Home > Blogs
I’m sure we’re going to look back at 2009 and say “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ and it will no doubt be interesting. Here’s my predictions….
Social Networking Everywhere
Although online social networking companies are already struggling with diminished valuations, in 2009 we’ll see social networks break out of their silos and become essential platform elements that see their way into other online applications such as travel, e-commerce, job-posting boards, online dating services, CRM services, web based email systems, etc. Blogging is also changing, slowing down in fact. Micro-blogging with status update-esque features in FaceBook, Windows Live, and of course the explosion of Twitter will take on even larger roles. It’s as true today as it was back in 1964 when fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan wrote “The Medium Is The Message”.
The Death of Optical Media
Okay, so you’ll still be able to walk into a video store to rent a DVD or buy a spindle of blanks at your grocery store but make no mistake about it – the death march is on, and that includes you too Blu-Ray. Blu-Ray will never see the adoption curve that DVD’s had. They thought they won when HD-DVD died, but if winning means dying last, then sure, you won. We’ll increasingly be renting our movies on-demand through our cable boxes, on our converged PC’s and XBOX 360’s via services like Netflix. Along with this, the rest of us will start to realize we don’t really need to own our libraries of movies. With IPod penetration as high as it is, it may take longer to realize we don’t need to own our music either – frankly we don’t own it anyway even though the pricing models try to convince us we do. I won’t go out and predict the death of DRM, frankly, I think 2009 maybe the year where DRM starts to get more tolerable once we are clearly renting our music and movies. The Zune Pass is making some inroads here but until Apple starts offering a similar subscription pricing, this may take a bit longer.
The Mac Air may have been a bit ahead of the curve with dropping the optical drive, but get used to it. Expect more vendors to do the same as they reduce size or cram in additional batteries or hard drives.
The Rise of the NetBook
If 2009 is the year of doing more with less, then this will surely be the NetBook’s year. Mainstream hardware manufacturers hate these and their small profit margins, but Acer and Intel will be raking it in building market share if not large bottom lines. Who knows, MS may learn to love the NetBook if they can get Acer to start shipping Windows 7 on them this year as well. Be prepared to see these everywhere in 2009, but don’t expect to see Apple make one (ever).
Zune Phone
The big story at the end of 2008 has been the global suicide of the original Zune 30s. I predict that tomorrow they’ll be they shall rise from the dead but it might take until the 2nd for everybody to figure out that they need to entirely drain the battery. The big news is that there won’t be a Zune phone with the MS brand name on it, but the Zune UI will come to Windows Mobile (6.5?) turning legions of touch based smart phones into music players almost as good as an IPhone. The bad news is that without an App Store to vet software quality, crapware will continue to be the source of reliability issues for the Windows Mobile platform. The good news is that without an App Store, Windows Mobile users will have lots of choice in the software for their devices, not to mention lots of choice in devices, carriers and plans. The battle between Good and Evil may morph into the battle between Reliability and Choice.
Touch Everywhere
Get your head out of the gutter, that’s not what I meant. What I did mean is that 12-24 months from now, it will be difficult to purchase a digital frame, LCD monitor or phone without an onscreen touch capability. Windows 7 will light these devices up and we’ll start to not think about the differences between Tablet PC’s and Notebooks as they just converge into a single device. With the advent of Silverlight, WPF and Surface computing, MS has been banging the “user experience” drum for a while now but when touch starts to be the expectation and not the exception, we’ll have to re-engineer our applications to optimize for the touch experience. This may turn out to be bigger than the mouse or even a windowed operation system.
Flush with Flash
In 2008 we’ve been teased with sold state hard drives but with less than stellar performance at outrageous prices, they’ve been on the fringe. In 2009 prices and read/write times will both come down in solid state drives, but with the increased capacity of USB memory sticks 32gb, 64gb +, we likely won’t see SSD drives hitting mainstream this year. Instead I think we’ll see an increase in the behavior of people keeping their entire lives on USB flash memory sticks. Hopefully we’ll see sync & backup software such as Windows Live Sync, Active Sync, Windows Home Server, etc. become more aware of these portable memory devices that may get synced from any device in your mesh.
Camera flash will have to have a new format as SDHC currently is maxed at 32gb. With the increase in demand for HD video recording on still and video cameras, we’ll need a new format. As such we’re seeing rock bottom prices on 2gb chips now. Maybe somebody will come out with a SD Raid device that lets us plug in a bank of 2GB SD Cards.
