__clrtype__ Metaclasses Demo: Silverlight Databinding

I’ve gotten to the point where I can actually demo something interesting with __clrtype__ metaclasses: Silverlight Databinding. This is a trivial sample, data binding a list of Products (aka the sample class I’ve been using all week) to a list box. But according to Jimmy, this is something he gets asked about on a regular basis and there’s a AgDLR bug open for this. The __clrtype__ feature is specific to IronPython but I bet the IronRuby guys could implement something similar if they wanted to.

When you install IronPython 2.6 (or 2.0.1 for that matter), it comes with the AgDLR bits in the Silverlight subfolder. This includes Silverlight compatible versions of the DLR and IronPython as well as the Silverlight DLR host and the development web server Chiron in the Silverlight\bin directory. There is also a script in the Silverlight\script directory that will generate a dynamic Silverlight application from a template. I ran “sl.bat python sldemo” in order to build the skeleton project.

In the generated app.xaml file, I removed the default text box and replaced it with this XAML code that I stole nearly-verbatim from my blog post on data binding in WPF with IronPython. The only thing I changed was the binding path for the text block (title became name).

Then in the App class, I set the ItemsSource of the ListBox to a hand-built a list of Products.

And that’s pretty much it. I used Chiron’s /z command to create a Silverlight XAP file, uploaded it to Silverlight Streaming and embedded it right here in this post. Code is up on my skydrive as well. Uusing Silverlight Streaming for this app was very easy - basically upload the XAP file to their server and embed some iframe code in this post via the source view and that was it. I’m not sure I would use it for a production app, but it rocked for hosting this demo.

The XAP is a big download for such a trivial app - about 1.3MB. The vast majority of that is the DLR and IronPython assemblies. The XAP would only be 2.9kB if it was just the Python, XAML and manifest files. This kinda stinks, but there’s a new transparent platform extensions feature in Silverlight 3 so we can at least break the DLR and IronPython DLLs out into their own separate XAPs. That way they only get downloaded once and cached in the browser instead of being included in every single IronPython Silverlight application anyone creates.

So that’s one scenario down, one to go. In order to be able to build WCF services in IronPython, I have to add a lot more infrastructure – notably emitting CLR methods that can invoke dynamic methods as well as emitting custom attributes. Invoking dynamic methods means understanding DLR binders, so look for more posts on __clrtype__ next week.

AgDLR 0.5

I mentioned yesterday that it looked like a new release of AgDLR was eminent and sure enough here it is. There are some really cool new features including Silverlight 3 Transparent Platform Extension support, In-Browser REPL and In-Browser testing of Silverlight apps. As with IronRuby 0.3, Jimmy has the a summary of the new AgDLR release.

One feature of the new release I did want to highlight was XapHttpHandler because I’m the one who wrote it! :)

The Silverlight versions of IronPython and IronRuby ship with a tool called Chiron that provides a REPL-esque experience for building dynamic language Silverlight apps. John Lam had a good write-up on Chiron when we first released it last year, but basically the idea is that Chiron is a local web server that will auto-generate a Silverlight XAP from a directory of Python and/or Ruby files on demand. For example, if your HTML page requests a Silverlight app named app.xap, Chiron automatically creates the app.xap file from the files in the app directory. This lets you simply edit your Python and/or Ruby files directly then refresh your browser to get the new version without needing an explicit build step.

The problem is that, unlike IIS and the ASP.NET Development Server, Chiron doesn’t integrate with ASP.NET. So it’s fine for building Silverlight apps that stand alone or talk to 3rd party services. But if you want to build a Silverlight app that talks back to it’s ASP.NET host, you’re out of luck. That’s where XapHttpHandler comes in. XapHttpHandler does the same exact on-demand XAP packaging for dynamic language Silverlight applications that Chiron does, but it’s implemented as an IHttpHandler so it plugs into the standard ASP.NET pipeline. All you have to do is put the Chiron.exe in your web application’s bin directory and add XapHttpHandler to your web.config like so:

<configuration>
  <!--remaining web.config content ommitted for clarity-->
  <system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add verb="*" path="*.xap" validate="false" type="Chiron.XapHttpHandler,Chiron"/>
    </httpHandlers>
  <system.web>
</configuration>

The new AgDLR drop includes a sample website that shows XapHttpHandler in action.

Quick note of caution: by design, XapHttpHandler does not cache the XAP file - it’s generated anew on every request. So I would highly recommend against using XapHttpHandler on a production web server. You’re much better off using Chiron to build a physical XAP file that you then deploy to your production web server.

Afternoon Coffee 174

You know, this gets pretty long when I go a week between morning coffee posts.

