I'm excited to say that TechEd has accepted my pre-conference proposal, Multiparadigmatic C#, where the abstract reads:

C# has grown from “just” an object-oriented language into a language that is capable of expressing several different paradigms of software development: object-oriented, functional, and dynamic. In this session, developers will learn how to approach programming in C# to use each of these approaches, and when.

If you're interested in seeing C# used in a variety of different ways, come on out.

And if you're not going to TechEd.... why not? It's in New Orleans, folks!

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"), and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics. Just for convenience, here's a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah. Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted, 2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot" jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today, pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?) But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares? They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo, you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building. Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness 2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm. Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted 14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still.... No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted 18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No, wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything, isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's, and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots, they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security, after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion, proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

These are the things I think as I sit here in my resort hotel on the edge of the Dead Sea in Israel after the JavaEdge 2009 conference on Thursday:

• The JavaEdge hosts (Alpha CSP) are, without a doubt, the most gracious hosts I think I've ever had at a conference. And considering the wonderful treatment I've had at the hands of the 4Developers and JDD hosts in Krakow (Proidea) and the SDN hosts in Amsterdam, this is saying a lot. But the Alpha CSP folks have simply floored me, top to bottom, with their generosity and warmth.
• The JavaEdge crowd is a great one. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, because in the US we don't hear much about the tech going on in Israel, so I was a bit concerned that (a) my English was going to be difficult to grasp or that (b) my humor was going to sail over their heads due to the language barrier, or worse, (c), the developers at the conference wouldn't be ready to hear the keynote message ("Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages"). I shouldn't have been concerned on any of those points—this crowd understood me perfectly, laughed at most of my jokes (hey, not even my family gets all of them), and more importantly, not only accepted the thrust of the message but also came up to me afterwards and either sought clarification, challenged one or more points, or simply said they enjoyed the keynote. It was as engaged and enthusiastic a crowd as just about any I've had.
• Fan(tom) is something worth looking into. Some of the speakers at the conference were talking with me about Fan (recently renamed to Fantom, to make it easier to Google/Bing), and I've realized that Fan's too interesting a language for the amount of press that it gets. I think this is something I'm going to pursue in the coming calendar year, maybe put together some presentations and/or workshops on it.
• Israel is ready for Groovy, Scala, and closures in Java. These folks were chomping at the bit at the thought of using one or all of these, at least based on the comments and questions I got after the keynote.
• Swimming in the Dead Sea is a truly bizarre experience. To be honest, one doesn't really "swim" in the Dead Sea—one just rests on top of the water, because the salt content in the water is so high that it is (quite literally) impossible to go under the water. It's like lounging on an inflatable raft in the water, except without the raft. It borders on the creepy. Still, my skin is much softer now than it was before.
• Jerusalem is a fascinating city. Alpha CSP set me up with a tour guide (Ido Notman), and we toured Jerusalem yesterday: all four quarters of the Old City (the Christian quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Moslem quarter and the Armenian quarter), the "Tomb" of King David, the Holy Sepulchre (where Christ was supposedly crucified and buried), the Western Wall, and then back to Tel Aviv for the night. Throughout the entire day, Ido kept up a running commentary about the history of the city and the three religions that are centered there (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) and the stories/legends that each holds about the city's place in their religious beliefs. I came away just flat overwhelmed, and, once we got back, flat on my back—we walked for most of the day, and Jerusalem is not a flat city like you might expect—it's nestled in some serious mountains, which makes it a bit rough on the calves. But it was well worth it, because there's nothing like standing and looking at pillars right in front of you—excavated from beneath a high-rise apartment building, just there for anybody to stroll up to and see and touch and take photos with—that were built back when Rome meant the center of civilization. Wow.
• The Palestinian-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflict(s) are a lot more "real" when you're in the middle of it (geographically). Seeing armed Israeli guards, driving through security checkpoints, even just driving past the wall that Israel is building to keep a physical barrier between them and Hamas/Hezbollah is all a vivid reminder that the nine-o'clock news is more than just something that's happening "over there" when you're "over there" too. The highway we took (the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the same one mentioned in the parable of the Good Samaritan—and, yes, we passed the Inn of the Good Samaritan on the way here, which was just a little creepy and exciting and weird all at the same time) drove right alongside that wall for a stretch of about five or so kilometers, and I couldn't help but wonder if somebody in one of those apartment buildings over there, who had a clear line of sight to our car zipping by on the freeway, was looking at us through the scope of a sniper rifle. It's a creepy feeling, and even worse knowing that there may well have been an Israeli sniper looking back across the wall as well, into somebody's apartment. I won't weigh in on one side or the other here, because that's not my point; my point is that we in the US take our physical security way too much for granted, compared to some other parts of the world where it's not such a given.
• And no, in case you were wondering, I was never concerned for my safety. Yes, it's something I thought about. But you have a better chance of dying on a New York street corner from a runaway ice cream truck than you do from a rocket attack or a terrorist suicide bomb (or something like that). I'd come back in a heartbeat.
• Israelis really know how to party. First the after-conference party on Thursday night, then a quieter speaker dinner last night, but each time, the company was excellent, the food was amazing, and the wine/beer/liquor-of-choice was flowing fast. I don't know if it's just the Alpha CSP folks or Israelis in general, but these people really have a work-hard-play-hard mentality that I just love.