Growing up in the Cloud
Cloud computing is going to be a very long term trend. I think we’ll only see baby steps in 2009 towards this goal. In the consumer space we’ll see more storage of digital media in the cloud, online backup services and the move of many applications to the cloud. Perfect for your Touch Zune Phone and Touch NetBook without an optical drive eh? IT shops will take a bit longer to embrace the cloud. Although many IT Data centers are largely virtualized already, applications are not all that virtual today and that doesn’t seem to be changing soon as developers have not whole-heartedly adopted SOA practices, addressed scalability and session management issues nor adopted concepts such as multi-tenancy. As we do more with less in 2009, we won’t see that changing much as a lot of software out there will be in “maintenance mode” during the recession.
Maybe, Just Maybe, this is the year of the Conveniently Connected Smart Client
Adobe Air & Silverlight are mainstreaming web deployed and updated rich client desktop apps. It’s hard to take advantage of touch interfaces and massive portable flash storage within a browser. All of these other trends can influence Smart Client applications, potentially to a tipping point. We’ll hopefully see out of browser, cross-platform Silverlight applications in 2009 to make this an easy reality on the MS Stack.
Incremental, Value-Based and Agile Software Development
Many of my customers began large-scale re-writes of their key software assets in 2008, many of them against my recommendations. For most of my key customers in 2008 and into 2009 I’m an advocate of providing incremental value in short iterative releases, not major re-writes that take 6+ months to develop. Even if your application is written in PowerBuilder 6 or Classic ASP, avoid the temptation to rewrite any code that won’t see production for 4 months or longer. We can work towards componentized software by refactoring legacy assets and providing key integration points so that we can release updated modules towards gradual migration. It is difficult for software teams in this economy to produce big-bang, “boil the ocean”, build cathedral type projects. We simply can’t predict what our project’s funding will be in 4 months from now, or if we’ll be owned by another company, scaled down, out sourced or just plain laid off. That is of course unless you work for the government. Government spending will continue if not increase in 2009, but still, try to spend our taxpayer money wisely by delivering short incremental software releases. It allows you to build trust with your customers, mark a line in the sand and move onward and upward, and let’s you move quickly in times of fluid business requirements and funding issues.
Incremental, Value-Based software development isn’t easy. It takes lots of work, creative thinking, and much interop and integration work than one would prefer. It might easily seem like an approach that costs more in the long term, and in some cases you could be right. But if a company has to throw out work in progress after 6-8 months or never sees the value of it because of other changing business conditions, then what have you saved? Probably not your job anyway.
I’ll be speaking tomorrow night at the Metro Toronto .NET UG tomorrow night.
Entity Framework: What You Need to Know
Is this the last data access technology we’ll ever need from MS – or just another one along the way? What is the Entity Framework and what is the difference between EDM, and LINQ to Entities. What’s different between LINQ to SQL? This session will give you the background on the Entity Framework and help you understand the MS data access strategy and how to apply it in practice. We’ll look at what’s available today, how best to apply it in the real world coupled with other complimentary technologies such as ADO.NET Data Services and Enterprise Library’s Validation Application Block.
And best of all, we’re having a food drive for the Daily Bread Food Bank. You can donate cash by clicking here or non-perishable good such as.
- Peanut Butter
- Baby Formula & Food
- Canned Fruits or Vegetables
- Canned Fish or Meat
- Dried Pasta & Tomato Sauce
- Rice
- Lentils
- Cans of Soup or Hearty Stew
- Powdered, Canned or Tetra Pak Milk
- Cans of Beans
- Macaroni and Cheese
Did You Know?
Your cash donation will purchase twice as much food as you can purchase at the grocery store. The daily bread food bank purchases Bulk Quantities of food, which gets to where it is needed faster because there is no sorting step required.
DevTeach Montreal is less than a month away but it’s not too late to register. This is a great conference with sessions covering .NET FX, Future, SQL Server, VSTS/Team System, Silverlight, Agile Development, Software Architecture, ASP.NET.
