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Taming the JungleThe joys and perils on being in the bleeding edge of software development technology. |
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January 08 Windows 7 beta availableMicrosoft released yesterday to its beta testers (at http://connect.microsoft.com) a new version of Windows 7. I am already downloading the multi-gigabyte package.
This is a much-anticipated version because of a recently non-official leaked version that got good “reviews” on the Web, “unofficial” and official such as this one at CNET: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10134184-92.html. December 18 At Last a (very) good Cross-Reference tool for .NETOk, I am old. I started programming professionally with Applesoft BASIC on Apple II in the early 1980s. At that time there were many “cross-reference tools” that would go through your code and find what function each function called – a “call graph” and display it as a list of function and the ones it called.
Software was small but even then the cross-reference tools (there were many!) were useful in order to see the impact of changes, help reorganize the code (we call it “refactor” nowadays), find bugs and so on.
Now I am managing a large health care application that was developed along the years by people that professional courtesy forces me to call “not very careful”. As it is now, there are very few DLLs (including a huge one) and it seems that each method calls every other one, without any layering and any order.
I desperately need to break down the code in sensible layers so I can recode parts of it and plug in new functionality with ease. I desperately need a modern version of my old Applesoft “cross-reference” tools. Of course, a modern version would know about assemblies, classes and would display the “call graph” graphically. I spent many hours on the Web and didn’t quite find anything satisfactory. The closest I got was something called “Total “.NET XRef”, but it didn’t work with .NET 2.0 and it lacked a graphical output. I even entertained the idea of writing such a tool myself – after all, AFAIK the information is all there on the assemblies and can be pulled in by reflection.
Now my prayers were answered: Microsoft came up with such a tool for Visual Studio 2010. It is no longer called “cross reference”, it is called the “Architecture Explorer” - marketing people in action, you see.
Anyway, this "Architecture Eplorer" is reason enough to upgrade to VS 2010 when it is available. Actually, I it’s reason enough to download the 8 GB CTP, put up with the slow speed of the Virtual Machine and keep using it till the cows come home – or Microsoft launches the final version.
Take a look below at XPS file it generated. Inside VS 2010 you can drill down at each module, see classes and methods. This thing is simply Glorious. Hail to the people at Microsoft that came up with this.
 October 13 Silverlight 2 is hereMicrosoft announced today that its new browser client platform, named Silverlight, will be available for download tomorrow, Oct 14th at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/.
Silverlight is a kind of “.NET Light” that runs under many Internet browser (IE, Firefox, Safari) and operating systems (Windows, MacOS and Linux). It is very attractive to Microsoft shops because it uses the same languages, class library and development environment as the “full .NET”.
Silverlight is a direct competitor to Adobe Flash. Compared with Flash, Silverlight has a much more robust and feature rich development environment. The one thing that Silverlight lacks when compared to Flash is 3-D graphics, but that can be included by the applications themselves. Also, Microsoft can extend Silverlight at will in the future and include support to different APIs, I believe it’s just a question of getting customer feedback.
I hope .NET finally delivers the promise of “Smart Client” applications made by Bill Gates during PDC 2001 but never quite delivered by .NET 1.X or even ClickOnce. Smart Client applications are meant to deliver the ease of deployment of browser applications with the rich user experience of Windows apps.
Compared with ClickOnce, Silverlight has some clear advantages:
It’s not as powerful as the full blown .NET Framework but I expect it to have the right balance of power and simplicity. Given that it was developed under the leadership of Scott Guthrie, of ASP.NET fame, I have a very good feeling. September 24 Windows will be shown for the first time during the PDCMicrosoft will for the first time publicly the next version of its flagship operating System, Windows 7, during the Professional Developer’s Conference to take place in Los Angeles during the last week of October.
See more at http://www.microsoftpdc.com. September 23 Preparing for PDC 2008PDC (Professional Developer’s Conference) is the premier Microsoft’s event for developers. The exciting thing about PDC is that, contrary to TechEd, it does not happen every year. It only happens when Microsoft “has something new to say”. Because of that, its contents are somewhat foggy; the real news is “saved” for the event itself.
In no PDC was this most striking than PDC 2000 in Orlando. In the agenda you could see that there were only “general sessions” and absolutely no abstracts were published beforehand. Even then Microsoft managed to attract about four thousand curious developers to see what used to be called the “New Generation Windows Services”, now known as “.NET”. You can check at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/.
This year there are abstracts published, but the main focus – as far as I can tell – will be “Extending the Platform to the Cloud”. From a developer point of view it seems it’s a new set of APIs to stuff over the Internet in deeper ways that it’s now easily possible. There’s video about the strategy at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Countdown-to-PDC-2008-This-is-the-Software--Services-PDC-Plus-a-Hard-Drive-Chock-Full-oBits-is-a-PDC/.
And BTW, I just got the wind that there will be so many things delivered that they will give away a 160GB USB hard disk to each participant with the contents in!
I will be there.
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