects and one developer (me). That was a good project team. And I have seen small projects with just one or two developers having one full time architect.

Enterprise Library 3.1

Tom Hollander describes the news in Enterprise Library 3.1 here. It's more or less a maintainance release.

New features in Orcas and Rosario

In Orcas there are a couple of really nice features included. I really like the XSLT debugger there you can debug with breakpoints and all that both from the XSLT file but also from the data file. A really cool feature there is that you can also debug the XSLT from your C# code.

In Rosario there will be a XSD Designer that will help alot, check it out here.

Good tips for a successful team

I found this post of a couple very good tips for a successful team lead.

SQL Server Katmai

Read more about the next generation SQL Server Code Name "Katmai" here.

We are the best programmers in the world

Sweden took all three medals in the "7th International 24-hour Programming Contest" in Budapest. Read more here.


Final result
Rank Points Team Nationality
1 11150000 Balloons'R'Us SE
2 10557500 Jon får bestämma SE
3 9010000 Team KTH Itello SE
4 8787500 Royal Air Force SRB
5 8146095 Rusty PL

VBx

The last couple of days there have been a lot talking about VBx. What is it... If you wonder read about it here "What the heck is VBx".

CSLA 3.0 avalible

For all of you using CSLA the 3.0 (test release 4) framework is avalible for download. Read more here. CSLA 3.0 uses WCF and WPF.

Must read post

Den här blogposten av min gode vän Micke är det bästa jag läst på länge. Läs den Micke har träffat rätt igen.

Session Mix 07

All sessions from Mix 07 are are published here.

Web Service Software Factory v3

I found this video from Don Smith about v3 of Service Factory. See it here.

The v3 release of Service Factory I think will be great. Now the Service Factory will use model-first. I think that model-first is critical for most to start use the Service Factory in real life project.

The realease date for v3 is set to 15 november 2007. Can't wait.

Web Service Software Factory v2 evaluation

After some tests of the Web Service Software Factory v2 it's time for my thoughts some kind of evaluation.

The whole Software Factory idea is great. You got a built in framework and built in code generation in the development environment. Your development time could decrease and the quality could increase. I say could because it doesn't matter what tool, framework or technique you use you could abuse it and get the opposite result.

I think that this version of Service Factory isn't ready to use in real life projects. There are some critical issues that must be solved first.

• The framework doesn’t quite feel like a whole. There are different wizards you must use and then there still are source code you must write manually. This work flow must be clearer and more natural.
• The code-generation is just for the first time, and then you must code changes yourself. There must be a way to do the generation many times.
• The code-generation is made from the existing database. The work flow should start with the creation of the business entity. The database should be a place for storing data and the focus should be the business entity model. If we use model-first we have a model to use for repeatedly code-generation when needed.
  

My main concern is that this version of Service Factory isn’t using a model-first perspective. By model-first I mean that the development is starting with the creation of a business entity model and a model for the service contracts. The models will be the glow that holds the whole application together, all code-generation will use the model as the truth.

Today I found and downloaded the v3 of Service Factory. It is really great. The major difference to v2 is that now we use model-first and the models are the foundation of the application. If you do any changes in the model just re-generate the source code.

Pandora closed

Pandora (internet radio) is closed for all us non-US citizens. I found Pandora a year ago and has been a devoted listener. I have found about 5 new great artists there and bought their CD from Amazon. I think the music industry are digging their own grave. They are closing down music services that people use and enjoy, they are hunting fans that playing their idols music and share chords and lyrics. I saw an old film clip on TV from the early days of Mp3 when some record company excecutives was saying that Mp3 was not a threat for them and that they don't gonna change their old strategy for this new media. They woke up when it was to late and now they fighting a fight they could not win.....

The music industry has lost yet one battle by closing down one way for people to find their way back to music.

[Friday fun]: Fainting goats

You must see the fainting goats.

Astoria and Jasper

I saw that Microsoft annonced two new data access technology on the Mix conference in Las Vegas. Both are avalible now as CTPs and they are called Astoria and Jasper.

Astoria: Read the overview document. It said for example "Astoria is an early technology for creating and executing data services. Astoria data services use the Entity Data Model to model data in terms of entities. These entities are exposed as URI-addressable resources that can be accessed using plain HTTP. Astoria also establishes uniform patterns that UI widget frameworks and libraries can leverage to provide additional services on top of the data services."

Jasper: "Project Jasper is geared towards iterative and agile development. You can start interacting with the data in your database without having to create mapping files or define classes. You can build user interfaces by naming controls according to your model without worrying about binding code. Project Jasper is also extensible, allowing you to provide your own business logic and class model. Since Project Jasper is built on top of the ADO.NET Entity Framework, it supports rich queries and complex mapping"

Read more here.

I'm looking forward to the new technologies. I will be interesting to see what happens. I'm just worried when the new technologies don't support model first. I think we must start thinking first about the domian model and not about the database model. We have to wait to Rosario to get a proper model first tool in EDM Designer.