Atalasoft Community

Hiring with Passion

Steve Hawley — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:22:00 GMT

After reading a couple Stack Overflow articles about interviewing and hiring, I've been reflecting a lot about what I look for and the process by which I use. I won't talk about a great deal of specifics of what I ask, as I consider that to be intellectual property, but I will talk about process.

I think that one of the more important things I look for in a hire is passion. It's futile to sit down at a table with a candidate and ask, "say, it says here that you have C# and .NET experience - are you passionate?" In this case I fully expect an interviewee to answer 'yes' under all circumstances. This is a clearly a conflict of interest: it is in the candidates best interest to answer 'yes' in order to play to what they believe the interviewer wants to hear.

So a direct approach is out. Instead, I have several questions, each of which gives the candidate the opportunity to speak in depth about something they should know well. You can tell the people who have it and who don't. All it takes is a little spark to start a three alarm fire under someone who is passionate.

So how do you do that? In my case, I try to be as broadly educated as possible so that I can ask what are called "essential questions" in education speak. The essential questions about a subject are those questions which represent fundamental limitations or the core basis of a system, to which there are no simple answers. These are the types of questions that can simultaneously polarize or unite groups of people. Has the designated hitter rule damaged the American League? Dewey, LC, or Cutter? For any resume, I can find many ways of sneaking in questions to find passion.

Why is passion important? In design, it is what separates the extraordinary from the pedestrian. In implementation, it is the desire to have the "right" code instead of simply working code. In debugging, it is understanding the root cause and searching for more instances of it instead of patching the code in front of you. It is the ability to excite those around you and bring up the level of the status quo.

I'm passionate about interviewing. It takes me at a minumum an hour for a good candidate, but I prefer two hours. I try to make sure that I've haven't missed something in the process and that the candidate gets as much of an opportunity to rake me over the goals as they see fit. What? It's true. I try to allow candidates to do that too. I've been asked some hard questions or some that just take a lot of time to answer fully. Interviews shouldn't be one way - I want to hire someone I want to work with. Similarly, you should want to work with the people who are hiring you. Maybe you should be selecting for passion too.

Scan to Scribd CodeProject article

loufranco — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:58:00 GMT

Last May, Atalasoft released 31 apps in 31 days, each free, with full source available, and made with DotImage.

I wrote App #7 which was a desktop application to scan, clean, OCR and upload your documents to Scribd.

This month, I went back to the project and wrote a step-by-step guide to building Scan-to-Scribd for CodeProject.

All of the non-uploading code will work in any Scan to X project, where X can be Amazon S3, Azure SQL Data Services, Google Docs, SharePoint, or any CMIS compliant ECM (you just need to write the uploading part). If you want to roll your own service we have this tutorial for building a simple repository with upload service using ASP.NET webservices and SQL Server (DotImage only needed if you want to scan or view documents)

The Case for Zero Footprint Document Viewing

Bill Bither — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:43:48 GMT

Recently Ralph Gammon from Document Imaging Report interviewed Jack Berlin, the CEO of Pegasus Imaging, about the new release of their Prizm Viewer, a heavy client 25MB ActiveX Document Viewer. Ralph asked about the new wave of AJAX based zero-footprint viewers on the market. This was his response:

"There is certainly some demand for lightweight viewers" he said. "If you are talking about users doing ad hoc viewing of images a couple times per month, I think zero footprint viewers work. However people doing imaging every day as part of their jobs, typically need the power of a locally installed application. It's our view that large corporate users especially are moving away from zero footprint viewers. They want the best performance and are willing to install software on their PCs to achieve it. Of course, they don't want deployment headaches. That's why we are always focused on improving our administrative tools."

Mr Berlin is right on one point, that customers are willing to pay for the best performance. That's exactly why our Zero Footprint Viewer is so popular. When viewing documents that are located on a server (which is the case for any ECM system) it's faster to start viewing the documents instantly in a browser by asynchronously streaming thumbnails and tiles of the document to the client opposed to downloading the entire document to the client for viewing.