Aside from the great content, build up your professional network by rubbing shoulders with the speakers in an intimate conference. The list of speakers is particularly impressive this year. From MS you’ll get to see Elisa Flasko and Carl Perry from the Data Programmability Team, Beth Massi and Yair Alan Griver. Of course .NET Rockers Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell will also be there with fellow MS Regional Directors Tim Huckaby, Joel Semeniuk, Stephen Forte, Jim Duffy, Guy Barrette and yours truly.
But wait, there’s more. Each attendee will get Visual Studio 2008 Pro and Expression Web 2.0 full copies along with the entire DVD set covering all sessions from TechEd 2008 Developers conference from Orlando this year. It’s Shamwow!
If you attended TechDays, your included coupon is now worth $350 off the price of DevTeach. If you didn’t, you can use this code:TO000OBJSHARP good for 50$ off. Sign up here.
An early Christmas present from our friends in Redmond! Beginning October 1, 2008 subscribers to VSTS Developer Edition and Database Edition will have access to the additional SKU. This was reported this week over at the MSDN VS 2010 & .NET Framework 4.0 overview page, but you don’t have to wait until Visual Studio 2010 is released.
Well that is just an awesome announcement and kudos to MS for listening to the community feedback about the multiple hats people wear on projects. I’m sure that this will lead to more teams actually using the Database edition functionality on their project which offers great source code integration for their database scripts not to mention T-SQL unit testing and test data generation.
Oh where did the summer go? Not spent blogging. My life was turned a bit upside down this summer. My expectant wife Caroline was hospitalized for pre-eclampsia (high blood pressure) for 2 weeks, and when she did get released – she was put on bed rest. Caroline has been a stay-at-home Mom for the past 9 years so I had to learn her ways of keeping the wheels moving with two busy daughters during the summer months, not to mention hospital visits to see Mom once or twice a day.
I picked up the Rogers Portable (Wireless) Internet service so Caroline and I could both keep up on email while at the hospital (no cell phones allowed). It wouldn’t penetrate our new windows in the house, likely because of the low-emissivity coating on the glass but it worked fine from the Oakville hospital.
The situation for high-risk pregnancies in Ontario was quite grim this summer. There few hospitals equipped for a high-risk/early delivery (i.e. not Oakville) were quite full and they threatened to move us to as close as Credit Valley in Mississauga, to downtown Toronto, to Montreal, Winnipeg (yuck), or even Detroit or Buffalo. I can’t believe the lack of capacity in our healthcare system – it’s embarrassing.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks at home, pre-eclampsia was turning into eclampsia so they decided to do an early delivery (just under 7 months). We picked the right day (July 14th) as we managed to get a spot at the nearby and wonderful Credit Valley Hospital. Our baby was breech so they had to do an emergency cesarean section delivery. We were blessed with another baby girl weighing 4lbs, 14 ounces, not bad for a 7-month old. As usual, we didn’t have a name picked right away so I nicknamed her Buttercup. The nurses quite liked this and made a special name card for her isolette.
Caroline’s blood pressure was still pretty high and she had a dedicated nurse bedside for the next 24 hours taking her blood pressure every 5-15 minutes as they loaded her up on various blood pressure medications including magnesium sulphate. After 24 hours she was well enough to be moved to the regular labour & delivery unit. Caroline was in the hospital for another week, which wasn’t too bad since she was able to visit Baby Buttercup as often as she liked.
Caroline had received a steroid shot for lung development when she was first admitted a month ago so that really helped with Buttercup’s lung development. Buttercup still needed oxygen for the first week or so to keep her saturation up as she breathing very rapidly and shallowly. They kept her on IV fluids and then added a nutritional supplement for the first couple of weeks before they started feeding her *** milk with a nasal tube. After almost 4 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit at Credit Valley we were finally able to bring her home. By this time she was fully breastfeeding and was about 6lbs and gaining weight every day.
I don’t think I’ve spent as much time in a hospital my entire life as I have this past summer, but we are very thankful that everybody is now home together and healthy. Claire and Fiona adore their new baby sister – now named Maeve Juliet, and as of today' she must be well over 8lbs.
As if this wasn’t enough, I started leading a new project in July with a few of my O# colleagues. It’s a rich client in .NET 3.5, WPF front end connecting to SQL Server through a ADO.NET Data Service (formerly Astoria) sitting on top of the Entity Framework. We’re using elements of our own framework as well as portions of Enterprise Library 4.0 including the Unity IoC Container, Composite Application Library (CAL) and the Validation Application Block. Of course we’re also using VSTS including the database edition and using TypeMock here and within our unit testing.
