techno.blog("Dion")

Bruce Eckel pointed to Microsoft Spectra, the new feed reader that uses Flex, and he questions their lack of dogfood eating. Of course, this is MSNBC (which is far from Microsoft), and who knows when development started.

What I find more interesting is the fact that beyond the flash-y visualizations, would you actually want to read news like this:

Rich visualizations are great when they show you something in a new way that adds value. This just seems to make it harder to get to the content :)

Even Ryan Stewart must think that this isn’t a good “RIA” ;)

Microsoft stopped IE and messenger. Roz got on stage for years promising a native Office, and then when it gets here it is disappointing.

I like some of the MS stack. Expression Studio, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET, all promising.

It could have been for good reason (e.g. Safari really was decent then…) but, what about the trust?

And, when I see people the Olympics and the Library of Congress even signing up for Silverlight content? Erg.

It is fantastic to see IE8 up the ante on concurrent connections from 2 to 6. I would love to know how they made the call for 6. It sounds reasonable. You don’t want too many else you could end up sucking down so much content at once it could freak out the browser (e.g. imagine a bunch of video on a high speed line).

This should mean, for some situations, that you may not need to deal with www1, www2 type hacks to split up your domains. Of course, sometimes you will still run into the limit and it will be required.

I do wish that Twitter would up their ante too. Maybe not by changing the 140 char limit itself, but maybe by supporting #hashtags so they don’t “take up the room” and instead get moved down below to the metadata layer etc.

The IE 8 updates are out, and there are some great features that relate to Gears. Also, a lot of the features are standards based so we will see the functionality in other browsers too.

Six connections per host

Yay! The 2 connection limit has been so painful for rich Ajax development, especially when you get into advanced work like Comet. This small change is going to be huge.

Connectivity Events

Connectivity events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.

This is fantastic. A lot of developers want this functionality, and we have held off implementing it in Gears as it is actually quite tricky to do correctly. Having a version of this in the browser will be great, and Gears applications can leverage it.

DOM Storage

The simple storage for offline applications. I could see someone writing an app that uses DOM storage for simple cases, and Gears for the more advanced (SQL vs. name/value pairs).

Cross Domain

Cross domain is actually going to happen in 2008, which is very exciting indeed. By jumping in we can iron out the issues and end up with a real mashup world that is more than read only tools. I am assuming that this is also using standards such as postMessage.

Cross-domain communication is an integral part of AJAX development
and mashup Web applications. Internet Explorer 8 includes two
features to help you build cross-domain communications that are safe
and easy to implement:

• With Cross-domain Request (XDR), developers can
  create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the
  XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this
  request, called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous
  requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making
  their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have
  you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data
  aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure
  and fast.
• Cross-document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow
  communication between documents from different domains through
  IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardized.

I was gutted to read that Dare is quitting his blog. He almost did it before.

This would be a real loss, as Dare is someone inside Microsoft who gives his honest voice and opinion to the community. I am sure that people within the company aren’t always pleased at what he says, but he is doing everyone a great service (including Microsoft).

I have a couple of hopes:

• That Dare comes back with renewed vigour, refreshed, and ready for more
• That he isn’t quitting the blog due to someone being a pain in the arse and getting him to quit.

At first we had Nelly and XSL/T, and then we had Lisp. Now it is time to to evolve to C^HJavaScript.

ps. There is nothing geekier than a ^H joke.

At first we had Nelly and XSL/T, and then we end up with Lisp.

Paul Krill asked Bill Gates about declarative languages and how they are the future (and ironically the past!). Bill talked about some of the work happening at Microsoft:

“Most code that’s written today is procedural code. And there’s been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn’t have to write so much [procedural] code,” Gates said. “We’re investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today.”

“You should be able to do things on a declarative basis,” Gates continued. But this has not caught on partially because of weak data models — first Codasyl and then relational. Stronger data models since have emerged, such as rich schemas around XML as well as modeling work being done by Microsoft and others, Gates said. “We’re bringing the data models up to be much, much richer, and we think in that environment, a lot of business logic can be done in a declarative form. Now, we haven’t totally proven this yet. We’re doing a lot of internal developments ourselves that way,” including some Microsoft business applications, he said.

“We’re not here yet saying that [a declarative language has] happened and you should write a ton less procedural code, but that’s the direction the industry is going,” Gates said. “And, despite the fact that it’s taken longer than people expected, we really believe in it. It’s something that will change software development but more like in a five- to eight-year timeframe than overnight,” he said.

I am guessing that the work of Doug Purdy, ChrisAn, and Don Box is fitting into this world, as well the mentioned work of Brad Lovering.

But…. maybe the future is a port of Jelly ;)

Microsoft as a company still posts considerably higher revenue than Google does. Microsoft’s executives last week trumpeted the fact that the company — consisting of everything from the Office productivity suite to the Xbox 360 game console — surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time in the fiscal year ended June 30.

Two companies. Lots of money.

I saw Microsoft’s Answer to Google Gears popup in my news feed, along with Mary Jo’s piece itself: Microsoft delivers first test build of its online-offline sync platform.

I was excited to read about the sync platform and see how it compares with the Database, LocalServer, and WorkerPool components that you get with Gears.

Instead I end up at the main documentation which makes the sync framework look nothing like Gears at all.

Instead you see the providers:

• Sync Services for ADO.NET: Synchronization for ADO.NET enabled data sources
• Sync Services for File Systems: Synchronization for files and folders
• Sync Services for SSE: Synchronization for Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) such as RSS and ATOM feeds

This looks interesting from a client-side perspective, and I want to take some time to look at the sync API itself and see what good stuff we could potentially use in Gears. Microsoft has had to do various sync protocols over the years, so I am sure there is a lot to learn, but this isn’t a Gears rival in its current form.