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October 2006 - Posts - Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist

For more information, visit www.UdiDahan.com - my main blog.

October 2006 - Posts

.Net 2.0 no big deal?

[Copied from my main blog]

Jesse seems to be swallowing the Microsoft party line without missing a drop in his latest post Screw 2.0, I'm Going Straight to 3.0.

From his post:


"The 2.0 framework doesn't really give you a massive amount of really new really cool features. There is one-click, which we probably wouldn't use anyway, generics (which are useful as a time saver, but don't really do much that you can't do without them), and some other little features... but the best part about the 2.0 framework is probably the IDE/dev experience, not what customers get out of it."

Granted, One-Click is nothing to write home about, but the runtime level additions, they just totally changed the way I write code. I'm talking about generics, anonymous methods, delegate inference, and the rest. The rest of 2.0, like the enhancements of the provider model in ASP.Net, well you would have developed the same kind of framework yourself if you were doing serious web development.

The whole 3.0 story, I've got to tell you, I'm pretty underwhelmed. Everybody seems to be jumping up and down about WPF, and yes, it's new and shiny, but there still the clunkety Windows message pump in the background. No real changes in how you're going to write multi-threaded UIs, which seem to be the real future given the rise in multi-core processing. The visual aspects of client side code in the systems I write run at around 5% of the overall effort. So the UI will look better, I dunno, 4D buttons and stuff, sorry for not falling over with enthusiasm.

And then there's WCF. Ah, wait, no publish/subscribe. Bummer, most of my systems being asynchronous in nature are built on the pub/sub model. An OO interface for interprocess communication? Who wants it - I need a message-based interface.

Don't forget WF - what was that for again? The main place where WF can fit my needs is for handling long-running workflows between systems, since I don't use Biztalk. But the performance of WF doesn't seem to fit this environment, it seems to be more suited for human workflow times.

If anything, I'd have to say that .Net 2.0 was a relatively big deal. 3.0 will probably be just as important with the runtime level enhancements like lambda expressions, extension methods, anonymous types, and implicitly typed variables. All the rest of the hyped up stuff in 3.0, I don't really expect it to change anything in how I work today.

Udi Dahan - The Software Simplist

Hello, my name is Udi. Some of you already know me, and my blog (http://udidahan.weblogs.us, and it's alias http://www.UdiDahan.com).

Yosi has been after me for some time now to start posting here, so here I am.

To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure what I'm going to talk about. Besides my main blog, I have another blog focusing specifically on SOA and Web Services on the Dr. Dobb's site: http://www.ddj.com/dept/webservices , with the details here. You can also find the "Ask Udi" podcast at the Dr. Dobb's site, subscribe here. I post more generic architecture type content can be found on the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) blog here. Beyond the online stuff, you can find me speaking at events like the VS2005 launch, as well as TechEd Developers Europe this year.

So, I guess I'll just open this up. What would you like to hear from an overbearing loudmouth who can't type worth sh!+ in Hebrew?