| Mauro 的个人资料Taming the Jungle照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
|
10月31日 Trouble at the ODF campThe ODF document format, promoted by Sun and IBM is a competitor to Microsoft’s OpenXML.
I think that both are substantially different and can coexist. However, the situation now became murky due to the rise of a third document format called CDF - “Compound Document Format”. To make things more confusing, this third format is now supported by the “ODF Foundation”, an organization created to support ODF!
The "ODF Foundation", which might need to change its name, vindicates many of the Microsoft’s positions on ODF, including:
You can read more at:
10月24日 Functional LanguagesI think it’s fair to say that in the last 12 years, since the popularization of Java, there have been few changes in the programming language landscape. C# and VB.NET are quite similar to Java and even Java is not all that different from C++, the last real big change.
Well, now Microsoft is bringing some quite impressive changes in programming language.
First there’s the LINQ project that together with previous changes with C# 2.0 such as generics and “yield” bring some whole new possibilities. Now you can write code such as:
var result = from c in Customers
where c.City == “London” orderby c.LastName descending select new { c.FirstName, c.LastName, c.Address }; One of the new things you can see above as the “where” expression is something called a “lambda expression”, a construction that allows you to pass functions around. This capability comes from something called “functional programing” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming).
Well, now Microsoft just announced full support for “F#”, an academic functional programming language developed by Microsoft Research (http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx).
You can read more at Soma’s (VP of language tools at Microsoft): http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/10/17/f-a-functional-programming-language.aspx.
The idea is that functional languages are better not only for modeling scientific problems, but also for making it easier to write code that access databases, a notorious deficiency of today’s languages.
10月15日 Daylight Saving time in Brazil – WHAT TO DODaylight saving arrived in Southern Brazil. We are told that we have to advance the clocks in one hour. This is valid for the computer, right? NO, IT ISN’T.
IT IS SIMPLY NOT OK TO JUST SET UP THE COMPUTER’S CLOCK! This will mess up things such as Outlook’s calendar and so on. There are many better options.
My preferred one is to download a tool called TZEdit.exe from http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/8/a/58a208b7-7dc7-4bc7-8357-28e29cdac52f/tzedit.exe and adjust entry and exit of daylight saving to:
This tip does not work with Vista. Under Vista you have to request a “hotfix” from http://www.microsoft.com/brasil/windows/products/windowsvista/verao.mspx. You will receive an email in “8 commercial hours” (mine took 20 minutes) with instructions and password from download. 10月6日 Microsoft can’t be right!As I reported before (http://maurosjungle.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F3CEB0849B03B6CC!306.entry), Microsoft will release the source code for the .NET Framework in a way very integrated with the Visual Studio development/debugging tool.
I am sure this is reason to cheer up. In more than one occasion I had to use third party tools to disassemble the Framework in order to check its exact behavior and make my code work better. I even found a bug and the access to source code was the only way to code my way around it.
Now some people, notably the so called “Open Source Community” is complaining that “Microsoft should have done that earlier” or that “the license is not GPL”. What a bunch of whiners. I am sure, thought, that although loud, they are a minority. Most of the developers are not complaining.
A similar situation happened with the Office file format. At first the format was not documented and the Open Source bunch complained. Then Microsoft documented it and they again complained that it was too complex and Microsoft should supply Open Source libraries to read/write it. Or “make it XML”. Microsoft then made it XML with the “Open XML” format, made it freely available to everyone and submitted to a standards body (ECMA) and made available libraries in the .NET Framework to manage the file format. Then the Open Source bunch combated OpenXML saying that we should abandon it and use Sun’s ODF instead!
The conclusion is that this people are not serious. They are “against Microsoft”, no matter what Microsoft does, even when Microsoft does what they want! 10月3日 Source code for the Framework available soonIn the year 2000 I went to Redmond for a press event announcing the availability of .NET Framework “Beta 2”. I then asked Anders Hejlsberg about the availability of the source code for the .NET Framework. He answered that “they were thinking about something”. Releasing the source code of libraries is a standard procedure for compilers, but since the Framework is more like part of Windows now, this came into a gray zone. The implementation will be pretty cool too. Since there are already many versions of the Framework and some Service Packs, Visual Studio will check the actual DLL being loaded and then download the correct source from Microsoft! Kudos for Microsoft! |
|
|
