.NET From India

WF - Windows Workflow Foundation

WF is the new workflow engine that is part of WinFx (Note, it was previously abrv to WWF, but now the official abbrv seems to have become WF). I have been working in it for around two weeks now and the more I see it, the more I like it.

Dave has a wonderfully detailed post on the different types of workflow that WF supports and which to use when. This is good post to get started with WF.

More VB Samples??

Tom Archer has a post on how there are more VB.NET based code samples in MSDN now compared to C#.

I have a feeling of Deja vu.

When .NET was first released, almost all code samples that led to a great amount of misinformation being spread that C# was the language of .NET and that VB.NET would be dead in a few years time. There was also a lot of debate on how all VB developers should move to C# as they had no future.

Now when .NET goes into version 2.0, the adoption of VB.NET remains very strong, both in the corporate world as well as among hobbists. And atlast Microsoft seems to have realised that it may have been sending a worng signal, one it did not intend to.

Though I dont buy the explanation Archer gives, I still think it is good move to atleast debunk the VB is dead bogey.

Aspects with .NET

If you are looking at doing AOP with .NET, there is a new open source program called NAspect which may be worth a look.

You can read more on this at NAspect AOP engine

Want to Give VS 2005 a try?

You want to try out the new VS 2005, but do not want to download the trial version, nor install anything on your machine.

Microsoft now has a Virtual Server setup where you can try out some of the new stuff with accompanying hands on labs.

Try these out at Microsoft Visual Studio Hosted Experience

Inside XBox 360

AnandTech has a look into the internals of XBox 360...

New Adverts on the Blog

If you are reading my blog on the web, you would have noticed this new advertising system I have up there apart from Google Ads (On the left panel).

This one is a new system called eminimalsl by Chitika.

These are new visually compeling Ads focusing on products. Thier API is quite flexible and you can actually choose what set of products make sense for your site. And they also have a good referral program.

You can also get this these on to your site if you are interested using the button on the left panel below the Ads or follow this link. (using me as referral)

New .NET 2.0 Benchmarks

A new set of benchmarks have been published comparing .NET 2.0 performance vs. IBM Websphere.

The results show that the .NET 2.0/Windows Server 2003 implementation of the benchmark application running against SQL Server 2005 outperforms the Java EJB-based WebSphere 6.0.2.3/RedHat Linux implementation by up to 183%. The results also show that .NET achieves significantly better price/performance ratios than WebSphere 6 on all implementations tested. This paper will also show that Java applications can get good performance when connecting to SQL Server 2005: the performance of the PlantsByWebSphere JDBC-based application that uses the soon-to-be-released Microsoft SQL Server 2005 JDBC driver is approximately equivalent to the performance of the equivalent application that connects to Oracle 10G.

How about SP1 for VS 2005

Well, it is not going to come out now... So dont worry.

According to this post, they have planned for a service pack sometime mid next year. So it looks like we are going to have more regular updates this time compared to VS 2003.

Soma also has a post on what are the future plans for the developer division.

Microsoft Case Study

One of the stuff that I have been working on in Polaris in the past one year has now become a case study on the Microsoft site. You can find it here.

Express Editions Free for 1 year

I had been expecting something like this to happen. It is now official that the Express editions will have a honeymoon period of 1 year, when they are free(after that they are going to cost USD 49, which works out to be roughly Rs.2000) and you can just go and download them from MSDN. This really opens up .NET development to a lot of people who were disadvantaged by the cost of Visual Studio. One of the biggest group I can think of is the Student Community. As CNUG has a students chapter, I get a chance to talk to quite a lot of students. When I talk about .NET and show then VS, then get quite excited and the first thing they ask is how can we start playing around with it. The current answer that I give is to use the SDK with Notepad or Sharpdevelop.

But now they have acess to a toolkit which is very similar to what they will face when they actually get into the workforce.

I would have prefered if they had made the Express SKU free for ever(like the SQL Server Express Edition), but then this is still a very good start. Good Show Microsoft....

Note: The download can be quite big, upto 70MB and with MSDN library and SQL Express can go up to 400+MB as pointed out at the site.

Using Websphere does not guarantee scalability!!

Nor does using any tool/technology. It all depends on how well you architect/design/execute the project.

This was bought home to me when I read this post on Aussie Customs software debacle by Bill.

