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The Daily Grind 379

By Mike Gunderloy
Saturday, May 22, 2004

Have fun at Tech Ed. I can imagine very few things I would like less than being there, but I don't begrudge others the experience.

Software

Visual Studio .NET "Add New Item" Custom Template Installer - A way to make working with some of VS .NET's internal goop much simpler.
Furl - Shared online filing cabinet for Web pages coupled with a community-based recommendation engine to help you find interesting stuff. (via Mark Levison - hey, I can't find everything first!)
ShadowStor - Runs your entire PC as a virtual image, so you can just discard any session that happens to pick up a virus or worm.
Microsoft Office Information Bridge Framework 1.0 Beta - This appears to be a way to hook up XML markup within Office documents through Web services to enterprise content. "The Information Bridge Framework offers a standardized, metadata-driven approach: Web services designers expose enterprise business objects. Solution developers relate the objects across multiple line-of-business systems and associate them with a user interface (UI). Users access and act on these objects contextually from within Office documents." I took at look at the beta download, but it looks like it's still in pretty rough shape (lots of open issues, file names in the docs that don't match what's in the download). My guess is that this release was rushed out for Tech Ed. Most developers will probably be served just as well by reading the MSDN Content instead of installing the software at this point. Here's the Technical Overview.

Extensible Programming for the 21st Century - Greg Wilson argues for extensible tools, extensible languages, and code stored as XML. Before you decide he's nuts you should read this fascinating paper.

Microsoft MVPs and the Community - John Koziol discusses the MVP program (though I thought the Access MVPs predate the FoxPro ones) and offers his e-mail in case you know someone should be in the program.

ObjectSpaces Isn't Going To Ship - Jesse Ezell is among those covering the removal of ObjectSpaces from Visual Studio .NET, its merge with WinFS, and its slip to the Longhorn timeframe; his entry is worth reading because several object/relational mapper (ORM) vendors post their comments as well. ObjectSpaces was announced as a Microsoft technology back in 2001, so it can now be added to the long list of things (including WinFS itself) that were promised and then not delivered anywhere near on the time scale that Microsoft led people to believe. Whether this is just a continuation of the FUD policy that once served them so well, or continued inability to come up with realistic schedules (I incline towards the latter explanation but do not rule out the former), it underlines yet again an important principle: don't base your own ship dates on what Microsoft says will be available.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.