the case against .NET

Tickled to see that one of my photos currently appears at the top of the Flickr blog!

Last night’s dinner was certainly the best of the three I’ve attended to date. Many thanks to Simon for his hard work once again.

Two innovations: (i) a move to Brighton, arguably the epicentre of Sussex geekery, and (ii) the inclusion of a presentation within the format. Both were successes. There was a much livelier feel to the event (and I’m sure numbers will grow based on word-of-mouth), and Tristan’s low-tech presentation of Plone was quite excellent.

On a personal note, it was good to meet with other developers, including Clive, a Horsham-based web designer.

Spent the day at this Carson Workshops Summit, along with four colleagues from Eurotherm.

With high profile speakers such as Joshua Schachter from del.icio.us, David Heinemeier Hansson of Ruby on Rails fame and others, this was always going to be a worthwhile event. For an excellent account, see Jeremy Keith’s blog entries (starting here). Jeremy’s ability to blog in real-time, and in detail, is a real phenomenon.

Those with digital cameras were encouraged to use a common tag, futureofwebapps, when uploading to Flickr. I especially like Larsz’s MindManager maps.

Lessons learned? I wasn’t surprised by too much that I heard, though the strong emphasis from several speakers on having clean URLs gave food for thought. These must never change, and should reflect the site structure without being dictated by the implementation technology. In other words, use mod_rewrite to eliminate the .php or .html extensions. The strong presentation from Adobe of their Flex product was also unexpected.

With 800 delegates, some logistical slip-ups might have been anticipated - would the queues clear in time for the start, would the Wi-fi hold out? Actually, I don’t think there were any significant problems. Overall, thanks and congratulations to Carson Workshops for a very good day.

Thanks to Simon Harriyott for organising another fine Sussex Geek Dinner this week.

Slightly disappointing that our venue, the Highlands in Uckfield, has recently become a chain pub. However, it remains a very comfortable place with great staff. The chain pub food was also very good, as was the wine - the event was again sponsored by Stormhoek, who have chosen to use bloggers to spread the word about their product.

To answer Simon’s question about the venue, I’d be very happy to return to the Highlands, and would certainly prefer it to somewhere further east and less central within Sussex.

The company was again excellent, though I’m disappointed I didn’t get to have a longer chat with Sven, to hear about his Blogwise site and compare notes about AdSense.

A podcast I listen to regularly is OnTheRun with Tablet PCs, by James Kendrick and Marc Orchant.

I’ve not yet heard the latest edition, number 8, but apparently you can get yourself a free copy of Buzz Bruggeman’s ActiveWords by doing so.

ActiveWords is not a tablet-specific program, though there is a free add-on to make it more tablet-friendly. If you’ve not tried ActiveWords, I strongly recommend you take up this offer. Imagine being able to run any program, visit any web site, or open any document, whatever your current context and without having to switch away from the program you’re currently working in.

The free ActiveWords offer expires at the end of December.

Mindjet, makers of the wonderful MindManager mapping tool, are reporting that upgrading to .NET Framework 2.0 breaks one of their primary products. Users are recommended to not install .NET Framework 2.0.

This is not an isolated incident. In October, Microsoft released a fix to allow Tablet PC software to continue working with .NET 2.0.

How did we get into this mess? Why are lengthy articles required to document compatibility issues between different .NET versions?

I’ve said it before: it would be foolishness to develop client-side applications around the .NET framework. Use .NET on the server, where you’ve got full control of the working environment, but you simply can’t trust Microsoft not to pull the rug from under you on client systems.

Over time, I’ve found that really good software - I don’t mean software that just does the job, but that does it simply and elegantly and looks gorgeous - is very often written using Borland Delphi.

Nevertheless, I was pretty amazed to find today that the Skype client for Windows is a Delphi application. I confirmed this fact using one of my favourite free utilities: Greatis WinDowse (also a Delphi application).

Using WinDowse, it’s often possible to establish, within a few seconds, which class or component libraries have been used to create an HMI. It turns out that large parts of the Skype UI appear to be built using the free Delphi Unicode Controls from a perhaps unlikely source: TntWare - a husband and wife team who create free software for missionary workers. And why not?

An idle thought - would Skype have become the same mammoth success story if the developers had opted to use .NET rather than Delphi? I rather think not.

For my money, this has to be the best story to emerge from the blogosphere to date. Watching it develop over the past 2 weeks has been fascinating:

• from Mark Russinovich’s original post,
• to being picked up by the mainstream media,
• to Sony’s repeated attempts to shoot off their own feet,
• and the news of pending lawsuits.

And it just keeps getting better (or worse, depending on your standpoint). Today, The Register reports that the first trojan to exploit the Sony-BMG rootkit to conceal itself has been found in the wild. This story has a great deal more mileage in it yet!

I mentioned in September that I’d already stopped buying BMG discs, because of the aggravation caused by an earlier copy protection scheme. I suspect rather more people are now adopting the same attitude to this company’s disgraceful disregard for its paying customers.

I wrote in October about why I was reluctantly giving up Pandora, the personalised Internet music streaming service.

I’m very happy to say that I’m now able to reverse this decision. They’ve just released version 2, and have addressed almost all my criticisms.

Most importantly, there is now a free ad-supported version. I firmly believe that this service is a billboard for the music industry, who should therefore be underwriting it. Nevertheless, an ad-supported version will do for now. It’s not entirely clear what forms these ads will take (”you’ll notice us playing with different advertising forms over the coming months”). Display ads should be fine; audio clips played between music tracks will quickly have me reaching for the close button again.

The other major enhancement is the ability to edit all the preferences for a station, including the removal of artists/tracks added in error (which previously had the unfortunate effect of skewing the playlist well away from what you were aiming for).

I’m listening to my personalised Pandora station now. It started up with tracks from The Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, Bonnie Prince Billy and Patti Smith. Excellent - especially as 3 of these 4 artists were (appropriately) selected by Pandora based on the list of the artists/tracks I’d entered.