The software originally was budgeted at $33 million dollars, blew-out to $250 Million dollars

Next Business Day

One of the things you will have to do for almost every enterprise application is to find the next business day. So you have to skip over weekends and holiday. The complexity comes when you start looking at the regional aspects of weekends and holidays.

Rob Scholl has put up an article at SQLServer Central that looks at a recursive function to arrive at this information.

Customized .NET Install

Aaron Stebner posts about doing a customized and silent .NET 2.0 install and also how to find the correct command line parameters you will have to use.

How to perform a customized command line install for the .NET Framework SDK 2.0

How much is going to break??

This question is important if you have been coding with .NET 2.0 and VS 2005 (as I have been), then now that the RTM is out and you are interested in moving to RTM.
Microsoft has put up a doc at the MSDN site which contains all the breaking changes from Beta 2 to the RTM version.

Table of Contents

 

Breaking Changes in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework

Breaking Changes Overview

Functional Areas

.NET Framework Version 2.0

Threading Cancellation Functionality

INullableValue Interface         

System.Nullable<T>

Boxing and Unboxing of Nullable<T>

.NET Client

MenuCommands Class

Behavior Class

ColumnWidthChangedEventArgs Class

BindingContext Class   

DataGridViewRow Class

DataGridViewCell Class

Client Application User Settings

Application Settings Serialization

TreeView and TreeNode Classes

BackgroundWorker Class

MaskedTextBox Class

GetPreferredSize Property of Form Controls          

Windows Forms API Changes

CancelRowEdit Event

AsyncCompletedEventArgs.Error Property

RadioButton.TabStop Property

MDI Automatic Merging

BindingSource.Items Property

.NET Compact Framework

EventArgs Classes

Common Language Runtime (CLR)

X509Certificate2UI Class

System.Threading.Thread Class

KeyValuePair Class

AssembliesVisibleTo Attribute

System.Data Namespace

SqlDataReader.GetSchemaTable Method

SqlNotificationEncryptionType Enumeration

System.Data.SqlTypes.SqlStreamChars Property

SqlDataReader.GetSqlValue Return Type

Globalization

Persian Calendar Class

DateTimeFormatInfo Class

Visual Studio Tools for Office

VSTView Interface

Visual C++ Programming Language

ATL Server — CAtlHttpClient Class   

Floating-point Control Word Support Functions

Dynamic Cast from Private Base

MFC Wrapper for LoadLibraryEx()

MFC 64-bit Message Map Support

C# Programming Language

Compilation Error Due to Implicit Conversion

Checked and Unchecked Expressions

Nullable<T> Does Not Satisfy IComparable Constraint Error

Cannot Form a Delegate Over Nullable<T> Error

Operator "is" Returns true for T and Non-null T?

Visual Basic Programming Language

TypeOf Statement

Non-CLS Compliant Return Types

Overriding Object Members in Structures

Namespaces with Different Casing

Implementing MustOverride Methods

AppActivate Case-insensitivity

AppActivate Right-Hand Title

CreateObject Case-insensitivity

Zero-Based Collection Object 

FileIO Enumerations

FileLogTraceListener.CustomLocation Property

FileLogTraceListener Date Format

ClickOnce Runtime Process

ClickOnce Store Change

WebBrowser Permissions

Visual Studio   

Visual Studio Settings           

Machine.config File Changes          

Visual C++ Beta 2 Project Open Error

Errors When Deploying Device Projects to the Device Emulator

ASP.NET

Unique Class Names

HTML Default Validation Schema

Events for Non-Visible Controls

ICallbackEventHandler.GetCallbackResult Method

ASP.NET Personalization Database Schema           

Page.CreateStateFormatter Method

Aspnet_regiis.exe Utility Argument Change

WebPart File Format

System.Web.UI.IPageHeader

Relative References in the Configuration File

Web Project Global Settings and Project Policy Settings

New Certifications

Microsoft has announced a new set of certifications with the release of .NET 2.0

Focus now seems be able to provide people with specilized certifications and help them become experts in a particular technology.

You can find more information on this at The New Generation of Microsoft Certifications

Now it is Oracle's turn to go Express

According to Syscon, looks like Oracle is going to come out with a lightweight low end free version to compete with the likes of MySQL and SQL Express.

Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Oracle's server technologies division, has given a briefing to CNET in which he apparently says that a new low-end edition of Oracle's 10g database will be released by Oracle Tuesday, aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle's 10g such as MySQL and EnterpriseDB.

Oracle To Release No-Cost Entry-Level 10g Database Today