Live! from Orlando: "Dude, this rocks!"
Orlando is synonymous with glitzy, dollar-hungry theme-parks, slick time-share marketing, and all-the-sunshine-you-can-tolerate-and-then-some. VSLive is at home in Orlando. For a week, Microsoft migrates south, like predatory birds seeking a warmer climate to claim their territories: .NET (predominately male) developers eager for a glimpse of the next big thing (Orcas) before fully breaking in the Visual Studio 2005 version they have.
Nestled in the Disney Swan, the conference offers attendees thick carpet awash with geometric patterns and amenities like artic air-conditioning, a lacquered black grand piano and strategically placed fountains. Pleasant but non-descript music is piped in to sooth the beautiful (or in this case, technical) people.
Of course for VSLive attendees, the most sought after feature is a comfortable nook close to a power outlet for recharging the absolute necessity at such an event: a notebook with wireless connectivity. We all pull them out, like six-shooters, as evidence of technical prowess, and I catch attendees casting glances at each other's equipment out of their periphery. Mine is a humble Averatec that I appreciate for its lightweight portability; yet, in the realm of PC-envy, it doesn’t rate.
So far the sessions have been attended en masse, making for literally elbow-to-elbow seating. When the fellow to my left laughed to placate the speaker, I felt short bursts of air (breath?) on my arm. Am I just a little claustrophobic? I expect tomorrow to be a different configuration as we break into our respective (but annoyingly overlapping) focus areas.
The keynote speaker first thing this morning was Sam Guckenheimer, a low-key, scruffy-faced Microsoft employee who described himself as a former employee of the defunct Rational Corporation. When he said he'd also worked for IBM for three weeks, he was rewarded with a collective audience chuckle. The stage was set with Broadway-style black curtains swathed with crimson lighting for dramatic effect. Two giant project screens flanked a cockpit of 8-10 computer consoles for running the show. (At the beginning of the day I was hopeful with all that computing power we might see something more impressive than Powerpoint. We did, but only in tantalizing morsels.) In fact, I believe it would not be an overstatement to summarize the attendee reaction to the first day of VSLive like this: Cheers for projection-screen, live (though clearly rehearsed) coding; Jeers for Powerpoint droning.
The speaker and Microsoft employee who won the award for the most personality (and ability to keep the audience out of REM mode) was Jay Schmelzer. He described the Atlas framework as facilitating asynchronous calls with partial rendering (AJAX style), providing rich web experiences while leveraging development productivity. Sound like a sales pitch? Well, in Orlando, with evangelist Schmelzer at the pulpit, it was more like revival. If the crowd got too quiet, he'd demand an "Amen" by teasing, "Not that cool, eh?" to which the audience would clap. At one point he said, "For those who haven't heard me speak before, I feed off the audience," to which someone in the back bellowed, "Dude, this rocks!"
The day was riddled with a polyglot of features high on the cool scale such as triggered postbacks and LINQ (language integrated query). Buzzwords were "friction-free metrics" and "people-ready software." An interesting add-in for VS 2005 available free for download from MSDN was demonstrated: Refactor. The third-party tool had definite wow-appeal as it seemed to magically do what you wish you could yourself: streamline and beautify code. In the words of a conference attendee to my distant right: "Sweet."
Stay tuned as I plan to figure out how I can clone myself tomorrow to attend ASP Live! And SQL Live! scheduled in the same time slots.
Barbecue and Tobacco
Dan, I understand. Equating Orlando to theme parks would be like saying all my stomping ground has to offer is barbecue and tobacco. I guess I was struck by the similarity of the glitz/glamour of the Orlando themepark and the flashy Microsoft sell. Don't get me wrong...I come from a Microsoft farm so I don't mean to be entirely critical.
About LINQ...I figured I'd have to check this out further. It gets even deeper with CLINQ, DLINQ and XLINQ. To me it seemed like a flavor of embedded SQL...something we'd been encouraged to avoid in favor of stored procedures but I am sure there must be *some* logic...some cool and fabulously obscure reason it will become an indispensable part of our lives.
The LINQ/LISP Connection?
An article, You are the Missing LINQ by Andy Patrizio, had this to say: "Underneath LINQ is a technology called functional programming, which can be found in old languages like LISP." I thought this one might interest some readers like Mr. Nilges.
That IS interesting
Who knew...
I haven't used Lisp much. But it is a *lingua franca* of high end computer science and a philosophy professor of mine at Princeton, Gil Harman, used Lisp and Prolog to simulate what we consider intelligence such as the process of scientific discovery.
I recommend two books highly. One is STRUCTURE AND INTERPRETATION OF COMPUTER PROGRAMS, a readable view of computer science (emphasizing the basic lesson of my own little book: instruction following is just following instructions for following instructions, so there). It is at this link on Amazon.
Apress has two book on core common Lisp because Gary Cornell is aware of Lisp and its importance: http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=237 (an introduction to the core of Lisp) and http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=263 (a nice reference manual).
Big John McCarthy at Stanford invented Lisp using the old IBM 709 mainframe which is why two of its primitives are CAR and CDR: they refer to 709 instructions to Change Address Register and to Change Decrement Register.
In LISP as in SQL you say what it is you want, not how to get it. This is considered high-class since it is more like mathematical formulas and less like spelled out algorithms, the latter being more "a tale told to [not by, at least not if the programmer knows his trade] an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", as Macbeth put it.
Functional programming is closer to my childhood image of The Giant Brains of the Twenty First Century, which I fancied would be programmed in symbolic logic by superior beings representing all the galaxies in the Federation, each committed to mutual recognition and respect having confirmed, after the invasion of Earth in 1999 by benevolent giant spiders, that Hegel was right.
As it was, I discovered computers being programmed in low instructions in a monkish style. One of my mates wanted Cobol to support a COME BACK operation.
COME BACK would tell the computer to always "come back" to the routine he'd written to pull the magnetic tape and read the next record, after wandering his GO TO paths. His code had two input routines: one before what he was pleased to call the main logic and one after. They replicated each other with interesting, if maddening differences. Sometimes they'd run right after each other causing a record to be skipped.
Nothing could be further from the vision of the wise leader instructing the computer not to kill people, like the kid does in Terminator II.
Business systems aren't programmed in LISP, perhaps because this would let more than one cat out of more than one bag.
Thanks for the tip
Thanks for the tip on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I'm going to pick that up. I'd love to support the authors by purchasing a new copies, but a new one is over $100. I figure the authors have already been compensated enough from the textbook publisher ripping off college students--I'll buy one of the $40 used copies. Textbooks are such a scam...
Did I miss the invasion of benevolent giant spiders in '99? I hate it when I miss stuff like that...
Dan
The Missing LINQ
Thanks for the report, Donna. Interestingly, for me Orlando is synonymous with one more thing: home. It's where I grew up. My old neighborhood was right next to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.....
Seriously, there's more to Orlando than theme parks. Not much more, but it's there.
Anyway, as an old hand at SQL, I'm quite interested in LINQ. To be honest, what I've heard doesn't thrill me. The concept sounds great, but I think I'd like it more if it were approached from the opposite direction -- that is, promoting actual SQL queries to a position of legitimacy w/in C#, rather than creating a new syntax or language construct for it.
Of course, as with most M$ preview concepts, the whole thing could be completely different now than the last article I read about it.