Mr. Berlin is also correct on another point that IT administrators do not want deployment headaches. With Zero-Footprint, there are no deployment headaches as there is no software to install. It works with any modern browser on any Operating System including: IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. With the right zero-footprint viewer, you don't have to give up features. Our viewer supports features such as markup with annotations, and editing and cleanup. DotImage 7.0, to be released soon, adds support for freehand annotations that performs as well as any thick-client freehand drawing tool.

Where Mr. Berlin is 100% incorrect is that users are moving away from zero-footprint viewers. In fact, the opposite is true. We have fortune 500 customers and ISVs who have purchased a total of over ten-thousand servers. They are each successfully using our Zero Footprint viewer to serve thousands of end users who view, edit, and annotate thousands of documents a day. Atalasoft understands the value that zero-footprint viewers brings to an enterprise level high production environment. This is why we continue to innovate our web-based imaging technology.

Our new product, Vizit SP, applies our zero-footprint viewer to SharePoint giving SharePoint users a zero-footprint document image manager that will scan, index, view, edit, and annotate PDF, TIFF, and Word documents in your SharePoint libraries and workflow.

Windows Live Writer Makes Blogging Less of a Hassle

RickM — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:23:00 GMT

The blog CMS we use is great in a lot of ways but it’s built in editor is really, really bad. Initially, I had used Microsoft Word to fill the gap, with disastrous results. Since then I have moved to using our blog software’s horribly antiquated text editing system but that has limited my formatting options quite considerably. Now, after a recommendation from a friend, I am giving Windows Live Writer a shot. This blog post is a recursive review of my experience writing this blog post in Windows Live Writer.

Full Featured Editing

Here is a screenshot of Windows Live Writer:

Windows live writer has everything you would expect from a html based text editor. This includes font formatting and paragraph formatting, colors, block quotes and alignment.

For comparison, this is what the Community Server 2.0 interface I have been using looks like:

It is not resizable and it has no undo between saves. Also, it has a feature set right out of the HTML 1.1 spec:

Bold, Italics, Underline, Strikeout,
Indenting and Outdenting
Linking
Pictures
Tables
What, no blink?

It lacks such basic 1990s era formatting as text size and alignment. This can make creating blog posts with any kind of real formatting really time consuming.

It’s a huge difference.

Content Made Easy

While I came for the the easy text editing interface, I stayed for the slick client-server integration and simple content management. Windows Live Writer has a number of wizards each of which take the hassle out of adding a type of content to your blog. For example, here is a screenshot of its GIS integration:

As Windows Live Writer completely manages the process for you, inserting non-text content is extremely easy. For images, you can just add them your post using the insert picture wizard and it will handle the thumbnailing, uploading and linking for you. It has native youtube and sopebox support as well as the ability to add your own local video via a wizard. As shown in the screenshot, it has out of the box integration with windows live maps for quickly inserting interactive maps into your post.

It also has a plugin interface so other types of content integration can be added. When you click on “Add a Plug-in” Windows Live Writer will actually take you to a list which currently contains 105 different live plugins. I haven't yet tried to implement my own content integration but if 105 different plugins already exist, it can’t be too difficult.

The One Downside: High Resource Demands and Sluggishness

This seems to me to be the biggest problem with Windows Live messenger:

That’s about 253 Megabytes of peak memory usage for what is essentially a text editor. Maybe it’s just that I once had a functional computer with 64 kilobytes of ram but I find this kind of memory usage from a blog editor to be absurd. That amounts to about 15% of your ram if you have 4 gigs in your box.

On my Intel Core 2 6600 @ 2.4 Ghz with 2 gigabytes of ram I have found Windows Live Writer to often be sluggish. When I click to move my cursor or highlight text it can take what seems like a whole second to respond. When typing or deleing text it sometimes will lag slightly behind my input.

Performance issues are forgivable considering that it is still a beta software package. I do hope that the development team is able to take some time to try and work through these issues.