Thanks again to Miya, Ety, Shlomi, Roi, Alex and Ido for a wonderful combination work/vacation trip.

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!, Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks for keeping the pressure to a minimum."

My copy arrived in the mail while I was at the NFJS show in Denver this past weekend, and with a certain amount of dread and excitement, I opened the envelope and sat down to read for a few minutes. I managed to get halfway through it before deciding I had to post a review before I get too caught up in my next trip and forget.

Short version

Debug It! is a great resource for anyone looking to learn the science of good debugging. It is entirely language- and platform-agnostic, preferring to focus entirely on the process and mindset of debugging, rather than on edge cases or command-line switches in a tool or language. Overall, the writing is clear and straightforward without being preachy or judgmental, and is liberally annotated with real-life case stories from both the authors' and the Pragmatic Programmers' own history, which keeps the tone lighter and yet still proving the point of the text. Highly recommended for the junior developers on the team; senior developers will likely find some good tidbits in here as well.

Long version

Debug It! is an excellently-written and to-the-point description of the process of not only identifying and fixing defects in software, but also of the attitudes required to keep software from failing. Rather than simply tossing off old maxims or warming them over with new terminology ("You should always verify the parameters to your procedure calls" replaced with "You should always verify the parameters entering a method and ensure the fields follow the invariants established in the specification"), Paul ensures that when making a point, his prose is clear, the rationale carefully explained, and the consequences of not following this advice are clearly spelled out. His advice is pragmatic, and takes into account that developers can't always follow the absolute rules we'd like to—he talks about some of his experiences with "bug priorities" and how users pretty quickly figured out to always set the bug's priority at the highest level in order to get developer attention, for example, and some ways to try and address that all-too-human failing of bug-tracking systems.

It needs to be said, right from the beginning, that Debug It! will not teach you how to use the debugging features of your favorite IDE, however. This is because Paul (deliberately, it seems) takes a platform- and language-agnostic approach to the book—there are no examples of how to set breakpoints in gdb, or how to attach the Visual Studio IDE to a running Windows service, for example. This will likely weed out those readers who are looking for "Google-able" answers to their common debugging problems, and that's a shame, because those are probably the very readers that need to read this book. Having said that, however, I like this agnostic approach, because these ideas and thought processes, the ones that are entirely independent of the language or platform, are exactly the kinds of things that senior developers carry over with them from one platform to the next. Still, the junior developer who picks this book up is going to still need a reference manual or the user manual for their IDE or toolchain, and will need to practice some with both books in hand if they want to maximize the effectiveness of what's in here.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it is liberally adorned with real-life discussions of various scenarios the author team has experienced; the reason I say "author team" here is because although the stories (for the most part) remain unattributed, there are obvious references to "Dave" and "Andy", which I assume pretty obviously refer to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers and the owners of Pragmatic Bookshelf. Some of the stories are humorous, and some of them probably would be humorous if they didn't strike so close to my own bitterly-remembered experiences. All of them do a good job of reinforcing the point, however, thus rendering the prose more effective in communicating the idea without getting to be too preachy or bombastic.

