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Tuesday, December 03, 2002
 

Just browsing

Doug Seven has a nifty one pager about a quick and dirty way to handle a multi-step form

Scott Hanselman discusses webconfig verus machine config, which includes some good pushback at one of the more prolific pundits of the NET realm. 

A few days ago I had a former engineer of Microsoft's Hotmail division interview for a job with my team. We discussed the painful change of Hotmail from Free BSD to Win2K.  The Register has an even better breakdown via some ill-gotten internal MS memo, which once again shows the difference between reality and MS "public" information - in this case TechNet. Is it any wonder I'm so cautious about data access issues?

A total Java Geek expresses some love for .NET. It's a funny world we live in isn't it? I know that NET is cool. Unfortunately MS isn't. But that doesn't matter, the war is over, MS has won and it still has the biggest cash reserve of any company in our industry.  In another segment of his blog this fella provides a Java centric complement to my wishes that I could port my C# Windows code to another OS via MONO perhaps. At least there are more people out there hoping rooting for Miguel.

While reading the referer log for other entrants into my little Dataset controversy I came across this item by Justin. It reminded me of a project I did with CNET DataServices in Switzerland. This subsidiary of C|Net was in the business of standardizing merchandise information for e-commerce. The system used an object database backend and published relational feeds to subscribers. Very interesting stuff. It was designed by three Russian and two French engineers and had one of the best schemas for catalog information I have seen.  


7:19:36 PM    

Chris makes a good point

One has to like a guy who starts his blog entry with " Geeks argue too much." and then proceeds to make a pretty good argument for using Datasets as described by Microsoft. Chris, that was a very nicely argued point. Still, I'm of the opinion (perhaps not expressed very well) that it is a good idea to isolate ones work from the latest and greatest twists of MS data access technology. I've been through every release of "data objects" since Access 1.1 and it gets very tiresome to constantly rewrite stuff that was tied to the latest and greatest from MS. It seemed to me that with .NET I have an opportunity to build something that can exist independently (as much as possible) and heck with the help of efforts like MONO might actually work in a non Windows OS. And by the way, as much as I like the description of what one has to write in order to equal the built in value of Datasets, it only makes sense if one intends to go that route in the first place. All this discussion makes me wonder how we could have had this incredible Internet boom in the past years without all the benefits of ADO.NET. Or alternately how do companies like PeopleSoft remain market leaders without the notion of a Dataset. These are good-natured  rethorical questions, not intended to get a rise out of you.  I should mention that I do use Datasets in my daily work but oftentimes can't help feeling like a person eating junk-food , while wondering if I will ever complain about this junk-food the way people are trying to sue McDonalds for selling burgers that made them obese. I guess I'm eating my "burger" with eyes wide open and shouldn't complain in the end.


2:29:38 PM    

"HTML Validator" [Daypop Top 40]
1:18:13 PM    

A non .NET voice

Dan sent his observations via email. I like them because they tend to remind me of the fact that my high and mighty indignation doesn't matter one iota if the end result sucks. Here is his comment:

".....I've been trying to follow this Dataset vs. Datareader thing, not because I really care which side is winning the debate, but because it's so entertaining that the debate takes place at all, and that folks can get so passionate and verbose about something that--in most cases--probably has no negligible net effect, (get it? NET effect. ha ha). This struck a nerve with me, as it is a huge pet peeve of mine when this kind of debate moves beyond intellectual stimulation and is taken seriously during an actual design phase on a real project.

The funny thing is that we see a lot of this kind of low-level debate in our line of work (whether MS or J2EE), yet most of the systems we encounter are pure unadulterated crap. In other words, for all the careful and drawn-out discussion about how variable should be named or which of Microsoft's 927 data access implementations should be used, the end result typically proves to be a huge mess.
 
Of course, the reason these systems are so bad is probably because there was too much paralyzing discussion about indenting 4 spaces vs. 3 and not enough productive discussion about how to organize the class schema, for example. ....."
 
 

1:05:20 PM    


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