Conclusion

Although it has some problems, Windows Live Writer is by far the easiest and most convenient blog editor I have ever had the pleasure to use. The tight client-server integration means that in the future I will be able to avoid all of the tedious resizing, uploading and pasting of html snippets and instead be able to concentrate on content. I can only hope that by the time it gets out of beta some of the memory issues and sluggishness will be worked out as otherwise this is an amazing piece of software.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. If you want to read some other opinions, you should check out a Phil Wainewright article entitled “Writer is Microsoft’s first Live Killer app” and Paul Stamatiou’s Review.

Edit: After I posted this blog I noticed that its formatting looked remarkably similar in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.0.

Pros:

Slick looking.
Everything would expect in terms of text editing features.
Direct Community Server integration.
Conveniently manages inserted content for you.
Its output looks great in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Cons:

Keyboard input can be sluggish.
Huge memory footprint.
Beta software.

Document Imaging in SharePoint

loufranco — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:26:00 GMT

Over at the Document Imaging blog, there's an interesting post on 5 considerations for using SharePoint with document images. I don't agree with the first one, however:

In many organizations, SharePoint projects are departmentalized and are outside of the domain of IT. In fact, according to AIIM’s 2008 State of the ECM Industry, only 42% of SharePoint projects have a formal plan that involved IT. Therefore, your capture integration with SharePoint should be virtually “plug and play” and should not require any modifications to the SharePoint server.

SharePoint is a platform for provisioning websites -- and has quite powerful facilities for deploying and hosting server-side code. In fact, it is this capability that makes SharePoint so effective at hosting document images, because the server-code can preprocess the images and render a zero-footprint viewer, thus making it possible to view document images directly in SharePoint.

Here are my top considerations for document imaging in SharePoint:

#1: Getting scanned content into SharePoint should be streamlined with your scanning process. You have paper in your hand and you want it in a document library -- it should be no harder than (1) load the paper (2) click a button on the scanner. It would be great if your software could read the document and just know where in SharePoint it should go, but barring that, a quick list of choices show up on my screen and I pick one.

#2: Viewing a document should be fast. Document images are potentially very large files. I should be able to quickly bring up a thumbnail of the first page and get others on demand. I should not have to download the entire document image to find out what it looks like.

#3: It should be easy to act on multiple documents at the same time. When indexing or cleaning up a document image it is very likely that I will want to do more than one at a time.

#4: Document Imaging should be pervasive. Should be supported in libraries, lists, web parts, search results, workflows, etc.

#5: Cost should not be a barrier to adoption. Ubiquitous document imaging is only going to happen if you can afford for everyone to use it. No document imaging silos.

Atalasoft is working hard on this, and making document images usable in SharePoint is so important to us that we're giving away SharePoint document capture and SharePoint document imaging previewing (#1 and #2 above -- and I guess #5 -- stay tuned for how we're going to address #3 and #4).

Blueprints – Reason #42 for not turning in your term paper after an all-nighter

Elaine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:30:00 GMT

Microsoft Blueprints, or the plans to a new interstellar hydro-combustion miracle-patented micro-teflon nuclear gamma strato rocketship-grade missile.

As part of the PDC 2008 Expo, Steve and I watched a demo of the new Microsoft Blueprints. If they work (notice I said “if”, campers), they will make delivering how-to’s, demos, templates, workflows, etc., as easy as pie.

Here is how they work for building a Blueprint:

1. Download and install the Blueprints Manager into Visual Studio 2008.

2. Open a new project, and launch the Blueprints Manager.

3. “Unfold” the Blueprints Factory into your project.

4. Follow the on-screen directions.

In the initial Factory Blueprint, it will lead you through creating a very basic workflow blueprint (not an uppercase Workflow, but workflow). You add activities, and with each activity you can create a Word documents, HTML files, or MHT files. You can even associate URLs with your activity. Word docs will open Word, and links will open up your default browser, but MHT and HTML files will open as details inside Visual Studio. Make a change to a Blueprint, and you can update your audience through an RSS subscription. You can include DLLs (imagine never having to download and install a hotfix again!)

