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Programming news: Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, Lunascape 6.1

April 15, 2010, 9:21 PM PDT

Takeaway: Read about SQL Server Reporting Services in PHP, 10gen offering MongoDB support, Gosling leaving Oracle, Microsoft Web Camps, and more.

Language/library updates

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 have been released, along with C# 4 and Visual Basic 2010. Here are the highlights of what is going on:

Changes in Visual Basic 2010
Changes in C# 4
Changes in WPF 4
IronPython 2.6.1 is released, includes huge advantages when run on .NET 4.
Visual Studio 2010 has a useful image library
Improvements to JavaScript IntelliSense in Visual Studio
Multiple monitor support in Visual Studio 2010
IntelliTrace, which allows the collection debugging data without having to step through, looks amazing.
ASP.NET 4 “gotchas”
F# is officially at version 2.0. It can be used in Visual Studio 2008 as well as 2010.
Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 changes, including installation in less than 10 minutes. (It’s about time — my first TFS 2008 install took a week.)

I will provide more in-depth coverage about these releases next week.

SQL Server Reporting Services in PHP
Continuing its support for PHP, Microsoft has released an SDK to work with SQL Server Reporting Services within PHP.

Tools and products

Silverlight 4 release
Microsoft has released Silverlight 4. The tools are currently in Release Candidate status and will be finalized soon.

Micro Focus introduces four new tools for .NET
Micro Focus has released four new tools to work with .NET and Visual Studio 2010:

Analyzer Express: Allows developers to understand code better; it’s particularly useful for maintenance scenarios.
Visual COBOL: Allows developers to write COBOL apps for .NET and migrate COBOL apps to .NET.
DevPartner Studio: Ensures code quality and tuning.
Silk4Net: Automates regression and functional tests.

10gen offering MongoDB support
If you are looking at alternatives to traditional RDBMSs, but have been leery of the support scenario, 10gen is now offering support for MongoDB. I had a talk with Kyle Banker from 10gen to learn more about MongoDB. It is a document-based system and essentially serializes data in JSON format. This allows it to be language agnostic (unlike some of the object-oriented databases out there) and scale horizontally.

Azure available to more customers
Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is now available in 41 countries.

Lunascape 6.1 released
Lunascape, the browser that supports three engines, just put out version 6.1 with a number of improvements and bug fixes. This is a useful tool, particularly for testing purposes.

Editorial and commentary

Apple’s insanity
Apple’s iPhone Developer Agreement has been changed to ban apps written in all but a few languages and to ban apps written in cross compiling systems. Even if your app was written in a system that accepts one language and translates the code to one of the acceptable languages, your app is banned. I’ll go into more depth about this topic soon.

Rally Software #6 best place to work in United States
Outside magazine listed Rally Software as being the #6 best place in the United States to work. Good to know that not every IT shop is an Initech.

Rally Software buys AgileZen
Speaking of Rally, the company just bought AgileZen, makers of collaboration software based on Kanban.

SpringSource buys RabbitMQ
SpringSource purchased RabbitMQ, which makes messaging queuing software. VMware (which bought SpringSource last year) is silently, slowly becoming the #3 or #4 player in the development scene. Keep an eye on them!

Have large companies been colluding on hiring?
The FTC is looking into whether a number of large companies have been agreeing to not hiring employees away from each other and determining whether to take legal action.

Gosling leaves Oracle
ZDNet blogger Dana Blankenhorn says the way James Gosling departed Oracle will leave a mark.

Twitter developers are upset
ZDNet blogger Tom Foremski talks about Twitter upsetting its developers and the devaluation of apps. While ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett has this message for Twitter developers: get over it and deliver real apps.

Tips and tricks

Overcoming AJAX’s bookmarking and browser history problems
Stephen Walther has written a must-read article about how to write AJAX apps that work with the back/forward buttons and bookmarks.

New ASP.NET syntax for HTML encoding
If you are tired of having to call HTML.Encode in all of your <%= %> blocks in ASP.NET, .NET introduces a new syntax to do this automatically for you, <%: %>. Scott Guthrie has the details about the ASP.NET syntax.

WPF 4 allows caret/selection restyling
This is a case of “why would you ever do this?” but it is still pretty neat: In WPF 4, you can change the appearance of the caret and text selections.

One more reason to improve site speed
Google now uses the speed of your site in its rankings.

Users spend 69% of their time on the left side of the screen
New research shows that 69% of users’ time is spent looking at the left side of a screen. In other words, if you put valuable information on the right, expect for it to be ignored!

Events

Bill Inmon’s data warehousing Webinar
Bill Inmon is giving a Webinar on April 21, 2010 about data warehousing and how it is changing.

Devscovery 2010 coming to NYC and Redmond
Wintellect is putting on a developer conference called Devscovery in New York City on April 27 - 29 and Redmond on September 14 - 16. The speaker list looks solid, as does the schedule.

Upcoming Microsoft Web Camps
James Senior is putting on a series of two-day Web Camps to teach folks about the new Microsoft Web development items. The Web Camps will be held in Toronto, Mountain View, Chicago, Redmond, and New York over the next few months. John Papa’s blog lists the specific dates for each location.

