Whidbey and WinFS

VisualStudio Magazine has a good article on Whidbey. Some exciting hints about Yukon integration and lifecycle management tools, but the gist seems to be that this is a release targeted at enterprise developers. #

Ray Ozzie points out the really exciting thing about WinFS is not the search, its the common schemas that apps can use to store their data. I hope he’s right that these standard, extensible schemas will enable interoperability at the data level. Currently, we as an industry don’t have much experience with reusing schemas across multiple organizations.

WinFS interview

Walter Smith points to a fascinating interview with Ray Ozzie:

“Now what if, as has happened in applications, the core abstraction of what is in a contemporary OS moves up by many notches? What if APIs become frameworks? What if a file system becomes more like a database? If higher level service-oriented architectures are in the underlying infrastructure as opposed to just generic standard C library runtime calls?

As a client side developer, I really want to take advantage of that stuff. It lets me be a whole lot more productive. But the more I do that the more I rely on higher-level infrastructure being around. So what I would ask you is the following: Are the Linux community and the Mac community prepared to step up their client-side investments to build higher-level frameworks to make it easier for me to code like Microsoft is doing?”

WinFS interview

Walter Smith points to a fascinating interview with Ray Ozzie:

“Now what if, as has happened in applications, the core abstraction of what is in a contemporary OS moves up by many notches? What if APIs become frameworks? What if a file system becomes more like a database? If higher level service-oriented architectures are in the underlying infrastructure as opposed to just generic standard C library runtime calls?

As a client side developer, I really want to take advantage of that stuff. It lets me be a whole lot more productive. But the more I do that the more I rely on higher-level infrastructure being around. So what I would ask you is the following: Are the Linux community and the Mac community prepared to step up their client-side investments to build higher-level frameworks to make it easier for me to code like Microsoft is doing?”

Pointers

Wired: “…one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies” #

BBC: There’s now one Harry Potter book for every twenty-four people on the planet.

Pointers

Wired: “…one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, ibiblio.org is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies” #

BBC: There’s now one Harry Potter book for every twenty-four people on the planet.

New Photo Gallery

I’ve just cut the site over to a new version of the photo gallery software. The new URL is:

http://photos.andrewjohnson.me.uk/

This is essentially a full rewrite of the old software, this time using XML to hold the metadata for the albums and individual photos. Its also much more configurable, using web.config and CSS. There’s still a few things to do. Currently the code doesn’t use all the facilities provided by the schemas, but I’ll add those features incrementally. For now I’m done with it.

Next job is to add some new albums, including some of the photos I tool in Scotland during the summer.

Freedom Pointers

Joi Ito: “I think the US is going down the slippery slope of becoming one of the most hated nations in the world when it still possible for it to be one of the most loved nation if only it learned to listen to, respect and understand the rest of us.”