This is fantastic for giving directions. It’s teaching you to fish, rather than just handing you a fish template. Let’s call this Fish Level 100.

Fish Level 200 is Code Resources. Say I’ve built a custom Fish class – unfolding a Blueprint that contains it will add this class to your project. Fish Level 300 is built-in commands (back to handing you the fish template); 400 is Solution templates (cooking the fish for you); 500 is altering Visual Studio to become Fishual Studio.

Here’s what I’m excited about – in one of those levels, I should be able to design a Blueprint so that I can tell you – Add a Goldfish to your project. If you add the Goldfish, the activity goes green and you can continue to the next activity. If you add a Flounder, the activity stays red.

At least, that’s what I was shown I could do at the PDC demo. And that’s what the screenshot on MSDN shows I can do. But I can’t find any samples of it being done!

So far, I’m seeing quite a bit of fluff. I’ve downloaded and installed the Blueprints Manager and every sample I could get my hands on, read through forums and discussions, watched videos, and pressed every button. The closest I’ve come to seeing anything useful used the Guidance Package Manager, which the Blueprints Manager is supposed to replace!

On another note, if you go to the Codeplex site, it says “Please also: Visit our MSDN site”… which gives you the related link back to the Codeplex site. Sheesh.

The Blueprints are definitely useful, even in their infancy – I will be building some Atalasoft Blueprints to demonstrate adding functionality to your applications. For this, I highly recommend installing the Blueprints Manager if you have Visual Studio 2008.

“And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand... and completely credible and convincing.”

Selection Bias in MS/OpenSource report

loufranco — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:33:00 GMT

Just saw a report on Microsoft and Open-source stack usage in the enterprise. Its goal was:

The goal of this survey is to research how open source is used within the enterprise, as well as examine the growing impact of Enterprise 2.0technologies and competitive systems such as Microsoft SharePoint.

And it had kind of surprising result:

Microsoft Stack Adoption
92% do not use or intend to use Silverlight;
86% do not use or intend to use .NET/Web Parts;
64% evaluate on Windows;
53% use or intend to use a Java architecture; and,
52% use or intend to use AJAX.

It's a comprehensive study (25,000 participants), but this is who they are:

Alfresco Software, Inc. recently announced the results of the third global survey of trends in the use of open source software in the enterprise. The Alfresco Open Source Barometer survey is the largest open source enterprise infrastructure/stack survey. The report covers data provided by over 25,000 of Alfresco's 74,000 community members during the period of April to September 2008.

Alfresco is itself an open-source/Java based product. So you need to take that into account when looking at these numbers.

They are totally up-front about this, but I'm not sure how useful Alfresco evaluators are as a barometer to finding out SharePoint usage.

Difference between JPEG and PNG

loufranco — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:06:00 GMT

Succinct and effective. Here's the long version, if you want to know why.

John Mancini's SharePoint Observations

loufranco — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:45:00 GMT

Over at the AIIM Blog, John Mancini shares some SharePoint observations. I was struck by the last one:

I am convinced that in the end analysis, “the elephant” is not really SharePoint. I think “the elephant” is really the “mainstreaming” of this industry -- the drive of content, document and records management to the desktop and the drive of these technologies into the mid-sized market. SharePoint is a big part of this drive, but it is not the only part. The drive of the IT infrastructure players to either enter or expand their presence in this market (and the resulting consolidation) is reflective of this movement of ECM technologies into the mainstream. The greater attention being paid to ECM by the big consulting guns and the services arms of the infrastructure players is reflective of this. So too is the emergence of credible open source players like Alfresco.

It's not just the emergence of open source alternatives, but the growing market of add-ons. By their nature add-ons have a smaller market than the software they add-on to, so they only emerge after the host application has enough of a foothold.

With our announcements of Vizit and the ClearView annoucements, it's clear that the ECM add-on space for SharePoint is heating up and is further evidence of the mainstreaming of using SharePoint for ECM.

