Wizards of Smart

Houston will soon have a new user group to discuss dynamic languages on and around the .NET platform. We’ll be focusing primarily on IronPython and IronRuby, but we’ll also touch on Boo, PHP, etc. as they relate to specific approaches (DSLs) and Azure. Our first meeting is coming up on Tuesday, January 5th at 6:30pm at Microsoft’s offices. We’ll be introducing the group and our goals as well as having a presentation introducing the Ruby language. You can follow the group via the Live Group and Twitter. If you’re in Houston, please join us!

.NET 4.0 is almost here, and with it, the DLR. What does that mean for you? If you are a .NET developer, you now have several new languages at your disposal in IronPython and IronRuby that will allow you to either write code much faster or embed scripting support into your projects. If you aren’t a .NET developer, you can now leverage the Silverlight full .NET framework using a language familiar to you. We’ll also be looking at other dynamic languages–such as Boo, JavaScript/JScript, and PHP–and their interoperability with various parts of the Microsoft ecosystem.

We’ll be starting up January 5th, 2010 and meeting the first Tuesday of every month. Please join us as we explore the possibilities with .NET and dynamic languages. More info to come!

Microsoft Research recently published the article “Exploding Software Engineering Myths,” by Janie Chang. For those who haven’t seen it, you will likely be surprised by some of the findings. Chang and his team worked with IBM and found that code coverage isn’t a terribly excellent metric, TDD may not necessarily speed development, Asserts (and by extension Code Contracts) greatly improve development code quality, and organization structure does matter though geographic proximity does not. The article includes links to the team’s published findings if you want more information.

I don’t really think the first finding is all that shocking, but I was surprised by the second. I’ve found TDD as useful as using Asserts–another unsurprising finding, at least to me. The authors do acknowledge that teams using TDD generally face far less post-production issues. So at worst, TDD likely keeps development time the same but allows the development team to catch the majority of the bugs as opposed to the end users. For my money, I would prefer my development team find the bugs and let the end users think we did an excellent job. In addition, you can never know when some bit of functionality just hasn’t been tested by an end user that might require a significant re-write to fix (heaven forbid).

That’s my two cents. What are your thoughts? Are you surprised at the findings?

Chrome Frame is all about improving the web, not hurting it, functioning as a back-stop against browsers that just aren’t keeping up.
- Alex Russel

In case you’ve missed it, Google has released a plugin for IE that will render as in Chrome (WebKit). All you need is a simple meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"/>

This thing is hot. The Google Group is abuzz. I had to switch to daily digest after receiving 40 emails over a span of about four hours. Looks as though more than just Google is ready for IE to catch up.

I am really excited about this myself, but keep in mind this is still very early. Google’s own sites don’t appear to have the tag yet, but I expect they will soon.

What tickle’s my mind most, however, is what Google is really about to unleash. We know about Wave. What else is out there? I have been touting the benefits of SVG as a platform, and this and Google’s other recent release of svgweb sure seem to put a lot of emphasis on SVG as the potential graphics platform of choice. Could it be Google is going to go head-to-head with Flash and Silverlight with more open standards? Please let it be true!

[Update: Check out this HTML5 introductory video from Google.]

Firefox 3.5 was recently released, and I’m now looking for a new browser. While the plugins are great and seem irreplaceable, the startup time has become atrocious and the memory usage is pretty bad. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to login to http://github.com/ using FF 3.5 at all, and I’m on there quite a bit these days. Not a winning combination.

First I tried Opera. It’s neat, but it’s just too different from what I’m used to, and so many of the extra features just don’t appeal to me. It did seem fast and everything, just not my cup of tea.

So then I tried out Safari. I like Safari 4 quite a lot. Two small quirks: you can’t opt to open to the last browser session automatically—a feature I fell in love with in FF—and the memory usage is worse than FF. It’s almost as bad as Visual Studio. (Both were running near or in the 300k mark.)

Enter Google Chrome. I tried it a few months back but wasn’t very impressed; at least not impressed enough to give up Firefox. With Firefox misbehaving so badly, though, I really feel I have no choice but to give Chrome a second look. And wow! Memory usage is very low, generally in the 30k range. It’s fast. Really fast. Firefox 3.5 says it’s fast, but I don’t think it has anything on Chrome.

So right now, I’m using Chrome. I like it. It continues to grow on me. But I’m curious, have any of you had this experience? What are your thoughts? What are you using?

I was finally listening to Alan Dean’s talk on REST from the European VAN. In it, he stated that anyone who fully understands hypermedia is a REST ninja. Well, I understand it, though I’m not sure in the fullest extent that he perhaps means. Nevertheless, I’ll go ahead and claim it considering so few others seem to understand. At least I can help spread the message. More to come on that; I’m writing and working on some things to try to help others get it, too.

Be sure to check out the E-VAN talk by Jim Webber and Ian Robinson on July 20th. Most of what I know I’ve learned from them.

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices team have posted links to the Channel 9 Prism digg/twitter search application on their CodePlex site. Check it out: patterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight – Home

I am very excited to note that the F# PowerPack has been released for VS2010. So what are you waiting for? Go grab it!

Also, I had performed some tests comparing F# with C# data access and was surprised by the results. Once I get the PowerPack installed for VS2010, I want to re-run it and see if it runs any differently in .NET 4.0, then I’ll post what I found.

Karl Shifflett and Jaime Rodriguez will be traveling to Los Angeles, London, New York, Chicago, and Phoenix to teach WPF MVVM for line-of-business apps. If you are interested, you can read more on their training event information and registration page.