Thursday, April 25, 2002

.NET works - you can quote me My friend Scott Roth asked if I wanted to be interviewed for an article some journalist was writing on .NET from the perspsective of an implementor. Despite being an architecture lead on a 20 man-year .NET project, I couldn't think of anything convincingly positive to say about the platform except: yep, it works. They caught up to everybody else. Most of the sizzle revolves around Visual Studio .NET (yep, lots of drag-n-drop) and cross language stuff that you work hard to keep *out* of your architecture. Would I use it if I was a Microsoft shop considering a platform for a new project? Sure, why not. Excited? No, not really. There is absolutely nothing I'm doing on this project with .NET that couldn't have been done with Visual Basic 6.0 and ASP. X-Copy deploy and no registry dependency is nifty, but compiling and versioning is still the same pain in the neck they always will be. Someday .NET might be cross-platform like Perl, Python, Java, TCL and REBOL, but then again they might rev their interfaces or sick their lawyers on people (Mono) following their patent-encumbered, 'open' ECMA standard. 1:53:24 PM      comment []  trackback []

Oracle joins the 21st Century (ouch - bad pun) Full Outer Joins in Oracle9i. Learn how to use the new ANSI-compliant join syntax in Oracle 9i, which simplifies the task of performing a full outer join. [O'Reilly Network Articles] About freakin time. 1:01:04 PM      comment []  trackback []

Digital vs. Print Photography - No Contest (for amateurs) Goliath, Your Prints Are Ready. New inkjet printers offer the ability to make glossy, poster-size pictures at home. Is it time to rush out and buy a high-resolution digital camera? By David Pogue. [New York Times: Technology] I'm a big believer in never going back to print photography. When I talk to people who still pay for prints, they seldom have a hard time seeing how cool (and affordable) it is to just print what you think is good, instead of everything you shoot. I probably take about 1K pictures/year right now, up from about 1 roll/year when I paid for development and used my clunky point and shoot. I'm sure I'm an extreme case because digital works so well for me, but how can you argue with free? 9:43:56 AM      comment []  trackback []