Dynamic Language Stuff

• There's a new version of the DLR Hosting spec. One of the biggest changes is the removal of DLR's pre-canned knowledge of IPy and IRuby. Now, you use app.config to specify DLR languages and map them to extensions. Sesh has the details and a sample. If you only care about hosting IPy, you can use our language specific hosting API which doesn't require app.config.
• Jimmy pushed out a new version of the Silverlight Dynamic Languages SDK. He's on the lookout for a better name, one of his commenters suggested "SilverWhisper Kit".
• Srivatsn shows how to pass Python keyword arguments to a C# method using ParamDictionaryAttribute, similar to how C# supports the params keyword via the ParamArrayAttribute. Unfortunately, there's no syntactic sugar for calling param dictionary methods from C#. I wonder, do most people like or dislike the idea of language level support for keyword arguments in C#? I'm guessing most would be against, though I think it's a cool idea.
• Maybe it's me, but I've noticed an uptick in twitter posts containing "ironpython" of late. For example, via Summize I discovered Joseph Jude's blog finally{} where he has posted a time tracking tool he built in IPy as well as his initial IPy learnings.
• Michael Foord, as usual, has been generating quite a bit of good IPy content. He did a tutorial on IPy at PyCon UK,  his book is almost done, he has some interesting thoughts on dynamic language performance and even admits that he likes C#, though not as much as he likes Python.
• Vernon Cole announced that the adodbapi project now supports IronPython 2.0 as well as CPython. This library is a DB-API 2.0 compliant interface for any database that support ADO (note, that's native ADO not ADO.NET). I love to see Python projects with explicit support for IPy.
• My boss - who apparently will be called "Rem" from now on in the office - saves you "gazillions" by explaining non-positional negotiating strategy and draws the comparison to agile software development. Not exactly related to dynamic languages, but I'd like to see him further explore the relationship super-optimal, non-positional, significantly-hyphenated negotiation and software design. (OK, I made up "significantly-hyphenated")

Other Stuff

• Don Syme blogs about an update to the F# CTP, a mere week after the original release. One week? That's more often than even IPy releases. I can't wait to see what they ship in next week's release! :) Seriously, I hope they can keep the release sprints short, but every week would be a bit crazy!
• Speaking of F#, Matt Podwysocki updates FsTest for the F# CTP and posts about Extension Everything in F#. Unlike C#, which only supports extension methods, F# also supports extensions properties, static methods and events, though like Matt I can't think of a good use for extension events.
• Still speaking about F#, Andrew Kennedy has a three part series on the new units of measure feature of F#. If you were going to use F# to build the physics engine of a game, I would suspect UoM would be extremely useful. (via Don Syme)
• Oh look, Chris Smith built an F# version of artillery game that uses Units of Measure for the physics code. I'll bet UoM was extremely useful. :)
• Talking about Live Mesh at TechEd Australia - where much to my surprise frankly they were demoing Live Mesh Apps - I pointed out to Scott Hanselman that Mesh is running an embedded CoreCLR (aka the same CLR from Silverlight 2). Scott went poking around and posted what he discovered. Looking forward to finding out what he digs up on using CoreCLR outside the browser.
• Speaking of Scott, I need to set up a family video conference solution like Scott's before my next trip.
• Congrats to Glenn Block and the MEF team for their initial CodePlex source drop! I've been hearing about this possibility since Glenn joined the team, so I'm really excited to see it happen. I need to take a look at it in detail (in my copious spare time) because I want to find out how to make it work with IPy.
• Bart de Smet has a whole series (starting here) on Dynamic Expression Trees. However, given that he specifically writes "This blog series is not about DLR itself" makes it seem pretty conceptual to me. Why not talk about DLR expression trees instead Bart?
• I'm sure you noticed ASP.NET MVC preview 5 dropped last week. I really liked Brad Wilson's discussion of the new view engine design.
• Tomas Restrepo has started publishing his source code on GitHub. Personally, I haven't published any source code lately but I am using Git for all of my non IPy core work (which is stored in TFS). Like Tomas, I'm still getting the hang of Git but I'm really digging it's speed, it's branching and the fact that there's zero infrastructure requirements. SVN provides the lightweight svnserve, but Git is even lighter weight than that.
• I liked Steve Yegge's post on typing. I am a touch typer, but I doubt I type 70 words a minutes. I do know where the number keys are without looking though, so I guess that's pretty good. I remember seeing Chris Anderson demo Avalon WPF long before it was public and being impressed at how fast he could type.

Morning Coffee 172

• I took the kids to see Fly Me To The Moon recently. We had to trek to Monroe (about 30 minutes away) because it's a special 3D movie, and it was only playing there and in downtown Seattle. The movie's story is insipid - three flies stow away on Apollo 11 - but all the space shots were actually kinda cool. It sure felt like they wanted to be scientifically and historically accurate about the the actual mission (well, other than the part about the flies). Patrick really liked it (he wants to build a rocket in the back yard) and Riley sat thru the whole thing with a minimum of fussing.
• I'm a big fan of Joe Biden, so I'm really happy Obama picked him to be his running mate.
• I know it's old news but what the frak was John Edwards thinking? I like his policies, but the arrogance it takes to run for president when you know you've got that skeleton in your closet is mind-boggling.
• On the other hand, watching the Sean Hannity and guest's hypocrisy on Edwards' affair, only to watch them scramble like cockroaches when Colmes points out McCain had admitted to having an affair was frakking hilarious.

OK, onto geek stuff:

• My new boss Dave Remy has moved to a new blog. If you're curious what he was up to for the 10 months he was away from Microsoft, he's happy to share.
• IPy and IRuby developer Curt Hagenlocher (aka Iron Curt) is blogging. Cue the Ozzy...I AM IRON CURT. Or don't. Anyway, he dives in the deep end of the pool - no "hello world" lollyblogging for Iron Curt - digging into the stack implications of rethrowing exceptions and debugging emitted IL.
• Srivatsn writes about static compilation of IPy scripts. Note, we're not talking about static typing - it's still the same good-old dynamically typed IronPython, just packaged up as an assembly, rather than as a bunch of .py files. Note, if you're interested in compiling IronPython, you should check out the PYC sample we published as part of Beta 4.
• Speaking of IPy Beta 4, Shri Borde posts about the COM dispatch support which is enabled by default as of Beta 4. If you're driving COM automation clients (like Office) from IPy, this is a huge improvement over the old mechanism.
• Jeff Hardy has released a new version of NWSGI, a managed version of Python's Web Service Server Gateway Interface. My understanding is that this would allow any Python web stack written against WSGI to run in IIS with IronPython (subject to IronPython's compatibility with CPython). Jeff's been documenting his efforts getting Django running with NWSGI on his blog. Awesome work Jeff! (Thanks for the correction Seo!)
• I never really bought into the "Attention Economy", but Chris Anderson's economic analysis of his DIY Drones site traffic was fascinating.
• Lutz announces "it is time to move on" from Reflector and there was a collective horrified scream in the .NET community. He's handing it over to Red Gate, who promised they "will continue to offer the tool for free to the community".
• I missed this when he posted it in June, but I really liked Nikhil Kothari use of the DLR in Silverlight to cut down on the XAML verbosity in his ViewModel action binding.
• Brian McNamara previews the new Add Reference and file ordering support in the upcoming F# CTP. I'm really looking forward to the project-to-project reference support. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten burned because my main project recompiled but my test project didn't. You just get used to hitting Rebuild All instead of Build. As for file ordering, it's a bit of a bummer that F# requires it, but the new experience is hella better than editing the project file by hand. I'm really looking forward to the new CTP.

Morning Coffee 171

• Big news for IronRuby out of OSCON. John and Jim have the details. Congrats to the IronRuby folks on reaching these milestones and paving the way for others (i.e. IPy) to follow some of the same paths.
• One of those OSCON announcements, is a project my teammate Jimmy Schementi has been working on: Silverline, which "let's you write Rails code that can run on the client".
• Shri Borde - the dev manager for IPy, IRuby and F# - tackles a tricky subject of static compilation of dynamic Python code. This came up on the mailing list recently as one of the outstanding requests for IPy to do is support custom attributes, which requires static compilation. Shri lays out some of the big issues with this approach. However, the community has been fairly clear on this, so it's obviously something we need to look at.
• I met someone from MS Research at the MS Product Fair who pointed me to the Institute for Personal Robots in Education, a joint effort between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College and sponsored by Microsoft Research. Their Myro software (myro == my robot) is written in CPython, but there's an effort underway (aka Miro 3.0) to build a .NET version that uses IronPython. Must investigate.
• Seshadri shows how easy it is to extend C# types in IronPython. It's also shows how simple it is to host DLR code in your app - it's like 6 lines of code!
• Early reviews of IronPython in Action are good.  
• If you want to run an IronPython IDE in your browser with Silverlight, check out SilverShell from Dan Eloff.
• The XNA team has announced their business plans for community games. Basically, you set a price point between 200 and 800 points (aka between $2.50 and $10) and receive a "baseline" of 70% of the revenue the game generates. More details are available in the FAQ. This is pretty excited. I'd like to build some co-op kids games.
• Speaking of XNA, Caligari is now offering TrueSpace 7.6 for free . David Weller and Glenn Wilson provide an XNA viewpoint on the announcement, Chris Pendleton shows how to upload your models to VirtualEarth.
• Congrats to the CodePlex team on their latest drop, which features that a cool new feature - Mailing Lists! IronPython has had a Mailman mailing list for years, so I'm not sure we'll use this feature on IPy, but I'll investigate it
• Two PDC notes: First, Rick Rashid - VP of MS Research - will be delivering a PDC keynote. Second, the PDC team has put up a video podcast on Producing a Ginormous Conference in 10 Minutes or Less! It's the "inaugural episode" so watch for more Countdown to PDC video podcast episodes in the future.
• I recently discovered Chris Smith's F# blog. He's got recent posts on Mastering F# Lists and Guidelines for Readable F# code. For the F# novice, check out his F# in 20 Minutes posts (part one, part two)
• Pat Helland is moving to the SQL team. Good luck Pat!
• I like Nick Malik's formal definition of use cases, but I can't help be reminded of Charlie Alfred's Value-Driven Architecture article in Architecture Journal 5 where he said use cases were "easy to teach and explain" but that "if simplicity were the only goal that counted, we'd all still be walking or riding horses to get from one place to another."

Morning Coffee 160

I took most of last week between jobs and have spent much of this week getting machines setup, access to builds, etc. Furthermore, RSS Bandit ate my feedlist and I am still soldiering on sans mobile phone so I was pretty much unconnected for about a week and a half.

IPy Stuff

• Laurence Moroney demonstrates how to configure a web site project in VS08 to use Dynamic Silverlight’s development web server Chiron. I looked at turned it into an exported template, but I think the Start Options are stored in the suo file and I’m not sure how to include that in the template. Maybe it could be set w/ a macro or at worst a GAX recipe?
• If you’re a regular reader, you might as well get used to the name “Michael Foord”. He’s a developer @ Resolver Systems, makers of the IPy based Resolver One app/spreadsheet hybrid I’ve written about before. He’s also the author of the upcoming IronPython in Action book and the maintainer of Planet IronPython and the IronPython Cookbook. I’m going to try very hard to only link to Michael at most once per day. Frankly, that’ll be tough.
• Today’s Michael Foord Link: Michael turned his PyCon talk on IPy + SL2 into a series of articles entitled IronPython & Silverlight 2 Tutorial with Demos and Downloads.
• Ken Levy (who now sits just down the hall from me) clued me into the 1.0 release of IronPython Studio, which is a free IDE based on the VS08 Shell for IronPython (based on code from the VS SDK). Big new feature in this release is support for the integrated VS08 Shell, which means it’ll snap into your existing VS08 installation (well, not express) rather than forcing you to install the 300 MB isolated shell.

