Sébastien Ros' Weblog

The second day at PDC was almost a keynote day as the whole morning was focused on annoucements. Though, I managed to attend very interesting sessions.

TL14 Project "Velocity": A First Look

Before going to this session I knew what Velocity was for: distributed data caching. I also knew about difficulties to implement such a framework as I have already created one for Data Tier Modeler, our old ORM framework. Going to this session was a great pleasure as it answered a lot of my questions, especially about all the available features, and real scenarios applications. Definitely one of my next development topics.

BB43 Identity: "Geneva" Deep Dive

I didn't really what it would be about but this session was very instructive. Not only did we learned about all issues concerning authentication on the cloud, but also some solutions, with our without Geneva. If you have to deal with network administration or just are a developer focusing on the cloud, don't hesitate. The demonstrations did not work smoothly but the expected results were meaningful though.

TL20 Entity Framework Futures

Entity Framework is a great initiative from Microsoft. But this session did not reach the expectations I had. We learned how to do the simplest thing ever with an ORM tool, and people applaused ! Hey guys, this example was trivial ! Mapping a table with two columns to a POCO ? That's not "Futures". At least this shows what we could expect for next versions, but those features are already implemented in lot of open frameworks. At least, it's better than LINQ To SQL.

Universal Studio

As last time Microsoft invited everyone to visit the Universal Studio Park. Always great, free food, free amusements, including new ones: Simpsons replacing Star Wars, and a scary tour instead of the usual studio visit

No, I did not only learned how to hide the ribbon I also saw a lot of great sessions. In this series of four posts, one per attendance day, I will give you what sessions I think are worth seeing as a developer’s perspective. As I couldn’t be everywhere at the same time, I missed a lot of great other ones and I hope I’ll be able to see them also.

TL33 Managed Extensibility Framework: Overview

MEF is great thing, really. It’s very simple to use and adapted to real extensibility scenarios. The session was pretty good, with clear examples, and easy to understand. A question which is still pending in my mind is the coherence with other Microsoft tools like System.Addin and Unity. MEF could be a winner if it is adopted by developers as it is internally at Microsoft. Hum, this reminds me something related to data access, don't you ?

TL10 Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET

This is a great session if you like dynamic languages. Jim is clever! Though, a lot of his examples were “stolen” by Anders Hejlsberg which was repetitive if you had assisted to this session also. If you want a headache at the end of the day, just watch this session. Not only is it really difficult to understand all the concepts he dealt with, but he also speaks really fast. Poor little French guys were we.

ES01 Developing and Deploying Your First Windows Azure Service

I have not seen this session at the PDC directly but at home. This is a great session to understand all the concepts behind programming for the Azure platform. Tables, Queues and blobs are well explained, and this is the only place where I had an answer whether a developer should use Azure storage or SDS.

Did you know that you can hide the ribbon and let it appear when the mouse hovers it by double clicking on any of the sections ?

PDC is fantastic, looking forward to going there again !

I have now finished my third day at PDC. So far a lot of interesting new products and functionnalities have been introduced.

Azure
Among the most interesting and important announces Azure is the top one. As a developper perspective it's not so interesting, I admit. But as an ISV it should have a huge impact on how we work, and more particularely on the real business. For those who are not aware (if there is any) Azure provides hosting services for any ASP.NET web application. This means we can grow as far as we want, simply, and we hope it will be cheap. Currently ASP.NET is far behind PHP in terms of hosting costs and services. I hope and trully think that this will reduce this gap, with a deep focus on websites.

C# 4.0
Good stuff, but I don't think those changes are important for the common grammer.
Yes it will add a lot of possibilities but those concepts are too far from reality. I currently know a few companies who really use the power of C# 2.0, I even don't want to tell about C# 3.0. But more is better than less, and it has the advantage to tremendously simplify the interoperability code for COM and the Office suite.

Windows 7
As a developer the functionality which is most interesting is the ability to create bootable virtual machines. We will be able to take the full advantage of our hardware on predefined development environments.

Visual Studio 2010
The only interesting stuff I have seen so far is UML 2.4 management. Again a business killer functionnality, integrated inside the environment. Great for the users, with great looking designs also. We can already use it in our presentations.

