Don Box's Spoutlet

Naming the Baby

don-box — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:57:00 GMT

I've been working on "Oslo" for quite a while now.

Like "Oslo" itself, several of the major pieces of "Oslo" have placeholder code names that will be replaced with the actual names we'll brand the product with.

This makes writing titles and abstracts for PDC talks especially challenging. We can't use the internal code names, because they're not long for this world.

We also can't use the actual product names, because we don't have a vetted set of names. Even if we did, the marketing and PR folks want to do the "reveal" in a newsworthy session or keynote, not in a random update to the PDC registration page.

That means that the titles and abstract have to use vague adjective-laden terms, which is surprisingly hard to make sound understandable let alone compelling enough to want to attend.

For example, rather than just using a title like "Foo" Under The Hood or Programming "Bar", we wind up writing things like The Tool for Writing Declarative Applications Under The Hood or Programming a Framework for REST Information Retrieval and Update.

FWIW, this is standard operating procedure - we had the same challenge in 03 with WCF and in 05 with LINQ and WF.

With "Oslo" its harder, as there are several significant (and separable) technologies (so we have more names to come up with) and we've not yet found the right terminology/adjectives that efficiently convey what we're doing.

I can give a pretty accurate picture of "Oslo" if I have five minutes to talk or 1000 words to write - we still haven't found the perfect meme.

Fun times.

PDC Musings

don-box — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:11:00 GMT

This year's PDC will be my eighth as a speaker and my third as an MSFT employee.

The last two PDCs were more or less the same in terms of my involvement.

This year, I'm also helping out on selecting roughly one-fourth of the talks being given, which means I have the added pleasure of having to say "we don't have room for your talk" to lots of my friends in buildings 42, 35, 41, and 1.

We have a finite # of slots and a seemingly infinte amount of content to fit in, all of which is "vital and strategic" to at least the person pitching the talk.

One amusing moment was yesterday when ChrisAn described a proposed talk as "super geek porn."

I hope that talk makes it in.

MJF and WHG on Oslo

don-box — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:42:00 GMT

Mary Jo has nice coverage of David Chappell's Oslo talk at TechEd this week.

Also nice was BillG talking about the project in his farewell address as an FTE.

I'd love to hear from folks who saw the Chappell talk - I had to miss it when he was in Redmond last week to deliver it to the team.

10 is the new 6

don-box — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:02:00 GMT

I'm in a PDC planning meeting with the VS folks.

I just heard the mantra around the Visual C++ team is that “10 is the new 6.”

msdev.exe was one of my favorite executables of all time.

Wahoo!

Velocity (the cache, not the templating engine)

don-box — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 04:09:00 GMT

Congrats to the folks from Building 35 for getting the first CTP of Velocity out the door.

Here's a nice page on getting started with velocity.

First CTP of Managed Extension Framework (MEF)

don-box — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:17:00 GMT

Congrats to Shanku's team for shipping the first CTP of MEF.

We're using MEF daily and it's quite a useful bit of code.

E4X and/or VB9 XML Users - How's it going?

don-box — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:53:00 GMT

I've been spending a lot of time with XML again lately.

Since my last stint with XML, I know we shipped native XML suppport in VB9.

I also know that there are E4X implementations out in the wild.

What I'd love to know is how either of these are working out for people?

What do you love?

What blows?

What do you wish you had?

I'm also interested in hearing from XQuery users, but I'm keenly interested on how the “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” solutions are working out.

Feel free to comment here or via a private mail (dbox at the usual place).

PDC08

don-box — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:00:00 GMT

It's PDC season again.

The site went live this week - http://microsoftpdc.com/

It will be good to put bits in people's hands (or in our datacenters :-)).

ironruby running unmodified rails!

don-box — Sat, 31 May 2008 05:17:00 GMT

Via John Lam's twitter.

Fowler's DSL Book

don-box — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:17:00 GMT

I talked to Neal Ford a week or two ago and he mentioned that Martin Fowler is working on a DSL book.

Just found the site here.

Pretty skeletal so far, but I think the underlying ideas are pretty spot on.

Can't wait to see the final manuscript!

Steve Yegge on Emacs

don-box — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:06:00 GMT

Via Stefan Tilkov:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/04/xemacs-is-dead-long-live-xemacs.html

I've got no opinion on the GNU-vs-XEmacs analysis. I never used XEmacs for more than a day. I stopped using GNU Emacs in November 2003. I'm sure both version of emacs are even gotten better over the past 4+ years.

Had this just been another installment in the GNU-vs-XEmacs soap opera, there'd be nothing to see here.

Sandwiched between this however are some observations that I think are relevant to anyone who writes programs (start reading from “the dubious future of emacs“).

It's hard to argue with the value of self-hosting.

It's even harder to argue with the momentum of the browser and dynamic environments.

Work

don-box — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:14:00 GMT

Doug's posted another “we're hiring” missive.

Doug's been running my team for coming up on a year.

Doug has more passion and energy than anyone I've ever worked with.

Getting to work on a team that's building a language and a tool is both exciting and intimidating.

The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.

Working on 2/3rds of that equation is pretty thrilling.

Way more fun than anything else I've ever done with a computer.

Way more fun than blogging, hence the relative silence for the past year or so.

Blast from the past: SOM and DSOM

don-box — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 03:02:00 GMT

I saw this piece on Slashdot about folks wanting to open-source SOM and DSOM.

SOM lost to the JVM (and the CLR on our side) - although it's interesting to go back and look at the COM/SOM comparisons of that era and replace SOM with CLR.

Fun times.

XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it.

don-box — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:22:00 GMT

This quote isn't mine, it's from the slashdot article on the Future of XML but I just had to reference it.

XML: Done like a well-cooked steak

don-box — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 04:20:00 GMT

This recent Slashdot post on “The Future of XML” made me think about Ted’s post on Java and doneness.

Personally (not speaking for my employer) XML has achieved Patriot-esque doneness (ignoring last Sunday's disappointment with the Giants).

The format and data model stabilized ages ago (at least internet-scale ages).

The standardization effort went into the errata/sustained-engineering phase years ago.

Most development platforms have moved beyond the W3C’s first (and hopefully last) attempt to define programmatic interfaces.

XQuery seems firmly implanted as a promising technology of the future.

More importantly, XML survived XSD.

Like Java (and C for that matter), XML is a stable and reliable technology that’s pretty much done being changed.

People can bet on it and know exactly what they’re going to get.

The future of XML is more of the same.

Kudos to Bray et al for building something to last.