Arcane Links

Some miscellaneous topics to cover for today. First, I had the need to copy several thousand files from one machine to another, about 6 gigs worth. Explorer? No thanks, to slow and unreliable. Fortunately I had recalled reading a post on Scott Hanselman’s blog just the other day on this topic. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/XCopyConsideredHarmfulRobocopyOrXXCopyOrSyncBack.aspx

Since the machine I was using to do the copying was Vista, I used RoboCopy. Worked like a champ. The bad part was I didn’t even know I already had this tool until I’d read Scott’s post. Always nice when you go hunting for a tool only to discover you’ve already got it and it’s ready to go.

On the subject of SOA, Redmond Magazine released an article on Microsoft’s SOA strategy. http://redmondmag.com/features/article.asp?editorialsid=756

It was a long article and interesting, although it seemed to have an anti-Microsoft tone. I picked up a subtle, and perhaps condescending, knocking of Microsoft for not falling into lockstep with other industry players like IBM. While I do agree Microsoft sometimes comes a little late to the party, I don’t think it has to jump on the party boat to be an effective player in the industry.

Windows Communication Foundation Guru Jeff Barnes is planning on some new WCF posts in the near future, so be sure to keep an eye on his site if you play in the WCF realm. http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/08/coming-soon-wcf-3-5-posting-blitz.aspx

Jeff’s also working on a WCF Site (http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/jeff_barnes/archive/2007/08/06/planning-a-wcf-community-site.aspx), another good reason to keep an eye on his blog.

Finally, Scott Hanselman has opened up a forum area on his site, some good info and discussions can be found here. http://www.hanselman.com/forum/

The UI of the Future

At yesterdays IPSA meeting (http://ipsaonline.org) our local MVP Todd Miranda (http://www.nxtdimension.com/blog/) gave a great presentation on XAML. My coworker Bin and I both felt it was an hour of our time well invested. I don’t know of many other ways we could have learned as much with the same investment of our time.

Coincidentally just yesterday I was in the book store and picked up a book on AJAX (Introduction AJAX for ASP.Net by Dino Esposito). Not too long ago we rolled out the AJAX for ASP.Net libraries on all of our ASP.Net servers, and I’ve wanted to dig into it.

It got me to thinking about user interfaces and the technology we used to create them. Not too long ago it was all text based. Just recently we showed a young collegue and old DOS based application still in use. Her reaction was “Did people actually used to use that?”

Windows made it better, with a standard set of controls that we could easily drop onto our forms. As Todd pointed out in his presentation today though, any attempt to change the basic appearance of these items could take thousands of lines of code.

With the introduction of XAML, I firmly believe we are on the verge of a new revolution in user interface design. It seems to have been a bit slow to start, but all it will take is that one “killer app” done in XAML to rock the boat. The recent introduction of Silverlight (formerly WPF/E) and it’s use of XAML will only serve to increase it’s popularity.

So where will we be in 10 years? I think under the covers compilers will be generating a lot of AJAX code, but I’m not so sure that we’ll be coding a lot of Javascript to deal with it. I feel a lot will be handled for you.

Of the two, right now I’d say XAML will be the more predominant player. I think the code generation tools will improve, but I feel a good, basic understanding of what’s going on with XAML will be crucial to every developer.