WCF and WF
Those new versions will not only increase dramatically the performance but also correct all the issues we can have currently: lack of textual representation, versionning. The only problem is the release date : late 2009. We need this now !

Quadrant
Quandrant is a visual data management tool for diagraming. It can diagram anything, and is fully configurable using itself as configuration diagrams. Technically it uses MVC everywhere and nothing useful for the developer can be used. But the paradigms are very interesting. We'll have to wait for more practical stuff.

Looking forward for the last day.

I am currently publishing all our innovative open-source developments on CodePlex for consistency. This is a huge work as we have many projects to publish, but I hope it will result in a bigger impact than publishing them separately.

You can see all the already published ones here: http://www.codeplex.com/Project/ProjectDirectory.aspx?TagName=Evaluant

Some more ones will increase the list.

I've just published a video demonstrating how to use Euss. This is the default demonstration script I show to anyone who wants to have a quick overwiew on what Euss is able to do. I think I'll add some other ones about more specific functionnalities. The next one should be data synchonization for disconnected scenarios.

Les Techdays 2008 ne sont pas encore terminés que les premiers retours apparaissent d'ores et déjà. Pour preuve les deux articles par Olivier Rafal sur nos sessions.

TechDays : Entity Framework au niveau des autres ORM, pour Evaluant et TechDays, des pointures à suivre

N'hésitez pas à me donner vos impressions en laissant un commentaire.

Je serai présent en tant que speaker pour Dotnetguru lors des Techdays 2008 à Paris. Je co-animerai une session intitulée LINQ et Entity Framework en compagnie de Fabrice Marguerie.

En plus de cela Evaluant aura un stand sur le plateau partenaires, et chose exceptionnelle, vous pourrez venir discuter avec nos experts et moi même de vos projets durant les trois jours que durera l'évènement. Donc si vous avez besoin de conseil, et que vous avez un peu de temps entre deux sessions, venez nous voir. Ce n'est pas tous les jours que l'on peut bénéficier de consulting gratuitement, il faut en profiter.

Cela sera aussi l'occasion pour moi de vous faire profiter de nos retours d'expériences sur toute la gamme .NET et sans doute de vous faire économiser pas mal de temps de réflexion.

James Taylor will make a short visit in Paris to execute another great concert at the Olympia Theatre in Paris next April.

Guess what I did when I heard it

See you there ...

This is not something I would say like this, but one of the Euss users community said to me this morning.

Just marvellous! Your good support for interfaces kicks the ass of every ORM I've tested. I can't understand why anyone would want to use NHibernate when Euss exists

Euss, what else ?

Ok, the title is a bit too abusing, but what a surprise to see a post on Scott Guthrie's blog showing a new Linq technology called LINQ Dynamic Query Library.

Obviously it was released prior to my NLinq framework. Still, NLinq can do better things, for the moment .

I have just released NLinq on CodePlex.

NLinq is a framework focusing on reimplementing the Linq functionnalities in Visual Studio .Net 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 (C# & VB .Net) by providing a Linq grammar parser and a "Linq To Objects" execution environment. With NLinq you can take advantage of major C# 3.0 features right now, without requiring it.

Example:

    query = new NLinqQuery(
        @"  from c in people
            let t = c.Age * 3
            where t % 2 == 0
            orderby t descending
            select new { c.Firstname, t }");

	
    linq = new LinqToMemory(query);
    linq.AddSource("people", people);
	
    foreach (object o in linq.Evaluate<IEnumerable>())
    {
        Console.WriteLine(o);
    } 

If like me you ever wondered how to convert an hexadecimal string repsentation into its decimal value, you certainly google'd it. Don't try, I did it for you, and I found nothing interesting but a million lines of useless code.

Instead try this:

Int32.Parse(
  "0B0C", System.Globalization.NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier
 );

In case you wonder how to do the opposite:

String.Format("{0:x}", 2828)

As ANTLR 3.0 is now out, I wrote an article on how to create a mathematical expressions evaluator in C# with it. You can find it here.

I am currently in the process of translating it in french for those who would like to wait this version.