Thursday, May 03, 2007

Morning Coffee 72 - Catchup Edition

The cross platform CLR isn't the only big news out of MIX this week. Other big news includes:

• The Dynamic Language Runtime, an extension to the CLR that implements typical dynamic language features. According to Jim Hugunin, this will make it "dramatically easier to build high-quality dynamic language implementations on .NET." Also, it works with Silverlight's CLR. And we'll be releasing the source, like we do with IronPython.
• We're building four dynamic languages on top of the DLR: IronPython v2, JavaScript, Visual Basic "10" (aka VBx) and IronRuby. He-man Programmer John Lam has a screencast demonstrating these the languages interoping on Silverlight. You can get an alpha of the new IPy which includes the DLR bits.
• Expression Studio is available, as is the first preview of Blend v2, which allows you to target Silverlight. There's also a Silverlight targeting Media Encoder preview available.
• Projects Astoria and Jasper are two new data access incubation projects. Astoria is for exposing your data as data services for consumption by other clients (think mashups) while Jasper is for quickly writing code that access databases. Both appear to build on the new ADO.NET Entity Framework that's shipping in VS Orcas sometime after VS Orcas.
• Windows Live has a new Contacts API, Spaces API and Feeds, a media hosting/streaming service for Silverlight and simpler terms of use and pricing model based on the number unique users. "Sites or Web applications with fewer than one million UUs pay no fees."
• All the MIX sessions are getting posted in very quickly - about a day after the session. The sessions are available for download a WMV or to view using a Silverlight based viewer. Nice.

A few quick thoughts on these announcements:

• On the subject of dynamic languages, IronRuby is probably the biggest news since we already have various implementations of the other languages. I wonder how well it will support Rails? ASP.NET already has a model for dynamic language support that I would assume IronRuby will plug into eventually. Between that, rumblings of MVC support for ASP.NET and Project Jasper, you've covered most of the surface area Rails covers. But I would assume many folks would like to see RoR proper running under IronRuby on ASP.NET.
• I wonder what the hosting model for the Silverlight CLR looks like? According to the "essential architecture", Silverlight includes the .NET Framework, the Core Presentation Framework and the Browser Host. But can you host somewhere other than the browser?
• Astoria sounds like web service based ODBC. While there are scenarios where that makes sense, I'm not sure I like the idea of delegating control of my data outside the service like that. Udi Dahan is also skeptical of this approach.

Update: The ADO.NET team recently announced that Entity Framework will ship "during the first half of 2008 as an update to the Orcas release of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio". (h/t Tomas Restrpro)