Other Stuff

• Caps had a BIG win last night when they needed it most. Now they’re tied with Carolina for the SE division lead, but they lose the tiebreaker so unfortunately, they can’t make the playoffs without help. ‘Canes have to head back home last night to play Tampa Bay, they have to win tonight and Friday to clinch. Loss in either gives the Caps control of their own destiny. Caps are only one game back of Ottawa, Boston and Philly, none of whom have played well down the stretch. It does mean I have to root for the frakking Penguins to beat Philly, twice.
• Now that I'm in a job where I'll be traveling occasionally, I really appreciated Scott Hanselman's travel tips, though I'm not sure "Don't look like a schlub" is in the cards for me.
• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Scott Guthrie blogged that the ASP.NET MVC Source Code is available on CodePlex. The project name is “aspnet” not “aspnetmvc” which makes me wonder if they might release the source to more ASP.NET stuff over time.
• Speaking of Scott Guthrie, today he blogged about unit testing in SilverLight. Jeff Wilcox appears to have the definitive post on the subject, including links to the SilverLight testing framework (it’s included in the SL Controls source code release). He also provides a prebuilt “SilverLight Test” project template for easy download. Personally, I really like the in-browser test runner. I wonder how hard it would be to hook that up to DySL so you could write your tests in IPy? (given that IPy doesn’t have attributes, I’m guessing there’d be at least a bit of work involved in making this happen)
• Speaking of SilverLight, apparently the next version of Windows Mobile (i.e. 6.1) will support it. Since I'm in the market for a new phone anyway, I'm thinking of getting one of these. Also, it's nice to see a marketing site for WM 6.1 using Silverlight instead of Flash like WM 6.0 marketing site does.(via LiveSide)
• Ted Neward turns the news that MSFT is releasing XAML under the OSP into a long and fascinating history lesson that is well worth the read. I’m going to skip commenting on it, beyond advising you dear reader to read this if you haven’t already, except to wonder: how many sides does a “Redmondagon” have?

Morning Coffee 157

• My Xbox 360 started flashing the dreaded Red Ring of Death on Friday. <sigh> I'm not going to have much time to play in the next week, so it's not the end of the universe, but I did have to dig an old DVD player out of the garage for interim duty.
• My Caps really stepped in it over the weekend dropping two games they had to have and by most reports (aka according to my dad) that they dominated most of the way. Caps Playoff Math isn't as dire as say Clinton's Nomination Math, but they are three games back of the Hurricanes with twelve to play.
• Ted Neward has a pretty good F# overview article in the most recent MSDN Magazine. I say pretty good because I wonder if someone with no functional programming experience will "get it". As much as I like F# and functional programming, I think some of the basic concepts don't pass Don Box's two beer test.
• Speaking of Ted, somehow his feed fell off my radar (bad DevHawk!) and I missed several great posts like Modular Toolchains (note to Ted, check out A Research C# Compiler), Why we need both static and dynamic in the same language (note to self, check out Cobra) and The Fallacies Remain.... (recently, I'm the guy shouting about risks).
• Speaking of MSDN Magazine, have you seen their new site redesign? I can't find any announcement of it, but man the site looks great.
• If you missed MIX, the sessions are all online already. That was fast.
• John Lam blogs about the availability of the Dynamic Silverlight bits. Apparently, Dynamic Silverlight includes more recent bits than the Silverlight 2 SDK, which does includes binaries and tools for IronPython, IronRuby and Managed JScript (quickstart). So you can get started with dynamic languages on Silverlight using the SL SDK alone, but I expect that the Dynamic Silverlight bits will be updated more regularly than the SDK.

Morning Coffee 156

• My hockey team won last night 4-2. No points for me, but I was even on the night. I did spend some time in the penalty box, but I was serving a two many men on the ice bench minor. We only had nine skaters, not enough for two full lines, so I'm pretty tired today. However, I'm not as tired as I was two weeks ago - that's a good sign.
• Politics 2.0 watch: The Obama campain announced yesterday that they raised $55 million in donations in the month of February. That's significantly more than Clinton ($35 million) and McCain ($12 million) combined. Even more impressive is that $45 million of that was raised online, of which $40 million were from donations of $100 or less and $22.5 million were from donations of $25 or less. I guess in Politics 2.0, individuals contribute more than online punditry and video parodies of political commercials.
• TextGlow is a Sivlerlight 2 based Word docx file viewer, created by James Newton-King. Nice, but what I really want is "SlideGlow", a SL2 based PPTX file viewer. (via DNK)
• Speaking of Silverlight, Windows Live launched an experimental site called PhotoZoom which will let you create DeepZoom photo albums. (via LiveSide)
• Charlie Calvert has created a home for Language Futures discussion on MSDN Code Gallery. If you'll recall, back in January he asked for input on Dynamic Lookup. Now he's looking for feedback on Call Hierarchy, a proposed VS IDE feature to help you visualize how your code flows. Great idea, but the Call Hierarchy dialog mockup isn't very intuitive. Couldn't we put these visualizations into the code editor window directly, like CodeRush does?
• John Lam continues his Dynamic Silverlight series, first building a Flickr image browser in Managed JScript then showing how to integrate an IronRuby version of the Flickr image browser with an ASP.NET MVC app.
• EdJez is inspiring. Subscribed. (via Brad Wilson)