Code Camp Stamford

loufranco — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 16:01:00 GMT

This weekend I attended Code Camp in Stamford. It was generally at the high quality that I have seen in the past. One note to presenters -- if you have a demo, make sure you get to it -- I went to a couple of presentations where I feel like a demo would have made a lot of things more understandable, there was one available, but they ran out of time.

My favorite session was at the end of the day -- Michael De La Maza's Agile Games session was an immersive exercise on the components of Scrum. Rather than show slides, we played games that map onto the principles of Scrum. At Atalasoft, we've been loosely following Scrum for a few years, and I still found some things to think about. You can find out more at his site: TastyCupcakes. The 99 Test balloons game was particularly good (although we only did one round).

Atalasoft's November 2008 Newsletter

Eric Deutchman — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:03:00 GMT

Atalasoft Across the Nation in November

Atalasoft has been busy during the past couple months traveling around the US and Europe to show our latest and greatest demos of DotImage for developers and Vizit SP for SharePoint. Since September, we have exhibited in Germany, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Toronto, and Los Angeles. We're ready for more!

In November, we'd like to see you at DevConnections in Las Vegas on November 10-13 or at the ECM SharePoint show in Orlando on November 17-19. We will be showing live demonstrations of our software and giving out free SDKs, so contact us to learn more or to set up a meeting.

Atalasoft Honored with Tech Citizen's Award

For the past 7 years, New England's Mass High Tech journal has been honoring technology companies who give back more than one-half of 1 percent of annual revenue or with total contributions of more than $500,000.

Atalasoft has been recognized as one of twenty-two New England-based companies that are leading by their reinvestments in their communities and we're proud to continue this effort and we encourage other companies to do the same for their community.

Here is the MHT article!

asp.netPRO Reviews DotImage 6.0

Stephen Orr of asp.netPRO used DotImage 6.0 and wrote up an account of his experience with it. Feel free to write your own review also - either on our Facebook page, Component Source, or elsewhere on the web.

Blogging @ Atalasoft

You may have seen some of our blog articles on Digg, DotNetKicks, or on Reddit. Here are some posts we'd like to highlight this month:

Steve's post "A Geek on Hallowe'en"
Lou's post "Microsoft's Five Year Plan for SharePoint"
Rick's post "The Future of Programming"
..and more

About Atalasoft

Atalasoft provides ECM imaging technology to ISVs, system integrators, and enterprises with thousands of customers and millions of end-users worldwide. Specializing in zero-footprint, AJAX-enabled web image viewing, Atalasoft provides the tools and experience to migrate solutions from the desktop to the web. Atalasoft is the creator of innovative imaging technology products such as DotImage - the leading imaging toolkit for .NET developers, and Vizit SP, document viewing and imaging for SharePoint users. Atalasoft is listed as one of Inc. Magazine's Top 100 fastest-growing software companies.

Airline Good UI/Bad UI

Steve Hawley — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:30:00 GMT

In getting to PDC, I took a flight out of Hartford to LA with a stop in DC. When I did the self-checkin, I was told that my originating flight was delayed and that I wouldn't make my connecting flight. I was asked if I wanted to look for other flights that day. I did, of course, and was told that there was nothing. I was asked if I wanted to check for other flights the next day. I did, of course, and was told that there was nothing.

Rather than give up, I called over an attendant and told her what I was told. She said that couldn't be right - no flights were delayed. I let her get me boarding passes and off I went.

About 30 minutes later, I was paged and sent to a gate. Apparently while the departing flight was on time, they were expecting bad weather that would delay its arrival, causing a missed connection, and would I like to get a seat on this flight to Chicago that was boarding?

So let's look at this - the first problem was that I was not given complete information as to why my flight was delayed. That's understandable to a certain degree, but it strikes me as something knowable. Telling me would've been nice and would've avoided confusion. In addition, the check for alternate flights should be mandatory and immediate. In other words, at the same time it was known that my itinerary couldn't be met, alternatives should've been posted. Further, if the return from that search was an empty set, an attendant should've been alerted. All of this would've made the experience better.