The book obviously intends to target a junior developer audience, because most senior developers have already intuitively (or experientially) figured out many of the processes described in here. But, quite frankly, I think it would be a shame for senior developers to pass on this one; though the temptation will be to simply toss it aside and say, "I already do all this stuff", senior developers should resist that urge and read it through cover to cover. If nothing else, it'll help reinforce certain ideas, bring some of the intuitive process more to light and allow us to analyze what we do right and what we do wrong, and perhaps most importantly, give us a common backdrop against which we can mentor junior developers in the science of debugging.

One of the chapters I like in particular, "Chapter 7: Pragmatic Zero Tolerance", is particularly good reading for those shops that currently suffer from a deficit of management support for writing good software. In it, Paul talks specifically about some of the triage process about bugs ("When to fix bugs"), the mental approach developers should have to fixing bugs ("The debugging mind-set") and how to get started on creating good software out of bad ("How to dig yourself out of a quality hole"). These are techniques that a senior developer can bring to the team and implement at a grass-roots level, in many cases without management even being aware of what's going on. (It's a sad state of affairs that we sometimes have to work behind management's back to write good-quality code, but I know that some developers out there are in exactly that situation, and simply saying, "Quit and find a new job", although pithy and good for a laugh on a panel, doesn't really offer much in the way of help. Paul doesn't take that route here, and that alone makes this book worth reading.)

Another of the chapters that resonates well with me is the first one in Part III ("Debug Fu"), Chapter 8, entitled "Special Cases", in which he tackles a number of "advanced" debugging topics, such as "Patching Existing Releases" and "Hesenbugs" (Concurrency-related bugs). I won't spoil the punchline for you, but suffice it to say that I wish I'd had that chapter on hand to give out to teammates on a few projects I've worked on in the past.

Overall, this book is going to be a huge win, and I think it's a worthy successor to the Release It! reputation. Development managers and team leads should get a copy for the junior developers on their team as a Christmas gift, but only after the senior developers have read through it as well. (Senior devs, don't despair—at 190 pages, you can rip through this in a single night, and I can almost guarantee that you'll learn a few ideas you can put into practice the next morning to boot.)

Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them, and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles, "Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

Given that both of those "articles" are summaries from presentations I've done at conferences past, I'm a touch skeptical. In fact, it feels like those summaries were scraped from conferences I've done in the past, and I certainly don't remember ever giving Sys-Con (or any other conference) the right to reprint my presentation as an article.

Then it turns out that apparently I'm not the only one suffering this problem. Go. Read that article, then come back. I promise, I'll wait.

(Seriously, go read it.)

Wow. Just... wow. If even half of what Aral's story is true (and I'm inclined to believe at least part of it, given that he's done some pretty meticulous documentation of at least his side of the story), then this is beyond outrageous, and squarely into "completely unethical".

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I've not heard back from Sys-Con about any of this, so if I get any sort of response I'll be sure to update this blog post. But...

Calling anyone a "homosexual son of a bitch", "terrorist" or "fag" is so unbelievably offensive it staggers the mind. Normally, I'd be a bit hesitant to just give either party the benefit of the doubt on that one, given just how ludicrous the accusation sounds, but Aral includes screen shots of the articles, which in of itself lends an air of credibility to the accusation—either Aral is the world's worst Turkish translator, or Sys-Con's translation into Turkish is a bit on the "edgy" side, or Sys-Con really did call him that. Which implies that whichever way this goes, doesn't look good for one of the two parties. But even if we leave that to one side....

Sys-Con is playing with fire by collecting my content and claiming me as an author. Sys-Con never contacted me about becoming a part of their "Ulitzer" website. They never asked me for permission to reprint my articles, though, I'll admit, I can't find where the articles actually exist, nor links to the articles, so maybe they didn't, actually, reprint the article, but just link to them... except I can't find the links to the articles or the presentations, either. They never asked me for an updated bio or photo, and in fact, they pretty clearly grabbed both bio, photo and "summaries" from an old location, because that bio lists me as a DevelopMentor instructor (which I haven't been for two years or so), and as living in Sacramento, CA (which I haven't been for about three years or so). Let me be very clear about this: I do not write for Sys-Con Media. I never have. They have never asked permission to reuse any of the content I have produced. I am appalled at being included in such a fashion.

