I've updated my PDC Wishlist.

I was recently asked by a friend of mine lucky enough to attend PDC this year, "What sessions would you go to?"  Well, this is an experimental entry which I will keep updated with my "PDC Wishlist"  What sessions I would attend and maybe even why.

• Chris Anderson's Avalon Talk -- Chris, whose weblog is the reason I blog today, is the original author of BlogX.  "What is Avalon?" you ask?
• Don Box's Indigo Talks -- I see Don Box's name everywhere.  He's had some great insights in his blog.  Click to talk link to get an overview of what Indigo is.
• Chris Sells if he's speaking -- He shows up on the speakers list, but doesn't appear to have a talk registered.  What's up with that?  Maybe I just haven't looked deep enough since I'm not actually going.  He's big on Longhorn, the next version of Windows.
• Anders Hejlsberg's C# language enhancements talk.  This will give us the goods on generics and the other goodies they're adding like anonymous delegates, iterators, etc.
• Anything else about Whidbey (next VS.NET/framework release).  I haven't found out who's doing sessions on this, but it should be a huge part of the PDC.  Generics will steal the show, but there's alot of other nifties in there as well
• I'm not that interested in Yukon (next SQL Server), but if I had leftover time, I'd make some sessions on that.
• I would definitely try to meet Miguel de Icaza.  He's head dude at Ximian which was recently aquired by Novell.  He wrote the Gnome desktop for Linux.  He's a fan of the CLR and heads the Mono project which is an open-source implementation of the CLR primarily targeted at Linux.  He's bound to be around somewhere.

I'll keep this list updated as I think/find more topics I'm interested in.  If anyone else has ideas on what's important to see, feel free to comment.

Check it out (if you interested in that sort of thing).  For those who don't know if they're interested, generics are like templates in C++, allowing you to define classes, methods, etc. in terms of a generic type rather than a specific type.  This article goes over the advantages of CLR generics as opposed to C++ templates or the proposed generics specification for Java.

Hey, I just wanted to make a plug for a really cool band.  The drummer (Weslee Copeland) was in the first Sunday School class I taught 3 years ago.  He's been in a couple of my videos too.  Earlier this year, I did a DiscipleNow weekend in Fredricksburg with the whole band.

They are really impressive.  I've really only gotten to hear them live a few times, but each time they've gotten better and better.  They've been in the studio again recently working on some new stuff.  I'm pretty excited about it.  They've got a music video up on their site if your interested in seeing/hearing them.  It's pretty good quality.

My weblog software lets me look at referrers (sites from which people have linked to my weblog).  I've noticed an interesting amount of people search for my name on Google.  Most of the hits include qualifiers like "belton" or "baylor", so I'm fairly certain it's me they're after. I really wish I had some way of finding out who these people are so I can get in touch with them.  There's no telling who they are.  They could be trying to figure out how to send me money.

I get alot of traffic from Peter's blog too.  I've got a pretty good handle on who those people probably are.

What really intrigues me is that there are evidently people sending links to my blog in their email.  I've got several referrals from yahoo where the url looks like someone was reading their email.  Again, I wish there was a good way to find out who they are.

I may have to modify dasBlog to log ip addresses and other relevant information to help me do some sleuthing.

My #1 grip with the Framework deals with ADO.net and the way they chose to implement the provider-specific mappings to native framework types.  The "generic" way to access a db is almost completely useless unless you are married to Sql Server.

There is no base type to deal with high-precision numbers that come out of a database.  Even with Sql Server you're forced to use the provider-specific types like SqlNumber and OracleDecimal, which are not related (which is impossible with ValueType I know) and provide horrible conversion implementations to the native types.

Of course the root problem is the lack of a true standard for dbs to represent data, and dbs like Oracle that have zero compatibility with accepted number standard like IEEE, but that's another story.  If System.Decimal better represented the numbers a db is capable of storing that would be a huge help.  Or even adding something like BigDecimal to handle high precision cases would be nice.

