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Domain Specific Languages: A summary of recent ideas & debates
Recent discussions have introduced new distinctions useful for understanding the use cases for DSLs. Joel Spolsky explained how the use of a DSL avoided large porting costs and simplified deployment/maintenance. Mark Dominus made the case that design patterns are a sign of language deficiency. Buko Obele says DSLs are a bad idea because they do not do a good job controlling change over time.
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LANG.NET 2006 Presentations Available
The videos (slides+audio) from the Microsoft-hosted LANG.Net Symposium are now available. Talks include "Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform", " Ruby on the CLR", "Spec#", and "VB 9". The conference focused on programming languages that target managed execution platforms such as the .NET CLR.
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Microsoft Open Specification Promise
Microsoft has announced the "Open Specification Promise", guaranteeing the freedom to legally implement any of the 35 Microsoft-supported Web services standards for both commercial and open source developers.
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CSS Control Adapter Toolkit Update Beta 2
The CSS Adapter Toolkit beta 2 update is out; it replaces the standard output of ASP.NET controls with CSS-friendly markup. A customizable style sheet is created for each control, allowing you to provide a consistent look and feel site-wide.
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GNOME 2.16 - Now with C#
GNOME, the popular desktop environment for Linux, has started offering C# bindings for the GTK+ and GNOME libraries. This has resulted in Mono, an open source version of the CLR, becoming a GNOME dependency.
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Atlas: Full Support and a New Version on the Horizon
Microsoft expects to release version 1.0 of Atlas by year's end with full 24/7 support. "It also means that the product has a committed servicing product lifetime of 10 years - which provides companies with the ability to depend on it for mission critical applications."
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Microsoft releases Expression Web Beta 1
Microsoft has released Expresson Web Beta 1, their professional web design product which is meant to fill the roll of FrontPage, which is being retired. Promised features include standards-based web sites, sophisticated CSS-based layouts, extensive CSS formatting and management. The style management features look particularly promising.
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System.Data.SQLite to Support ADO.NET vNext
SQLite is a lightweight database engine written in C. Designed to be cross-platform, it doesn't have any external dependencies and only takes about 250 KB of disk space. Though it doesn't support all of SQL92, it is suitable for smaller projects, especially ones that need cross-platform support. And to top it all off, the source code is in the public domain.
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Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0 August CTP
On Sept 7, Microsoft released the "Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name 'Orcas' Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0". These tools are designed to add Visual Studio support for developers working on.NET Framework 3.0. The release has nothing to do with LINQ.
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SQL Server Everywhere: the Future of Lightweight Databases
What is a developer who wants a light-weight, file-sharing based database to do? The answer is SQL Server Everywhere (SSEv). Like Jet, it is an in-process, file-sharing based engine. Though it lacks the functionality of SQL Server, it is suitable for small end-user applications that run on the desktop.
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Microsoft releases XML Notepad - completely rewritten in C#
XML Notepad was originally released in 1998, but was eventually pulled from MSDN because Microsoft was didn't have time to keep it updated with current XML standards. On September 1st, Microsoft released a new version of XML Notepad completely rewritten in C#.
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Why the "X" button on a PocketPC doesn't close apps
Mike Calligro from Microsoft's embedded product group expounds on why the "X" in the PPC OS does not actually close a PPC application.
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IronPython 1.0 Released
On September 5, Microsoft released the first production version of IronPython. This implementation of Python runs on the Common Language Runtime 2.0. IronPython 1.0 can be downloaded from CodePlex, Microsoft's community development web site.
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August Sandcastle CTP is Now Available
Last week Microsoft released another community tech preview for Sandcastle. Sandcastle is the tool Microsoft currently uses to produce the API documentation for Visual Studio 2005. Anand Raman of the Sandcastle team claims that they can compile the documentation for the entire framework API in about 30 minutes.
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.Net 3.0 Release Candidate Available
On September 1, Microsoft began offering a release candidate of the .Net Framework 3.0 (formally WinFx), containing everything except LINQ, which is still considered to be at least a year away. This version represents a major break in the way the .Net runtime is distributed.