ReMIX Atlanta 2010
If you missed MIX10 and can get to Atlanta, you’ll want to try to get to ReMIX Atlanta 2010 on May 8, 2010. It’s the same type of content with a much admission fee than MIX10 (the early bird price is $25; after April 27, the price is $35).

J.Ja

Disclosure of Justin’s industry affiliations: Justin James has a contract with Spiceworks to write product buying guides; he has a contract with OpenAmplify, which is owned by Hapax, to write a series of blogs, tutorials, and articles; and he has a contract with OutSystems to write articles, sample code, etc.

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About Justin James

Justin James is an employee of Levit & James, Inc. in a multidisciplinary role that combines programming, network management, and system administration. He has been blogging at TechRepublic since 2005.

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Misunderstood

Mark Miller 26th Apr 2010

I misunderstood Apple's license. As it says, any iPhone app. has to be originally written in C/C++, Objective C, or Javascript. So even Squeak doesn't qualify.

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Re: Gosling

Mark Miller 15th Apr 2010

I've wracked my brain a bit about why Gosling left Oracle. One thought I had is Oracle wants to encourage the development of alternative languages on the JVM. I thought maybe they're seeing the light since Java's design (the language) can only take it so far. I thought he might object to that since his original design goal with Java was a language that "used what worked" and "had no new ideas". Blankenhorn suggests another motive, that Gosling believes Java's future is with the open source community, and Oracle is not treating that community well. The thing is Blankenhorn would say that, since he's been an open source booster for years. I haven't been keeping track of what's been going on with Java's "custodians", but I don't see where Blankenhorn can make that assertion. Sun was supportive of the open source community, since that made Java more popular, but it took them a very long time to finally open source the JVM itself. If Oracle is not "getting" open source WRT the JVM it seems like it wouldn't be that different than how Sun treated it for years. Gosling apparently didn't feel that warranted leaving the company all that time.

Anyway, reading the comments to the post, people are speculating that Gosling will end up at Google. Interesting. Wouldn't surprise me.

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Missed opportunities

Mark Miller Updated - 15th Apr 2010

I see a (possible) missed opportunity. Quoting this example from the VB 2010 article:

Dim method = Function(product As String)
If product = "Paper" Then
Return 4.5 'units in stock
Else
Return 10 '10 of everything else
End If
End Function

Question: Why don't they structure ALL of the methods like this? Why do I ask? This comes so close to the way Smalltalk structures methods it almost hurts. I feel like saying, "Close, but no cigar."

In Smalltalk, methods are stored in a kind of key/value dictionary (or hash table) for each class. The "key" being the message (method) signature, the "value" being the compiled function. So when an object receives a message, the receiver looks for the message signature in its table of functions. When it finds a match, it binds the parameter values and then executes the corresponding function. This scheme makes method creation at runtime trivial. Also, since methods are objects, it's possible to modify code, which gets into messy stuff that I would say should be used with caution.

Re: Apple's insanity

I know what you're referring to here. It seems to me that this is a power play, particularly against Adobe's Flash. Adobe had just come out with a product that was supposed to make Flash apps. run on OS X's runtime, a translation layer. Apple's new license forbids this. I don't think it forbids cross-compiling entirely. I read the controversial part of the license, and the way I read it, it's legal so long as it was compiled in C, C++, Objective C, or Javascript.

Someone had ported Squeak to run on the iPhone a couple years ago, and he had written a few iPhone apps. with it. It seemed to me that Squeak would still be legal under this license, since its source code is Smalltalk, but it has its own porting engine which outputs C code, which is then compiled by the target platform's C compiler. However, people still wouldn't be able to do much with it, because the license doesn't allow a "translation layer", which is how Squeak would act if one wrote an app. on top of it. People could dabble with Squeak on the iPhone itself, but no Squeak apps. could be sold in the App Store.

You've heard me talk about this before, but I guess it bears repeating. I had the opportunity to meet Alan Kay for a bit last year, along with a group of people. He talked about how Steve Jobs had approached him about the iPhone, and referred back to some old history. Alan said of the original Macintosh years ago that it was the first personal computer "worth criticizing", which he meant as a compliment. Jobs asked him a few years ago whether the iPhone was "worth criticizing", and he responded with a curt "No."

As I recall, he expressed some frustration that, "Here is a computer that people can hold in their hand," and yet it's a closed box. The way I interpreted this is he saw it as a lost opportunity. He told the group, "I wish they'd let people program the darn thing!" I think he meant that in the sense of his long held vision of the Dynabook, a computer that provided an inviting multimedia environment that encouraged experimentation with ideas, through programming the device (buzz), was connected to the internet so that libraries of information could be retrieved (check), transactions could take place (check), and promoted collaboration among groups of people (is there an app. for that?). What we're seeing take shape is a technology world that's dominated more and more by "virtual devices", not by generative technologies. This forces technology to become task-oriented. It does not elicit our creativity. It becomes an optimizer for what most people already know how to do, which goes along with the automation ethos that most people exist in when it comes to computers.

Re: Users spend 69% of their time on the left side of the screen

I'd say the study is right on the money. With the way most web sites are formatted, the "right side" is where all of the ads are. Plus, they read left to right anyway.

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