Morning Coffee 155 - Dueling Conference Edition

• If you don't want to watch the video of yesterday's MIX keynote but still want a sense of what happened, check out Tim Sneath's keynote liveblog. (via Sam Gentile)
• Other announcements from Mix day one keynote that I missed (all via Tim Sneath)
  • Windows Media Services for WS08 released last week. Additionally, the IIS 7 Media Pack adds web playlists (CTP) and bandwidth throttling (GoLive beta) to the baseline media streaming platform.
  • The source code (and unit tests) for all the built-in Silverlight 2 controls is available for download. I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't look like a "reference-only" licence like the .NET Framework source code is released under. Very cool.
  • The Seadragon technology for smooth navigation of mutli-gigabyte sized images over the network will be emnedded in Silverlight as a feature called DeepZoom. You can see a cool demo of DeepZoom on the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and Scott Hanselman posted a walkthru of using the DeepZoom Composer preview tool build your own DeepZoom experience.
  • Apparently the .NET client roadmap isn't all perf and working set improvements. WPF is getting shader support. I couldn't find anything on this besides the announcement itself, but I'll be interested how much overlap there is with the DirectX / XNA shader language.
• Quick side note - Installing Silverlight 2 in order to check out the DeepZoom Hard Rock demo was smooth, fast and easy. It's hard to believe there's a whole CLR in there.
• Now on to public stuff I saw @ TechFest:
  • One of the problems with touch screens is that your fingers obscure what you're trying to touch. Lucid Touch solves this by having you touch the back of the device, while rendering a virtual shadow of your hand - a technique they call "pseudo transparency". You really need to watch the video to "get" this. It's not currently feasible - the prototype uses a webcam on a foot long boom to track hand and finger position. However, they expect a future version will have some type of imaging sensors embedded in the body of the device.
  • The Berkeley Emulation Engine version 3 (aka BEE3) (video) is a high powered hardware simulator. Apparently several orders of magnitudes faster than conventional simulation. Frankly, most of this demo was over my head and I'm not really a HW guy. But it sounds really fast.
  • BLEWS or "what the blogosphere tells you about news". Given my interest in political blogging, it's not a surprise I was interested in this project. This tool categorizes news stories according to their reception in the political blogosphere. It provides a visualization showing not only how many links from a given ideological sphere there are, but how strong the emotions are running. Kinda like Memorandum on major steroids.
  • Music Steering (video) is an "interactive music-playlist generation through music-content analysis, music recommendation, and music filtering". Sort of like LastFM + Pandora on your Zune.
  • In-Depth Image Editing (team site) showed some cool photo editing software that reminding me of Microsoft Max.
  • MashupOS (paper) is a set of abstractions to improve the browser security model, allowing for isolation between blocks of code from different sources while still allowing safe forms of communication.
  • MySong (paper, video) "automatically chooses chords to accompany a vocal melody, allowing a user with no musical training to rapidly create accompanied music". Karaoke singers rejoice! Actually, it's pretty cool. You can adjust sliders to adjust characteristics of the generated music like "Jazz factor" and "Happy factor". Actually, I just want a happy factor slider in all my software.
  • I saw some cool projects from the Socio-Digital Systems group and MS Research. My wife is a sociologist and always says there's no way she could ever get a job in the big house. Maybe after she checks out this team, she'll stop thinking that.
  • The Worldwide Telescope booth was so crowded that I couldn't get anywhere near it. From what I could see from standing in the back, it looked fantastic. It's not live yet, but you can check out the video from the TED conference to get a sense of it.

Morning Coffee 154

• Did you see yesterday's Dilbert cartoon? Classic.
• MIX isn't the only Microsoft conference this week. It's also time for the annual MS Research TechFest conference. It actually started yesterday, with a keynote from Rick Rashid and Craig Mundy (available on demand). I'll be heading up there later today and will blog everything I saw that is public, like I did last year. In the meantime, you can check out some cool MS Research projects on the TechFest video page.
• Speaking of MS Research, they've published the Singularity source code (for academic and non-commercial purposes) on CodePlex. Singularity is research OS "focused on the construction of dependable systems". I've wanted to play with this, but I've never had the time. Frankly, that hasn't changed, but now that it's available to the community, I'm hoping I can live vicariously thru other people hacking around with it.
• Some announcements coming out of MIX won't be a surprise to anyone:
  • The IE Team blog has been discussing IE8 quite a bit of late, and the folks of LiveSide are reporting the IE8 Readiness Toolkit is already up (download links aren't live yet). There are also a bunch of developer whitepapers on Code Gallery. Update: the install links are live.
  • Scott Guthrie already announced that Silverlight 2.0 would go beta at MIX, and Neo @ SilverlightExamples has all the links for the runtime, docs and the SDK.
  • Scott also already announced a new preview drop of ASP.NET MVC, which you can get from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions download page.
• Here some primarily "new" news from MIX:.
• I'm not sure which team owns it, but I'd say the biggest previously-unannounced news was SQL Server Data Services (aka SSDS), a "highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services." In other words, SQL in the sky. There's a free beta sometime this month you can sign up for. Very cool, though no word on what it's going to cost. If you're interested in this, I'd keep an I on the Data Platform Insider blog.
• John Lam announces the Dynamic Silverlight extension that lets you run DLR languages on Silverlight. Given that they talked about this last year, I'm not sure it's really "news", but John provides lots of gory details so it made the cute. But are they really using "DSL" as the acronym for this? Guys, that acronym's already taken.
• Mary Jo Foley has a scoop on Silverlight for Nokia Symbian mobile phones.
• There's a new beta of Expression Studio 2 as well as a separate Expression Blend 2.5 preview for Silverlight 2. Soma has the details. This isn't really a surprise, but I hadn't seen any news on new versions of all the Expression Studio products.

