Thursday, October 17, 2002

Type Safety in a Loosely Coupled World. In which I'm inspired by Tim Ewald and come to realize that runtime type checking is a very good thing. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News] Sam amplifies on this showing differences between languages and pointing to his excellent essay Dealing with Diversity. "Until recently, most programming activities were mono-cultures focused around a language centric base.  A much more successful model is emerging.  One in which the service provider has an opportunity to suggest what data types it would prefer.  This gives the intended consumer an opportunity to adapt if it so chooses.  Ultimately the service provider will decide whether or not it can process the request as sent." 2:26:28 PM

Ken Rawlings has been bothered by a few things in .NET recently. I will leave the combustable issue of the size of the runtime aside for now but one point he made I would like to address: Around $6000 upfront software costs for ASP.NET deployment (XP Server plus SQL Server 2000). I honestly don't have any idea where he gets this figure but I don't think its correct. Neither XP Server (whatever that is, I assume you mean .NET Server which isn't even out yet) or SQL Server 2000 is required for ASP.NET development. For that matter, neither is VS.NET. You do need IIS right now (although even that is changing). You can develop .NET on a $99 copy of XP Professional, grab the .NET Framework SDK and Runtime,  and use Notepad. So far, I'm at $99. But I didn't even have to do that. I could have used my old copy of Windows 2000 or Windows 2000 Sever, or even NT4. So my cost would have been $0. ASP.NET applications do not require SQL Server.  If you are talking about data applications, you are talking about a whole different cart of apples. An industrial strength solution for the data enterprise will cost money no matter if its is Oracle, SQL Server or DB2 and that is a whole class of applications. And MySQL doesn't go in that category with its current limitations. This is not ASP.NET development. This is data application developemnt. Even if one did factor in the cost of a development version of SQL Server, it would be nowhere near $6000. Whenever Microsoft comes out with anything, many are quick to leap to the myth added costs, whether they are there or not. Follow-up; Brandon Lee makes the obvious point for me: "Ken Rawlings is bothered by the cost of .NET compared to OpenSource solutions. The comparison seems unfair because the greatest cost is SQL Server vs. MySQL. These are not fairly comparable because SQL Server is a full RDBMS (e.g. transactions) and people in the market for SQL Server will not be comparing it to MySQL. So you really have to compare .NET/SQLServer to something like Linux/Apache/Oracle and the price difference disappears. Ken Rawlings is bothered by the cost of .NET compared to OpenSource solutions. The comparison seems unfair because the greatest cost is SQL Server vs. MySQL. These are not fairly comparable because SQL Server is a full RDBMS (e.g. transactions) and people in the market for SQL Server will not be comparing it to MySQL. So you really have to compare .NET/SQLServer to something like Linux/Apache/Oracle and the price difference disappears. " 12:28:02 PM

Scott Seely, who gave an interesting talk, which may be the first time a Microsoft employee showed Apache Axis alongside .NET, has written a new MSDN article on a timely subject Understanding WS-Security. Of course, the hardest working man in the business has written on this as well as supplyinmg a toolkit. 11:30:34 AM

Drew is back! 11:15:57 AM