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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.
Information
Community
-
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.
Rants
-
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.


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