Lunchtime Coffee 153

• p&p have published new versions of both the Web Service and Web Client Software Factories. Beyond support for VS08, I'm not sure what's new but that's worth the price of download (admittedly close to zero) right there. I assume these need the most recent release of the Guidance Automation Toolkit as well.
• W3C has published a new working draft of the Service Modeling Language. I'm really interested to see where this technology goes.
• Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint, part of a larger Software + Services Blueprints initiative that I wasn't aware of. According to Michael Lehman (who's blog I've been been remiss to read of late), S+S Blueprints has a bunch of other interesting projects including Video.Show and Outlook+Services.
• Martian Maly demonstrates how you can use DLR trees to build a statically typed add function. Literally, my very first thought after Martin presented DLR Trees @ Lang.NET was "I wonder if you could use that for static languages too?" I guess the answer is yes.
• It's been six months, and Scott Hanselman still isn't evil. Perhaps he could start turn his ASP.NET wiki into an evil ASP.NET wiki? Actually, I'm only linking to his post because I liked the way he described blogging as "I'm writing a book that will never end".

Morning Coffee 152

• I was slammed Friday, so I didn't get a chance to post the results of last Thursday night's hockey game. I'm sure you've all been eager to hear. We lost, bad, 8-2. Personally, I was -3 and had no points, but I played much better than last week. We had three full lines of forwards, which was a big help, but I have started to find my ice-legs so to speak.
• Charlie Calvert has the now-definitive list of LINQ to Everything. Of all of them, I found LINQ over C# fascinating, especially given my recent efforts in parsing.
• Chris Tavares blogs about a distributed source control system called Bazaar. Unlike most version control systems, Bazaar is distributed which means you can use it without a server. According to Chris, you can share branches as easily as mailing a file. I wonder if you could make Bazaar work over a P2P network.
• While looking up the MSDN link for the previous coffee item, I noticed an entire new section in the MSDN Library for Open Protocol Specifications. Not much to add, just wanted to highlight their existence.
• Admitted non-designer Scott Guthrie shows off using the new version Expression Blend to build a Silverlight 2.0 app. Personally, I was most interested in seeing some of the new of built-in controls.

Morning Coffee 151

• Unity's first CTP was just over two weeks ago, but according to Grigori Melnik, it's shipping just over two weeks from now. That seems pretty speedy to me. By the time I get a change to take a closer look at Unity, it'll probably have shipped.
• I discovered Matthew Podwysocki blog via DNK. I don't typically subscribe to blogs that I discover via DNK, but Matthew has written about IoC/Unity, F# and DLR lately so I'm thinking I should be a regular reader.
• Corporate VP David Treadwell has an extensive post on updates to the Windows Live Platform Services that are being unveiled at MIX next week. The updates include the new WL Messenger Library, a new SDK for WL ID Delegated Authentication, a new WL Photo API, a new CTP of WL Tools, standardized support for AtomPub, updates to WL Contacts API and Sivlerlight Streaming and a new "experimental" service called Application Based Storage that "allows application developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in the WL data centers on behalf of a user". I'm sure there'll be more WL news at the MIX conference proper, but that's quite a good chunk of features to start digging into. Personally, I'm particularly interested in WL Delegated Auth, esp. how it deals with phishing, something I don't think OAuth handles very well.
• Windows Live isn't the only group making announcements in advance of MIX. Adobe announced a research project that allows "cross-compiling existing code from C, C++, Java, Python, and Ruby to ActionScript." This seems pretty obviously a response to Silverlight 2.0's embedded CLR, announced last year @ MIX. Support for C++ is very interesting - Adobe evangelist Ted Patrick claims they were even able to cross-compile Quake 1 to Flash. Interesting, but this is an internal research project @ Adobe with no projected release date while Silverlight 2.0 goes into beta next week.

Morning Coffee 149

• Big news yesterday was Microsoft announcing "Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability". More details available at the new Interoperability website and this interview with Bob Muglia.
• The videos from Lang.NET 2008 are now available, including mine.
• Mix08 is just under two weeks away, and the news is ramping up. Scott Guthrie provides a "first look" at the Silverlight 2.0 beta (aka the one with .NET) that will release @ Mix. He also provides a set of eight tutorials where he demonstrates building a Digg client for Silverlight 2.0. I've been doing a little Silverlight 1.0 experimentation recently, but I think I'm going to scrap it in favor of waiting for 2.0.
• Shorter Nick Malik: IoC is cool, but isn't a silver bullet. Go read the whole thing.
• Brad Wilson has a new laptop with a solid-state hard drive. VS08 installs in under 10 minutes? I gotta get me one of those...
• In addition to the XNA news, Microsoft also announced Gears of War 2, Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden II and Too Human will all be available this year exclusively on Xbox 360. Of those, I'm most interested in Fable 2, though Too Human is looking interesting. But what about Halo Wars? When is that shipping?

