Software Geek

A few weeks ago, ScottGu blogged about the ASP.NET MVC Framework roadmap…    I am happy to announce that we have taken the next step on that roadmap with the availability of the ASP.NET MVC Framework update. 

ASP.NET MVC Preview 2

The ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release contains the latest version of the ASP.NET MVC framework and related Visual Studio tools support.

In this release we have incorporated a ton of feedback, added some new features and enhanced the tooling support!

Check it out at http://asp.net/mvc

Find some great video overviews of the new features.

Walk through the MVC Quickstarts and use the MVC forums to ask questions and get help! 

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/05/asp-net-mvc-preview-2.aspx

Spring is a deep framework providing numerous approaches and techniques for Java developers, this post covers the topic of Java config and prototypes in the framework.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248013264/thread.tss

I haven’t done the research to find out when the last time 7 games separated one conference’s top 10 teams, all with a winning record and playing good basketball this late in the season. It hasn’t happened in the 8 years I have owned the Mavs.

This year is shaping up to be a crazy one. A 5 or 6 game losing streak and any of the 4 teams who have had the best record in the west over the past month could find themselves out of the playoffs.

This scenario is not lost on players or fans. The feel in arenas lately have been very playoff like. You can feel the energy as fans know what is at stake. Players are looking at the standings and paying far clos

er attention to game by game results of division and conference teams. They know what is at stake with every game.

This season, at least in the Western Conference, no one is going to ask the question of whether the regular season is important. For the remainder of this season, EVERY game is important. Every team will have their up and down streaks simply because its going to be hard to play playoff quality basketball for 40 games. Back to back games in the West are go

ing to be brutal.

The playoffs to make the playoffs has started and it doesn’t look like any team will get a breather between now and when their season ends.

That will make this the Best NBA Season Ever !

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http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/01/28/is-this-the-best-nba-season-ever/

Jason : I’m never a huge fan of string based designs, primarily because of their lack of compile time validation, etc… however, lets think about modifying your “Personality” pattern to work in.NET…

If you made the data type of “Personality” be a System.Type object, then you could do a reasonable assignment:

machine.Personality = typeof(ScanSideways);

This presents a could of interesting problems. First, you have a compile time dependancy on the ScanSideways class. Easily fixable by a slight change:

machine.Personality = Type.GetType(”ScanSideways”);

Which you can now parameterize, load from a file, whatever. So far, this is cake. My problem is that we have lots all the type checking. At some point the program will take the type object (even the strongly typed version) and do an Activator.CreateInstance call followed by a cast to the correct data type. Boom.

Personally, I wish there was a way of specifying the constraints of a particular type, some form of validation rules that could be applied (hey, wait! you mentioned that earlier in your post <G>). For example I could say:

public class Machine {
    [BaseType(typeof(Personality))]
    Type Personality { get; set; }
}

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Won’t you join us for some holiday cheer?

Place: Rock Bottom @ State & Grand in Chicago
Time: 6PM

Please note that this is next Thursday, December 15.

I’ll be giving away another JetBrains.NET Action Pack, consisting of ReSharper and dotTrace licenses (one each).

Happy Holidays!
http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/archive/2005/12/08/432710.aspx

Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development (2004)
by Tony Clark, Paul Sammut, James Willans

An excerpt:

Language-driven development is fundamentally based on the ability to rapidly design new languages and tools in a unified and interoperable manner. We argue that existing technologies do not provide this capability, but a language engineering approach based on metamodelling can. The detailed study of metamodelling and how it can realise the Language-Driven Development vision will form the focus for the remainder of this book.

In software engineering circles the term “language driven development” is synonymous with “language oriented programming”, a term which LtU members are more familiar with (thanks to Martin Ward’s article Language Oriented Programming which first appeared in 1994, and then Martin Fowler’s essays on the topic). The book hasn’t appeared on the radar here on LtU, despite 41 citations. I suspect this is due in part to only one citation at Citeseer , and the lack of cross-talk between computer scientists and software engineers.

There are a lot of similarities between the XMF language (discussion at LtU ) and that of the Katahdin language (discussion at LtU ). Other related discussions here at LtU, include Language Workbenches: The Killer App for DSLs - about the essay by Martin Fowler, Ralph Johnson: Language workbenches - a response to Fowler’s essay, XActium - Lightweight Language Engineering? - which discusses an essay about a previous version of XMF, Generating Interpreters? , Language Oriented Programming - discusses an essay by Jetbrain’s Sergey Dmitriev, “Language Oriented Programming” Meta Programming System - discussion of the Jetbrain MPS system, The DSL, MDA, UML thing again… - an older discussion on the relationship between DSLs and MDA.