In my opinion, ADO.net has not succeeded in providing a cross-db interface to data.  Instead of providing the Bridge pattern to many different database API's, the managed providers are forced to implement features missing from the bridge, thus eliminating its advantages.  Some people may never run into these problems, but working with Oracle at work (which I've grown to hate) keeps me from using the managed providers without creating my own wrappers for the "special cases" that happen every time I query.

For fun, Becky and I went to Maxwell Nissan to test drive a Murano.  I don't know why all the pictures are that nasty orange.  It looks much better in the silver or blue.  I've been itching to drive a car with variable transmission ever since I heard of a commercial implementation about 10 years ago.  I was very impressed with the transmission, which was well under 2000rpm at 65mph.  It leverages that technology to get fantastic mileage on an SUV.  The whole thing was pretty sweet.  Our salesperson, we'll call him "Ben" (because that was his name), said, "If you can feel it shift, I'll buy the car for you".  I found that to be only slightly amusing since it's impossible for the car to shift at all.

While we cannot afford the vehicle, they did set forth some interesting numbers on a lease.  With our Explorer not worth much on a trade-in, leasing seems like an interesting option.  I've heard it put, "just like buying a used car, you're paying for half of the car, but you get the new half."  Any opinions?

Just curious what experiences people have had with leasing.  I've heard some horror stories, that I mentioned to the sales-person.  They had pretty convincing rebuttals (rebuttals?  is that right?).  Tell me what you think.

Anyone going to PDC (wink wink) should check this out.

Also, Peter, looks like someone else is using your moniker.

[Technical]

After answering Peter's comment to my last entry on the threshold of complexity required before moving to an HttpHandler-based web application, I've done some more thinking.

I originally mentioned that threshold is reached when you start thinking about the application in terms of a flow or state machine, but that test would indicate everything but the most basic "list-of-standard-reports" web application would merit this approach.  While it is true that all of them would benefit from the approach, I think it's important to think about Microsoft's vision for ASP.net, which was to speed development, and provide a more power YET FAMILIAR framework for building web applications.

It's the familiar part that's most important.  People have been creating Handler-based solutions all along using ISAPI filters, and .NET reduces the complexity of this approach IMMENSLY using IHttpHandler, even thought it is significantly more complex than the classic ASP page model.  .NET reduced that effort as well.

I think .NET brings simplification to both approaches.  Most people creating handler-based approaches already have a significant amount of conceptual design in their current systems. and probably wouldn't use any canned solution for such an approach.  However, classic ASP developers were overdue for improvement.

I believe most applications would benefit from a handler-based solution, but without a standard coding model for this, most developers will feel more comfortable with the page-based model.  What's worse, Microsoft's suggested implementation still relies on the Page class, without explaining fully how to handle complex user interaction in this hybrid environment.

I'm afraid I haven't answered many questions.

[UPDATED 9:15 same day after reviewing dasBlog source code]

When should you stray?  As soon as you're ready.

[WARNING: LONG AND TECHNICAL]

I recently got a book on design patterns in software.  It basically takes a well-known theory on patterns in home and building architecture and applies it to programming.  The result is creating software that is incredibly flexible, portable, extensible, and easy to manage.  In reading it, I've been identifying ways I can improve the code I've written at Motorola.

One of these improvements lies with IHttpHandler, an interface that defines how an http request from a client is handled and the resulting content delivered.  Visual Studio and the standard ASP.NET programming model steer you away from using IHttpHandler directly in favor of the "simpler" technique of subclassing the Page class to create...pages.  I put quotation marks around simpler because this technique is only simpler in small, non-complex applications.

When the application reaches a certain complexity, this PageController pattern becomes very cumbersome.  This is when you need to create an entity that can make alot of decisions outside the context of a page, delegate data retreival and manipulation to other entities, and let the Page be a very passive participant. This concept is realized in the FrontController pattern, which is easily implemented via the IHttpHandler interface.

It is encouraging to see the concept of Patterns being embraced and documented so well at Microsoft.  I'll be implementing some ideas this week, and I'll update you on the progress.