Morning Coffee 127

• I'm back at the office today after almost two weeks away. So "catch-up" is the official hyphenated word of the day.
• Big news last week was an update on Silverlight. The next version (the one with the embedded cross-platform CLR in it) was rebranded Silverlight 2.0 and will include higher-level UI framework features and richer networking support. Look for a go-live beta Q1 next year.
• According to Scott Guthrie, there should be a CTP of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions this week, including the new ASP.NET MVC framework that many folks await with baited breath. Scott posted the second in new series on this framework, this time covering URL Routing.
• After a long blog silence, Pat Helland posted four presentations that he delivered @ TechEd Barcelona. They're pretty much required reading as far as I am concerned. Here's hoping the TechEd Barcelona folks recorded at least the audio of these sessions.
  • Metropolis: Interchangeability of Operations
  • Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: an Apostate's Opinion
  • Data on the Inside versus Data on the Outside
  • The Irresistible Forces Meet the Movable Objects
• There's a new drop of F#, v1.9.3.7. Don Syme calls it "a release candidate for F# 1.9.3". Full release notes are over on his blog.
• Speaking of F#, Douglas Stockwell explains how to roll-your-own F# Express by combining the F# download above & the VS08 shell.
• Still speaking of F#, Robert Pickering has written an article on Active Patterns as well as a series on concurrency in F#. So far he's covered Async Workflows (twice), Erlang style messages and message queuing.
• Speaking of concurrency, Soma announced the CTP of ParallelFX last week. This includes Parallel LINQ (aka PLINQ) and Task Parallel Library (aka TPL). Also check out their whitepaper, team blog and dev center.
• I'm a big fan of the Architecture Journal. Now you can get all that great content in a great WPF-based app. Simon Guest has the details.

Morning Coffee 107

• The last day of the service factory workshop was much like the second, primarily focusing on stuff p&p built to integrate GAT and DSLs. We also got a briefing in what's coming for factories after VS08 (can't blog about that). We ended with a look at the DSL Editor Power Toy, which provides additional views on a given model and allows you to completely replace the graphical editor with a Windows Forms UserControl. I wonder if you could use ElementHost in order to build a WPF based editor?
• Finished the last Harry Potter book last night. My wife finished it last week but kept quiet about it until I got to the end. No spoilers here, but I wasn't exactly surprised by how it played out. I wonder what J.K. Rowling will write next?
• As promised, Silverlight 1.0 RC and Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Refresh were released last week. Also finishing out this beta wave were Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Tools for VS08 and a new preview of Expression Blend 2. Scott Hanselman has all the details on all the releases.
• In one of his articles on LINQ to SQL, Scott Guthrie mentioned the LINQ to SQL debug visualizer in passing. Now, he drills into that feature in more detail. Apparently, this isn't a built-in feature of VS08 - it has to be installed separately. Make sure you do that, this seems like a must-have extension for LINQ to SQL development.
• Jeff Atwood is worried that he spends more time talking about programming than actually programming. That's exactly why I left evangelism to join MSIT.
• I'm still way behind on blogs, but if I don't post this soon, it's going to be an afternoon coffee. I've also got this day job thing that I've been away from for several days. So more old news tomorrow.

Morning Coffee 86

• Google announces Gears, a browser plugin for taking your web application offline. Developer docs are also available. TechMeme has lots more, but obviously this is yet another significant bow shot in the upcoming unified client platform war. By my count, there are four horses in this race: Microsoft with .NET and Silverlight, Adobe with Flash and Apollo, Google with AJAX and Gears and Sun with Java and JavaFX. Did I miss anyone? (via Dare Obasanjo and Scott Hanselman)
• Alex James writes that REST is about intent and shows a pseudo-code sample posting multiple changes to a single endpoint as a way of demonstrating your intent that they be applied atomically. Andres Aguiar left a comment saying that Astoria does something similar. Personally, I like that model for transactions better than the transaction factory approach Jon Udell describes. But either way, you've moved beyond simple CRUD style services and into the world of protocol. Surfacing intent via protocol aligns with what Tim described as making the protocol explicit
• Windows Live posted new beta versions of Writer, Mail and Messenger. I've been on an internal build of the new Writer for a while and I've really been impressed. There's also a new Provider Customization API, so I can't wait to see what the DasBlog folks do with that.
• Scott Guthrie's LINQ series continues, this time covering how to build the LINQ to SQL data model. Looks like they used the DSL toolkit to build the LINQ to SQL data model designer, cool! 
• Martin Fowler digs into racc, a yacc-esque compiler compiler for Ruby. Looks interesting as a internal DSL example (better than the now-canonical rake example). But why is the sexy new language on the block using old school CFG's instead of new hotness PEG's?
• Speaking of Martin, he writes about the opportunity Ruby presents to Microsoft, building on Scott Hanselman's concerns that Microsoft is losing the Alpha Geeks. Sam Gentile also weighs in, suggesting that Microsoft is at the crossroads. Frankly, I don't work in evangelism anymore so I'm going pass these links along without comment except to say that Scott, Martin and Sam are all folks I have much much respect for.

Morning Coffee 82

• Dare reached a similar conclusion about Silverlight and Apollo that I did. But newly minted Adobe RIA evangelist Ryan Stewart writes that calling Silverlight vs. Apollo the next platform competition is overblown. However, he then reiterates my point that MSFT is moving in on Adobe's traditional stronghold (aka the web) while Adobe is moving in on MSFT's traditional stronghold (aka the desktop). The upshot is that both companies are trying to deliver a unified "client" platform that spans desktop, devices and browser. That sounds like "platform competition" to me.
• Apparently I'm missing the this years compiler dev lab. :( John Lam is there, with slides from his talk on the DLR. Miguel de Icaza is there, with fairly extensive notes. Hopefully they will post talks like they did last year.
• Speaking of languages, Scott Hanselman explains why he thinks Ruby is "the tits". Personally, on the scale between "I can't see where Ruby is such hot shit" and "Ruby is the tits", I'm somewhere near the middle, leaning towards tits. I love the expressiveness of Ruby's syntax, but I miss the static typing. Call me over the hill, but I like the compiler catching mistakes at compile time. I realize it's not for everyone, but I like what I like.
• This talk about Ruby's expressiveness reminds me of something Larry O'Brien said in the wake of the IronRuby announcement: "I am surprised by the IronRuby announcement. I really thought we were going to see some form of Ruby#:Ruby::C#:Java. Although I'm happy, I was actually hoping to see a new language." The expressiveness of Ruby that Scott describes (which is to say, not all of Ruby's expressiveness) would be completely achievable in a statically typed language. Personally, I'd like to see that language...
• My birthday is past, but I want a Lego Ice Cube Tray. (via Geekdad)