As you can imagine, a tremendous amount of the application is declarative, not just architecturally, but also programmatically with liberal use of LINQ queries throughout. We’ve started to see some really great productivity now that the architecture is stable so I’m looking forward to resuming regular programming here with some tales from the trenches.
With all this heat, I almost wrote "perspiring". Why not beat the heat, and stay cool inside while watching these web casts from MS Canada targeting aspiring architects. With the predicted shortage in IT in the upcoming years, we're sure to see an influx of junior resources into our industry. This is a good opportunity for developers to transition into architecture roles to leverage their existing skill set.
The Aspiring Architect Series 2008 builds on last year’s content and covers a number of topics that are important for architects to understand. So it would be a great idea to watch last year's recordings if you haven't already. Links are available here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/tags/Aspiring+Architects/default.aspx .
Upcoming sessions are as follows:
June 16th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Introduction to the aspiring architect Web Cast series
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380836&Culture=en-CA
June 17th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Service Bus – Beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380838&Culture=en-CA
June 18th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – TOGAF and Zachman, a real-world perspective
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380840&Culture=en-CA
June 19th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Services Oriented Architecture (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380842&Culture=en-CA
June 20th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Interoperability (Web Cast in French)
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380844&Culture=fr-CA
June 23rd , 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Realizing dynamic systems
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380846&Culture=en-CA
June 24th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Web 2.0, beyond the hype
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380848&Culture=en-CA
June 25th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Architecting for the user experience
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380850&Culture=en-CA
June 26th, 2008 – 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. – Conclusion and next steps
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032380852&Culture=en-CA
Last week at TechEd I gave a talk about building data access layers with the Entity Framework. I covered various approaches from not having a data access layer at all, to fully encapsulation of the entity framework - and some hybrid approaches along the way.
I gave the first instance of this on Tuesday and then a repeat on Thursday.
To those who saw the first instance of this on Tuesday....
you unfortunately got an abbreviated and disjointed version for which I apologize. After I queued up my deck about 15 minutes prior to the talk I left the room for a minute while people filed in and while I was out, one of the event staff shutdown my deck and restarted it running from a different folder on the recording machine and didn't tell me. I was about 1/3rd into my presentation when I realized that I had the wrong version of the deck. At the time, I had no idea why this version of the deck was running so I wasn't going to fumble around looking for the correct one. Given a change in the order of things - I'm not sure if changing decks at that point would have made things better or worst. I still had no idea why this had happened when I gave the talk again on Thursday but when the same thing almost happened again - this time I caught the event staff shutting down my deck and restarting it again (from an older copy). Bottom line, sorry to those folks who saw the earlier version.
The complete deck and demo project is attached. It is a branch of the sample that is part of the Entity Framework Hands on Lab that was available at the conference and which is included in the .NET 3.5 Enhancements (aka SP1) training kit. You can will need the database for that project which is not included in my down.
Download the training kit here.
About a month ago, Live.com released an update to their search engine and I took it upon myself to write down my observations of Live as compared to Google. Although the features seemed to be a pretty good leap in many areas, I concluded that the only way to see which one was better was to change my default engine to Live.com for a week or two and give it a try.
Well, it's been a month now and Live.com is still my search engine. It's not like I didn't stop using Google however. I would say that perhaps 10% or less of the time, I felt frustrated by not finding what I was looking for on Live.com and cross-searched Google.com. Of those cases, I would say only half of the time, I found something useful on Google.com that wasn't found on Live.com. These aren't hard numbers, just an anecdotal feel of my experience. When Google.com was my default search engine, my failed searches were likely in the same order as was Live.com's ability to result in something useful where Google.com did not.
So the verdict for me is that in the area of core test searches, the differences were negligible. At no time did I feel that live.com's performance was slower and I always found the image, video & map search to be superior in Live.com. These features alone for me are reason enough to leave Live.com as my default for the time being.
ObjectSharp is going to experiment with some Live.com ads. I'm not expecting any kind of serious traffic to come through ads on Live.com so this is mostly a research project to get familiar with their ad engine.
Are you a design & mac user in a Windows Development Shop? Are they eyeing your Mac and measuring your desk to outfit you with a new PC? Over your cold dead corpse I bet. No worries. You owe it to yourself to check out the Microsoft Expression Professional Subscription. Yeah, you could run Bootcamp but then you'd loose the OS X & Quicksilver goodness while you paid the bills.
