If you were listening to the .NET Rocks show today, you heard me invent something that Microsoft has already shipped: The Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. <whew> One less thing I have to build myself. : )
I wrote this at the beginning of 2002 while
channeling my energies into the Windows Forms book. I never published it, but I
liked it (and I’m in writer avoidance mode as day #2 past my due date rolls by),
so I thought I’d share it:
The Dark Ages, a period of five
centuries beginning in 5 AD, marked a time of intellectual darkness and
barbarity. A ruling feudal class kept a firm grip on their over-worked
peasants in small enclaves eking out a meager living from the soil. Only
lonely, isolated monks were able to record knowledge using primitive tools
to painstakingly inscribing it into hand-crafted volumes, each unique and
each unavailable to their fellow man. Only pilgrims and adventures, willing
to endure long journeys and brave many hardships, had the chance of
obtaining this secret knowledge. Finally, the Renaissance, brought on by the
spread of knowledge in approachable formats using inventions like the
printing press, was able to rejuvenate a weary world and bring about a
period of intellectual growth and achievement that continues to this day
(interrupted only briefly by the Reagan years).
The
Browser Age, a period of ten years beginning in 1991, marked a time of
user-interface limitations and lowest common denominators. A ruling
standards body kept a firm grip on their over-worked participating members
in companies large and small, eking out a meager living from IPO wind-falls.
Only lonely, isolated web masters were able to record knowledge, using
primitive HTML to painstakingly code it into hand-crafted pages, each unique
and each unavailable to their fellow programmers. Only Perl programmers and
regular expressionists, willing to parse tangled byte streams and scrape
many screens, had the chance of separating the data from the presentation.
Finally, .NET, brought on by the spread of the information available
programmatically to rich client applications using inventions like Web
Services and Windows Forms [ed: and soon, Avalon], was able to
rejuvenate a weary software world and bring about a period of productivity
growth and achievement that will continue until long after we retire
(interrupted only briefly by the Internet Bubble burst).
Because of where we are in the Longhorn release cycle, i.e. a long way from a release, if the Avalon team agrees with Marc, they can make real changes.
As a result, Longhorn gets better because it’s able to accept early, critical feedback. Perfect.
Ian's piece says to evolve an SOA endpoint that you're best off creating and running a new service along side the old one. He takes 2267 words to say what I said in 20, but it’s still a joy to wind your way down Ian’s road. : )
My own preferred model is to do just as much as I can in XAML, because I find declarative style coding more flexible, but to put into code what makes sense, e.g. most event handling. My line in the sand is this: if I would have to embed code in the XAML, I go to real code, otherwise, I use XAML.
I used to live and die with Visual Studio Service Packs and the DevDiv Sustaining Engineering team has just released another SP for you Visual C++ 6 and Visual Basic 6 programmers. Millions of folks still use these products and it warms my heart that we're 2.5 generations past this, but still releasing SPs. I don't anticipate any more of them, though, so I recommend using this SP for your current projects and moving to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 on the next one, depending on the timing.