(more…)

Usually
I write blog articles on topics that people request via email or comments on
other blogs.  Well, nobody has ever
asked me to write anything about shutdown.

size=2>

But then
I look at all the problems that occur during process shutdown in the unmanaged
world.  These problems occur because
many people don’t understand the rules, or they don’t follow the rules, or the
rules couldn’t possibly work anyway.

size=2>

We’ve
taken a somewhat different approach for managed applications.  But I don’t think we’ve ever explained
in detail what that approach is, or how we expect well-written applications to
survive an orderly shutdown. 
Furthermore, managed applications still execute within an unmanaged OS
process, so they are still subject to the OS rules.  And in V1 and V1.1 of the CLR we’ve
horribly violated some of those OS rules related to startup and shutdown.  We’re trying to improve our behavior
here, and I’ll discuss that too.

(more…)

Brian Welcker posts some information on changes they are consindering to how you will administer Sql Server Reporting Services in the next version, codenamed Katmai.

Right now, administering Report Models exposed to Report Builder requires you to launch Sql Server Management Studio tool, while other features require you to launch the Report Manager website.   Also, there are some features that you rarely use, yet are exposed from the Report Manager portal, such as Job Management and System Wide Role & Security configuration.  

It appears that the end result of the proposed tool changes will be to correct these inconsistencies by consolidating server and system-wide configuration and administration tasks into Sql Server Management Studio, and moving some of the more user-facing admin features to the Report Manager.

Not a bad idea overall, now I just hope they fix support for FormsAuth throughout the entire solution (ReportBuilder, nudge nudge).

http://weblogs.asp.net/lhunt/archive/2007/04/24/reporting-services-administration-changes-in-katmai-v-next.aspx

This week the Soundtrack to Juno bounded to number one on the charts. A measly 65k units is all it took. Not great for a #1, but these days, its a great total for any theatrical soundtrack. Which raises a question. If a best selling soundtrack sells about 100k units, and 99pct of the rest sell under 10k units, is selling a soundtrack the best use of the music ?

I think not. Whether sold digitally or by CD, the reality of today’s music and theatrical release market is such that music from movies would generate more total dollars for everyone if it were given away with the purchase of a movie ticket.

To release a major motion picture theatrically th

ese days costs a lot of money. Not only does it cost a lot of marketing dollars to release a movie, not a single movie company in this country has any idea which money that it spends really drives people to theaters. Thats a problem. So where does music fit in ?

One way to entice people to get off the couch and attend more movies is to increase the value to customers. The most cost effective opportunity to increase value is to give away items to theater goers that have a very high perceived value, but a very lost cost of distribution.

Enter music.

How many people are going to rush out and buy the Soundtrack to the new Rambo movie ? But riddle me this. How many more people would go to the movie if they knew that their movie ticket stub had a code to unlock a free download of the movie’s soundtrack ? Or if they bought a ticket onl (more…)

Sometimes you got to brag. Tuesday nights on HDNet is News Night. We lead off with Dan Rather Reports
Dan has brought back real news with a full 60 minutes of reporting on news that matters. If you haven’t yet, check out some of his reports that we are streaming online

DRR leads right into HDNet World Report. World Report, which is produced by Dennis OBrien doesn’t get the visibility that Dan Rather Reports gets, but it knocks out great stories from around the globe week after week. Today, HDNet World Report finally started to get some of the recognition it deserved. Today, at the 74th annual National Headliner Awards, sponsored by The Press Club of Atlantic City, N.J. HDNet walked away with first place winners in TWO categories !

The first was for Documentary or Series of Reports: HDNET, “The Forgotten Front: Terrorism in the Phillipines; beating out CNN with their amazing “CNN Presents: God’s Warriors;” and CNN for their , “Children of the Storm.”
Our 2nd win came for News Magazine Program: HDNet World Report, “Uganda’s Silent War ( a co production with Newshour with Jim Lehrer);” finishing ahead of 2nd and 3rd place finishers, Dateline NBC, “To Catch a Con Man;” JumpStart Productions/NOW on PBS, “Casualties of War”.

You don’t have to be the biggest to beat the best, but you do have to outwork the bigger players. Congrats to everyone at HDNet and the entire World Report team for doing amazing work and making us proud.

This is just th (more…)