Microsoft 2008 launch event

March 20, 2008 Development No Comments

The UK launch event for Microsofts 2008 series of products was yesterday (yeah I know writting it the day after is so slow, I should have twittered it and started a revolt against the speakers or something) and it was pretty good, a lot more glamourous than the one I went to in London for the 2005 launch.

Basically I’m not too bothered about Windows 2008 server, it looks good, more secure and everything you’d expect from a new release. As a developer I’m more interested in VisualStudio but having been to loads of the .net 3.5 MSDN days I already had a pretty good idea of what they were going to say there, so I spent the day in the SQL server 2008 sessions (although I did manage to sneak into Mobile Development seminar…). To be honest I was impressed with SQL 2008 many of the new features aren’t what i’d be using day to day but you can see where they may be useful (filestream data type) but the geodata is great, that’s going to help me with stuff i’m doing now, just simplify my life straight out of the box and save on passing unecessary data. They have also speeded it up and made it a bit more robust, so to me it looks like a nobrainer upgrade for VS 2008 and for SQL 2008. But what excited me was the presenters. Rafal Lukawiecki and Keith Burns were awesome, Rafal was so enthusiastic I’m still excited about data-mining a day later! Keith was rather less flambouyant but dry wit and solid SQL. Loved it. I know that’s the whole idea and it was a day long advert but hey what can you do.

My Highlights:

  1. Keith and Rafal’s SQL session
  2. Andy Wigley’s Mobile development session
  3. The guy from Cambridge speaking about programming for parallel processing/multicore
  4. The guy in the Mac OS X T-shirt
  5. The company giving away a wii on their stand at a Microsoft event (evils across the room from the x-box people)
  6. The MS employee on my train who had printed out Google maps for directions (i didn’t get my camera out fast enough)

Hackers

March 13, 2008 Development, Random No Comments

Tim O’Reilly on Hackers.

Shiny things

January 8, 2008 Development No Comments

Technology changes fast, we’d all be bored if it didn’t.  But. Are all the changes necessary? I was reading Magpie Developers and couldn’t agree more, it’s something which has frustrated me frequently.  If it ain’t broke why fix it.  Yes okay so there are some really useful changes, optimisations and the like, but most of my development work is building web apps and really some of the changes in say .net 3.5 are not useful in themselves, i’ll probably never use a lambda in anger but i will use linq and lambda was necessary to make that work.  But I get developers coming in all excited about shiny new stuff which is probably, in itself, not needed in our core day to day work, but I know for a fact they will try and add it… because they can. Stop. make it work. simply, correct, robust.

I’m not a luddite and openly accept change, especially those which make things more simple, easier or faster but you need a context and to be able to show a useful improvement.  If we continually re-invent the wheel then we’re not inventing something new.

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