The other question is, how did the flight system not know that I could make a flight to Chicago, but a human could to page me? That strikes me as very odd.

On the positive side, I very much appreciated being paged. This was absolutely the right thing to do. The gate attendant was awesome. To round things out, the flight attendants on the flight to Chicago and from Chicago to LA were terrific - warm and funny. All of this is terrific UI - they are little things, but they make something that could've been at best a mediocre experience (and potentially a bad one), into a very good experience.

This is the kind of thing I see consistently in our own support - customers that have had troubles and have been given a potential solution, often get emails or phone calls if they haven't given us a "yes this works" to close the loop.

PDC 2008 -- Keep your head and hands inside the car at all times.

Elaine — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:36:00 GMT

Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference 2008 – Pretty Darn Cool.

So, sports fans and software enthusiasts, I haven’t updated in a few weeks. I’m here now to tell you all about this year’s PDC conference. The main course on the table was Windows Azure, Microsoft’s answer for cloud computing.

So, what is cloud computing, and why is Microsoft getting into it? First answer, it is a platform for you to run your ASP.Net applications on, eliminating the need for on-site servers to host applications, while also adding enhancements like SQL Services and Live Services (a way to let users use their MS Live IDs to authenticate themselves). Second answer, Amazon, Force.com, and Google all provide a cloud platform already. :-)

Now, there are two major caveats to impart before you rush out and download the SDK. #1 – the Azure SDK will not install on Windows XP-based machines. #2 – it cannot handle unmanaged code at the moment, which means DotImage is a no-go (we use both managed and unmanaged code – see Steve’s recent article for an explanation of the difference).

Some benefits to Windows Azure…

1. Need to expand your hardware? Not with Azure. Microsoft has said they will charge based on consumption, letting you expand as you need, or retract services if they are not used.

2. If you use Azure for application deployment, you will not have downtime while upgrading your application. They have a method to “switch” an application from Production to Staging seamlessly (switching the app back will allow for rollback if something goes wrong).

Some drawbacks…

1. To make changes to your data itself, you will need to include version numbers on your tables or adjust your code for old or new data – there’s no “backup” for the tables.

2. Right now, there is only one datacenter for running Azure services. Of course, that will expand to 9 or 10 worldwide when Azure goes live for everyone, but that opens up geopolitical ramifications.

This is just a brief opening for Azure. Tomorrow, I’ll be putting together a demo application. After that, I’ll be talking about Windows 7 (no more UAC? Haha), Blueprints, and “M” (a.k.a. Oslo – MS’s new modeling platform).

Also, if you find yourself out in Los Angeles and have an opportunity to go Universal Studios, regardless of the length of the line, get on the Simpsons Ride. So worth it.

Review: Programming ASP.NET 3.5

loufranco — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:39:00 GMT

Disclaimer: I was a tech reviewer for this book and contributed some text.

Whenever I ask Elaine which book I should get about a random .NET topic, she says to "get the one that Jesse Liberty writes." So, I was happy the one he co-writes about ASP.NET along with Dan Hurwitz and Dan Maharry arrived in the mail yesterday.

Most of the other ASP.NET books we have are great if you already pretty much know it and need to look up something. As control developers, we are pretty much in that category -- but as I was flipping through one of them last week while talking to an intern I saw how impossible they were for learning ASP.NET when you know a little C# and maybe some HTML, but not the ASP.NET model. This is the book to get if you want to start from the beginning.

But, the book covers advanced topics, too. By the end you'll have learned ASP.NET AJAX, WCF (web services), ADO.NET (databases), Security and Performance. I really appreciated that the lessons are put into a context of building out real websites -- the validation chapter is built around a bug database, web services are used to run search queries Google and MS Live, and parts of a bike store website are used in the data section and in developing user controls.

So, I very much recommend this book and can vouch that all of the code examples are perfect because I copied them into Visual Studio and tested them -- if you see one that isn't... must have been changed after I looked at it.

