"...covering products like Silverlight, ASP.NET, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Live services, and the Expression design tools"

..and the connection is tht all these things are proprietry to MS and designed to be non-inter-platform.

Will MS ever get it? No. I don't think so.

We, at Microsoft, wish to extend our hearty thanks to the programming community for continuing to endorse and adopt our "Best Guess du Jour" development patterns.

We earnestly believe that these new methodologies will result in increased programmer productivity (despite the need of retraining the whole crew) and result in increased remuneration seen at the bottom line (at least for us) and we encourage you all in the industry to overlook our previous Best-Guess efforts, and recognize this current crop of Best-Guess for the genius that it is.

As always, we promise that, if you adopt our methods, languages, and APIs, your company will remain at the forefront of the technology wave (even if your programmers need to be changed out for newer, more hip, plug-compatible graduates).

Remember, it's important to keep changing the paradigm, as that avoids the risk that a large number of currently productive software engineers will remain relevant, thus keeping salary creep in check while providing jobs for an annual crop of wet-behind-the-ears, clueless-yet-trained-in-what's-current, energetic-and-hip aspirants to the world of IT and Engineering.

Thenk yew awl, and good night.

What web?

No because they will never understand basics like validity, accessibility, and not spitting out garbage when nothing would do instead.

no...

"the initial appeal of ASP.NET - that it makes Web programming more like Windows programming"

That is such a terrifying thought - I wonder for whom the idea appealed ?

All MS has to do is release PHP.Net and they're back in the game. Don't think it's an option? Check out Phalanger. The names "unusual" for sure but it's pretty impressive none the less. ASP.Net MVC is about 3 years too late but it is cool. Will they ever get their stuff out of Beta though. MS are getting worse than Google :P

yes they know it's a computing world domination vehicle. What else is there to get?

and on another note:

There were some snippets of Silverlight news, or perhaps clarifications. Guthrie said the plug-in is getting 1.5 million installations a day,

I wonder if MS cares that we can't hide it from windows update like this guy is complaining about?.

http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.windowsupdate&tid=b7f4504f-69df-40de-86ae-65f3976c24e4&cat=en_US_56d1dd45-de9e-4fc5-9bc1-2d1d0de6daee&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=&p=1

Only that crappy company would brag about that many downloads of another entrapment gimmick via one of their greatest weapons against consumer choice.

Stevie has 666 tattooed to the back of his head... Just wait till he goes completely bald and finally the anti-Christ will be revealed.

Everything the net does has, in the last few decades, been developed as an antidote to the Microsoft Business Model (Microsoft Business Model? = Software -> ? -> Money (tm)) . All those years ago Bill didn't 'get' the net because he couldn't see where the money came from. In a way he was right, there is no money. Not from software alone anyway. So why should they get involved?

Microsoft still don't see where the money comes from but they can't live on the desktop tie in for much longer so the net is the only game in town. Their only option is to copy an existing success, use it to set a standard that they control and leverage into licensing dollars (Silverlight anyone?). Everything they have done in connection with the net is the same thing. They keep failing but they are falling into a desktop shaped hole and have nothing to fill it with.

Was the cameraman pissed when he took the photo? Car shots look cool at angles. Geeks in Slacks in front of a big display just makes me feel ill.

LINQ to SQL is cack. Been using NHibernate for some time and, while it has its issues, it is a glorious triumph compared to the pile of manure that is LINQ to SQL.

Then there is ASP.NET. Been using it for *years*. Each iteration seems to get more convoluted and hide more nuts and bolts from the programmer. Ajax integration is a typical Microsoft "just do this and it'll work" bodge up. Bolting WebForms to pukka middle tier business objects and logic is painfull. Bolting it to NHibernate is excruciating. Despite LINQ to SQL MS still have this sql fixation that requires everything to boil down to selcts, updates and inserts.

Then someone introduced me to MonoRail and ActiveRecord. Like swapping a clapped out jalopy for a Ferrari! OK, only been using it for a couple of weeks, and the gloss may fade, but, at the moment, I'm wondering why I spent so much time pissing into the wind with WebForms.

Since MS seem to be copying their entire design philosophy I must have missed how horrific RoR is for development over the last few years. Or something.

MS could start by fixing all the broken links on their sites. I've been on MSDN and microsoft.com quite a bit the last few days and the number of broken links is very frustrating. For example, go to the UK Office 2007 page and click the "what's in the box" link.

They also seem to specialise in untrustworthy SSL certificate errors (they appear in Firefox - not sure about IE). In fact these are just one of many problems encountered when trying to use their sites with Firefox or a non-IE browser.

I wonder if they really want new custom.

""LINQ to SQL is still being developed, but Entity Framework is the big bet,"

i.e. "that new thing last year, that we told you all to use ? Dead, use this instead."

It's a wonder developers put up with that sort of practice...

Microsoft insist on things that boil down to inserts selects and deletes, because that's what the back end is. I don't see the Ado.Net for entities to be a competing framework with Linq, it just solves a different problem.

In fact Data model architecture, despite being rubbished by people who think everything's an object referenced by and only by it's id, because they can only program in one language (usually c# or Java,) is in fact usually much faster than it's Domain model architecture equivalent. Data model architectures provide the ability to do _everything_ that object relational domain model architectures can do, but have the additional quality of a structure to the data.

I recently had an email from a mate describing how a load of "I've read software design in a Sun guide to selling more hardware design book, object relational types" came in and insisted pulling a basket full of skus from a database, and then checking the stock count via stored procedure for each is faster than simply returning the offending stock levels with the basket. How ridiculous. It was 30% easier for the DB to just give them the answer than to give them the data to work it out.

That said, the problem with the eponymous hibernate is not just the technology itself, but it's use encouraging the lazy into the failure to have balanced tiers, but when all you have is a hammer what can you expect?

Anyway, I foresee SQL Server's and Oracle's future generations to be genuine object stores, with tables migrating to lists, and Fields being objects themselves whose member variables become statically typed or strongly typed reference objects (FK); and the next versions of SQL to be more like Linq than anything else. Should scare the wits out of the Adabas crowd having a database that is truly object-hierarchic-relational.

Linq is a superset of SQL, and it's power is not in simply using it to parse objects. It's power is in two parts, its high level nature, and its fundamental distributed mechanism.

int thingsToDoCount =

(from r in myDiskFile

from row in myDatabaseTable where r.name == row.name

from tb in mySelectionBox.SelectedItems where tb.vale == r.name

from l in myInMemoryList where l.lastModifiedTime < row.Changed

from c in crm.Account where c.AccountType = "Business Account"

where c.name = r.name

select 1).Count();

Hardly rocket science to see why this will have less errors in it (and probably be faster for the average programmer) than the equivalent 200 lines of code in 3gl is it?

My view is that we should be coding in the highest level language that is scalable. Though I recognise there's a load of people out there who like programming for programming's sake, and don't really care about completer finishers, or performance.

It used to be that all those guys did c, because they loved its side effects. These days they all seem to be writing hibernate apps (before delivery - and leaving very before the second delayed delivery date) with the assumption that hibernate can handle multi million object aggregated transactions as well as a system designed predominantly for nothing else.

I remember when everyone thought XML was epic, it should be used for everything. Then people started realising that it took more time to unpack a 25 million element xml document than to rewrite the code.

Sharing information. Tightening up the holes (instead of just putting a band-aid over them). The things they don't do, in other words; which make the web work.

M$ is betting with your time and your sweat and your money.

Sweet deal for them.

If you don't want a bumpy ride, quit reinventing the wheel.

-HJC