This annual subscription's most important piece of software isn't made by MS: Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels will let you run Windows Vista or Windows XP (also included with the subscription) without leaving OS X - better yet with Expose, your desktop will be unified. And with the SmartSelect feature, you'll be opening Mac or Windows files in the OS of your choice automatically. Edit XAML files in Expression Blend (also include) in Windows, but open JPEG's in Photoshop in OS X - regardless from which OS you launched the file from. Very cool.
Here's the complete list of included software
- Expression® Studio
Which includes Expression Web for aspx/css/html stuff, Blend for WPF/Silverlight/XAML stuff, Expression Design for illustrations & graphics, Expression Encoder for media encoding, and Expression Media for asset management. - Visual Studio® Standard
Just in case the .NET guys make you check stuff into source control. - Office Standard
- Office Visio® Professional
For those workflow diagrams and ugly mock ups that the dev guys send you. - Windows® XP
- Windows Vista® Business Edition
- Virtual PC
- Parallels Desktop for Mac
And just to make things even easier, they've already included some pre-configured virtualized servers in the box as well - that will save you some time. Current pricing is about $1000 USD for the first year. This won't be available for a few weeks, but visit here to learn more.
And if you're trying to learn more about WPF and Silverlight, check out our new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Developers & Designers course. Rob Burke, our User Experience (UX) practice lead talks more about this course here. And finally, check out Rob Windsor's post on our Summer Seat Sale to learn how to save up to $500 on our training this summer.
Well it's just 1 week since DevTeach came to Toronto for the first time. What a great conference and it was my pleasure to be involved as a speaker, track-chair and attendee. The conference organizer Jean-Rene Roy just sent me a note with some of the comments from the overall evaluations. If you didn't attend this year, here's some reasons why you may want to next year:
Great conference! I especially enjoyed the up and personal nature of the conference. I was able to talk with the presenters. I spent most of my time at the agile track. Having topics that are rarely dealt with at user groups was a bonus. I enjoyed all the sessions I attended. The venue was great and the attention to little details, e.g., afternoon ice cream was appreciated.
Jean-René, thank you SO MUCH for bringing DevTeach to Toronto. It was fantastic and I will go again. Your tech chairs did a great job choosing sessions for each track. While I especially enjoyed the Agile sessions, I attended something from each track and the variety was good.
An outstanding conference! All the speakers I saw were terrific — affable, down-to-earth, talented, incredibly knowledgeable. The sessions were entertaining as well as in-depth and honest — no BS, no company line. I also met many people and had many interesting and thought provoking discussions outside the classrooms, and came away with new knowledge, ideas and inspiration. “Training you can’t get anywhere else” is an understatement.
Most of the speakers tell us 'why' and 'so what' instead of 'how'. This is what I expected and is good for developer in the long run. Please let speakers know this is good.
This is an excellent conference. I feel I updated my skills intensively effectively during these 3 days. I believe it will become a key event in .net area.
DevTeach was an amazing experience, especially for first timers. It was a good way to network with people in the industry, learn new techniques, make friends and bring home stories.
This was my first DevTeach and if I have any say in the matter, won't be my last. I had a great time, the sessions that I attended were top notch for the most part. Jean-Rene and his team deserve a hugh pat on the back for their efforts. What-ever they're getting paid - isn't half enough
What can I say. You'll definitely see me next year. I hope its still in Toronto. This was one of the BEST training conferences I've been on in quite some time. The "take-away's" from all the sessions were astounding. My mind is still spinning. Anyway, great job, nice prizes, great orgranization, absolutely no negative thoughts or comments.
This was a fantastic experience, MUCH better information than what I got from TechEd last year. TechEd's information was very visionary, things I can talk about now but not use for a few years out. DevTeach taught me things and gave me ideas I can use NOW! I LOVE THAT! The presentators were awesome, professional and very gifted at presenting their material. The only suggestions I would make are to have hot food every day (cold cut sandwiches are fine, even suggested for people at the Pre/Post Con but not for the actual event). More evening sessions (like at TechEd). I would have liked to have seen a presentation on MSBuild. PS You should have a value for the drop down of NA for hotel and accomodations if you didn't stay at the hotel.