Google and Microsoft Agree on Distributed Joins and the Properties Pattern

loufranco — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:26:00 GMT

Finally had some time to start looking at Azure today -- I decided to start with the data services, because the rest looked like what I expected. I was struck at how different it was from BigTable, but still based on two core principles:

1. Joins make distributing data hard: I was surprised that GQL didn't have any join support at all, MS supports relating data, but only within the same GEO-location -- meaning, you can have joins, but not distributed ones.

A container is also the largest domain for search and update. In this beta release, cross-container queries are not supported.
Because each authority is in one geo-location, all containers in an authority are located in the same data center.

2. Rows should be heterogenous in a table. The SDS is like BigTable in that the columns in a row are flexible. This isn't surprising -- a structure like this is way easier to map onto OO than having strictly homogeneous tuples -- this just after Steve Yegge's treatise on the Properties Pattern stormed across the internets (must read for all programmers). Steve talked about how useful this pattern is for extensibility and named BigTable as a prominent example.

My comment on BigTable when I saw it was that I love it as long as it is fast (and I trusted Google to do that) -- same goes for Microsoft. Working with data like this is so much nicer than having a strict schema, especially while you're prototyping.

The blob support in the current release look better than Google, but Google is working on this too. I'm still working my way through the spec -- I'll share more as I figure it out.

PDC Day 4

Steve Hawley — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:12:00 GMT

This is the last day of PDC. So far I've been to a Silverlight 2 talk and an unmanaged interop session. I'm currently sitting in a future look at AJAX, the last session.

One thing that really makes these sessions valuable and ultimately makes the worth of the conference is the ability to talk to people who are, at least in part, responsible for sections of an API or system that you work with.

For example, I spoke to the interop guru about an issue I'd had with STL objects being implemented in managed C++ (which was not my wish) and then being used by unmanaged objects thereby tanking my performance. I described my problem and asked if there was a solution beyond what I had done. And even though the answer was "no", I appreciated that I now have a definitive answer.

To all of our customers who stopped by our booth and took the time to speak with us, I thank you very much. I tried in every conversation to find out what we have done for you that has worked well and what we can do better in the future. I appreciate the kind words and the constructive criticisms.

PDC Day 3

Steve Hawley — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:31:00 GMT

Yesterday, I went to a number of sessions about the features in Windows 7 - specifically I wanted to look at the APIs surrounding text and graphics. They don't exist in a usable form yet from managed code (but they can be wrapped well enough). They're pretty slick, but due to the tight coupling with the hardware, to be used at the best a business app will start to look more like a game in its main loop.

I looked closely at the font rendering code and it appears that the main APIs are still based around rendering text within a bounding box instead of rendering relative to a desired baseline. This has always been a pain in windows and it looks like it will continue to be so in the future. There are ways to work around it, but still strikes me as poor modeling.

I enjoyed the C# futures talk (repeat - I got overflowed out of the first one). A lot of the upcoming changes appear to be syntactic sugar with some dynamic compilation. It bears some resemblance to the late binding code I posted earlier this month. If you're reading this, Hi Anders!

Managed and Unmanaged, Metaphorically

Steve Hawley — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:06:00 GMT

Last night I was asked what the difference was between managed and unmanaged code by a non-coder. I came up with a metaphor which works and Bill asked me to post it.

Unmanaged code is an Erector set. Not a current one, but the old kind that has lots of stamped metal parts with sharp edges. Anyone can build things with it, but you quickly discover the sharp edges on the pieces and get your fingers sore from working with the crummy little screwdriver and wrench. A master builder can put all kinds of wondrous things together from it, and has little to worry about from that dreaded old AC motor (I shocked myself on that more than once).

Managed code is closer to Duplo blocks (maybe Lego bricks, but still). You can build all kinds of fabulous things with it, it's bright and shiny and friendly, and there are lots of special-purpose pieces for you ready to go. It's also a lot harder to hurt yourself with Duplo blocks.