Morning Coffee 76

• Dare Obasanjo sez Cool URIs Don't Change. He's got other versioning advice, but that's the main takeaway. Good advice that dovetails nicely with "It's the URI, Stupid".
• I usually agree with Jack van Hoof's stuff, but I don't agree with his thoughts on loosely coupled transaction processing. It's much better than suggesting the use of 2PC system like WS-AT, but when he writes that "by design every action has a compensating action to undo the original action" I am reminded of Pat's old post Why I hate the phrase "Long Running Transactions". Personally, I'm a fan of using the Tentative Operation or Reservation pattern, described by John Evdemon. Note the lack of a transaction coordinator in that pattern.
• Speaking of service anti-patterns, I wonder how we rationalize the following two statements, both from Microsoft, in documents published by my old team:
  • "CRUD operations are the wrong level of factoring for a Web service. CRUD operations may be implemented within or across services, but should not be exposed to consumers in such a fashion. This is an example of a service that allowed internal (private) capabilities to bleed into the service's public interface." John Evdemon, Principles of Service Design: Service Patterns and Anti-Patterns, Readings in Service Orientation
  • "It is very common for Entity Services to support a create, read, update and delete (CRUD) interface at the entity level, and add additional domain-speciic operations needed to address the problem-domain and support the application’s features and use cases." Shy Cohen, Ontology and Taxonomy of Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture, Journal 11
• Ian Thomas wonders Does ERP suck? In a word: Yes! :) Seriously, I'm a strong believer in what Ian alternatively calls "unbundling" and "disaggregation" of monolithic enterprise systems - ERP is the most glaring example of such systems.
• Jamie Cansdale is figuring out how to host Silverlight's CLR outside of the browser. He's already got a console runner up and running. He's working of adding "Test With Silverlight" option to TestDriven.NET. You go Jamie.

Hawkeye on Silverlight

While I was crusing the zoo with the family on Monday, everyone else was focused on the big announcement coming out of MIX. Short version of the press release: the next version of Silverlight contains a small, cross platform CLR. As you might imagine, this is somewhat significant. Check out reaction from TechCrunch, Sam Gentile and Scott Hanselman.

A year ago, I wrote "Where else should the CLR live?" At the time, I was talking about XNA (which had just been announced) though I was aware of the plans around what I think is now officially called CoreCLR (got the name from Scott's post). The first time I heard about this, it literally floored me. Part of me is surprised that in the year since then the news didn't leak and no one figured it out. I mean, doesn't it seem sorta obvious, in retrospect, that a Silverlight should run on CLR? I mean, if we can shrink the CLR down to fit on a watch, getting it into the browser seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, it's such a huge departure from "Windows, Windows, Windows" that I wonder if most people had (have?) a hard time wrapping their mind around it.

(Actually, in searching for CoreCLR, I discovered this post from last summer basically confirming "the CoreCLR team working on the Macintosh version of the MiniCLR that's going into WPF/E". So it did leak, but it seems to have been met with significant skepticism and didn't make much news. )

Now that you know all about Silverlight and CoreCLR, go back and re-read my Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms post. Especially the last paragraph (complete with the bad grammar):

If the end user isn’t committed to a virtual platform like Flash, then who is? The developers who build software for that virtual platform. This is Virtuous Cycle of Virtual Platforms between the platform and developers instead of the platform and users. In the old model, developers go where the users are. In the new model, users go to where developers are. And developers go where they can be most effective.

Silverlight vs Flash looks to me like the next big platform war competition. It's just getting started, so you can't say with any certainty which platform will be "most effective". But early Silverlight reviews are pretty impressive. TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote that Silverlight "makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy". That doesn't erase Flash Player's head start in the RIA space, but it certainly makes catching and surpassing Flash sound feasible. I suspect most people didn't think that sounded at all feasible last week.

Of course, while catching Flash may sound feasible, Microsoft is a long way from achieving that goal. While the point of my earlier post is that that market penetration doesn't provide much advantage in the virtual platform market, Adobe does derive significant advantage from shipping nine versions of Flash while we haven't quite shipped the first version of Silverlight yet. Also, while I'm fairly sure the number of .NET developers far exceeds the number of Flash developers (anyone have hard numbers?), I would also expect that the number designers using Flash far exceeds the number of designers using Expression (given that MSFT only just shipped Expression on this week). I believe an important facet to the Silverlight / Flash platform competition will be a race to woo the competitor's core constituency. Can Microsoft woo more designers with Expression than Adobe can woo developers with Flex? We'll see.

I'm also curious to see how people's perspective of Adobe's Apollo project changes in the wake of the Silverlight/CoreCLR announcement. From my perspective, both Microsoft and Adobe are trying to unify web and desktop development. Not surprisingly, each is trying to unify around the model where they're stronger: Apollo takes the web development paradigm (Flash, HTML, AJAX and JavaScript) to the desktop while Silverlight takes desktop development paradigm (WPF, CLR) to the web. I'm sure you can guess which paradigm I think will be more successful, but how will the market react? Again, we'll see.