PDC Day 2

Steve Hawley — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Went to a couple nuts and bolts presentations - one about packaging and deploying ASP.NET applications (looks better, but is apparently still has room to grow) and one about the architecture and scalability and support levels for cloud computing.

Many years ago, a former coworker (who had worked at MS) described working at Microsoft as being part of a giant herd of wildebeasts. He said when the decision was made to change direction, the sheer momentum of people pushing in the same direction was awesome. I'm definitely seeing this here with regards to cloud computing. It really is the next big thing from MS - it's eclipsing just about everything else here, including Windows 7.

PDC Day 1

Steve Hawley — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:31:00 GMT

The big presented at the keynote was cloud computing. In MS' view, cloud computing is heavyweight, consistent, reliable support of distributed ASP.NET applications. They've tried to make the process of running and upgrading apps as robust as possible. The development tools are familiar, but tight integration could and should be better. Debugging works well on a "desktop cloud", but there is no support for anything but logging in the real cloud. This is a 30 year step backwards.

The conference itself is very busy. The cloud session overflowed twice - ie, it filled to capacity the main room and two other rooms with video feeds.

Met up with Stephen Toub at the reception and talked about image processing and multiprogramming. I was happy to see the interest.

Standards help me port my brain, but not always my programs

loufranco — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:18:00 GMT

There are a lot of different standards I work with every day -- I want to talk specifically about standards that are implemented by running services (rather than libraries). For example, HTTP is implemented in my web server, SQL is implemented in my DBMS, and soon CMIS will be implemented in my ECM.

I recently wrote about CMIS and why I think ISV's won't be able to use it right away. My argument comes down to:

CMIS won't be ubiquitous when taking into account old versions
CMIS may not run as well as the proprietary interfaces

Developers that work at a company using a CMIS compliant ECM won't have to worry about this. But for an ISV with competitors, we very much have to care about how many installations it will work with and how well it will work. It would be better to have the best SharePoint solution and the best Documentum solution than have a codebase that worked for both but had competitors in both markets that were better.

This isn't unique to CMIS. SQL is a well-established standard, and implemented in a consistent way across a variety of DBMS's. SQL helps me think about relational data and therefore whether I'm working on an ASP.NET site talking to SQL Server, a Django site on MySql, an iPhone app on SQlite, and J2EE site on Oracle, my knowledge of SQL goes over pretty unchanged. Even on Google App Engine, GQL is understandable because it's based on SQL. My code for all of these systems is hopelessly incompatible though.

Even if I try to move individual applications from one database to another, I can only do that because of other standards like ADO.NET, Django's ORM, CoreData or JDBC. These standards are completely incompatible with each other.

But it gets worse. Since each of the individual DBMS vendors are in fierce competition, they are constantly adding to their implementation of SQL in mutually incompatible ways. You run into this with web programming because there is no standard way in SQL to grab rows N through M in the results from a SELECT. In order to implement any kind of paging through results, you need to be able to do this efficiently. I wrote about this before in relation to grabbing images from a database and pointed to this page with the SQL for each different vendor's way to implement queries for paging. This isn't surprising, and it will happen to CMIS too if it takes off.

And, I haven't even mentioned stored procedures.

So, even though, SQL doesn't really help me port my program, SQL is a very good way for me to think about relational data. I can show it to other developers or DBA's, and we can have a conversation about storing data. Most of my data code will be based around SQL in some way and will be very understandable to any developer who knows SQL. My programs get many benefits from SQL, but not necessarily portabilty.

Which brings us back to CMIS. CMIS can be thought of as a collection of standards relating to ECM. There are two web-service specifications, which operate on a domain model, and there is query language based on SQL. The parts of CMIS that help me think about ECM will be a success. CMIS SQL, the query language, gives me a uniform way to access my repository and is useful even if I don't use the web services. I hope that the vendors will implement this for use outside of the Query Web Service.

CMIS's main benefit to me is that it will help me think and communicate about ECM. The parts that are tied to a specific technology (ATOM/SOAP) will have to compete with the proprietary API's for my attention until they are ubiquitous and the best way for implementing ECM addons.