Note that I'm not opposed to being linked to, mind you—if I put material on my blog, I generally expect (and hope) that people will link to it, and I don't demand permission or even notification when it happens. But to claim that I've written material for an entity does mean I expect to at least be asked if it's OK to use my likeness, name, or material. No such request was ever made of me, so far as I can remember or find (through my own email archives, which stretch back to 2001).

And I can say that I've thought about this issue before, from the other side of the story—back when I was editor at TheServerSide.NET, we began a "blogger's program" that would take interesting blog posts from around the Internet and "collect" them in some fashion for TSS.NET readers. Originally, the thought was to simply reproduce the content directly on our site, and I hated that idea, for the same reasons as I dislike it when somebody does it to me. Regardless of the licensing model the blog entries are published under, to me, a publication or media firm owes the author at least the right of refusal, and a chance to be notified when their material is reused. (In the end, we chose to ask authors if we could reproduce their material in the program, and we never (to my knowledge) had an author refuse.) It doesn't take a real rocket scientist's brain to figure out that asking permission is never a bad thing to do if you want to maintain good will with your sources of material.

This is an open and public request to Sys-Con media: either contact me about using my name, likeness and material on your website, or remove it. (I have emailed their editorial and asked them to acknowledge receipt of my request.)

In the meantime, I will be making every effort to make sure that other content-producers I know are aware of Sys-Con's practices, so they can act as they see fit.

If you are a reader, and find this distasteful as well, then I suggest you follow some of the suggestions mentioned in Aral's blog post:

• Tell everyone you know about what Sys-Con is doing (but don't link to them so as not to give them Google Juice). If tweeting, leave out the http:// bit so that your URL is not automatically made into a link.
• Sys-Con feeds upon the work of authors and speakers to live. If all authors had their content removed from Sys-Con and Ulitzer, they would not have pages to put ads on. So go through their list of authors and notify the ones you know. If they are unaware that they're listed there, they will most likely want themselves removed. Update: I've created a single list of all Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors. More information and the full list are in this post. The original list of authors is at http://www.ulitzer.com/?q=authors. You can ask for your Ulitzer/Sys-Con author page to be removed by emailing editorial@sys-con.com.
• Contact their advertisers and tell them what you think of their association with Sys-Con.
• If you know any speakers speaking at Sys-Con events, make sure they know the kind of company they are associating themselves with. Do the same with anyone you know who is thinking of attending one of their events. Raise awareness about their events at your place of work.
• Make sure Google knows that Sys-Con/Ulitzer is spamming Google with tons of duplicate content. Report them on Google's spam page for posting duplicate content. According to their terms and conditions, Google should stop indexing Sys-Con/Ulitzer. See this comment for a template you can use when reporting them.
• Make sure Google News knows that they are syndicating libelous articles from Sys-Con. Use the Google News Report an Issue form to report the following articles: http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1017038, http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1028923, http://www.sys-con.com/node/1035252, http://air.ulitzer.com/node/1038383, http://openwebdeveloper.sys-con.com/node/1039556, and http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1047589

Meanwhile, I'm going to be talking about this to everybody I know at Microsoft, desperately seeking to find out which department engaged the advertising with Sys-Con, and looking to convince them that they don't need this kind of press or association. Ditto for the contacts (far fewer in number) I have with IBM, and any other Sys-Con advertiser I find.

This post from TechCrunch crossed my attention inbox today, and I find myself quite flummoxed on the subject of how I think I should react.

Assume you have managed, through no overt work on your part (meaning, you didn't explicitly solicit, ask, or otherwise endeavor to obtain), to get ownership of "hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents" for a company. Assume further that these documents are genuine—there is little to no chance that they could have been forged or fabricated. The documents span a range of sensitivity, from documents that are "somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting", to documents that "show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices", to documents "showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings". In other words, documents that yes, could create a certain amount of havoc to the corporate entity in question, could embarrass individuals within (and not within) that company, and documents that could lead to a competitive advantage for the entity's competitors.

Now also assume, for the purpose of the discussion, that you are an entity whose business model or raison d'etre is to publish—you are a blogger, a "social networking maven", a media outlet, whatever.

Is it unethical to publish these documents? Is it simply trolling for hits? Is there a "journalistic responsibility" to publish this material?

The people from TechCrunch feel like they have a right/responsibility to publish at least some of the documents, and are unswayed by the arguments in the blog's comments about the morality of such a move, including such comments as "This is an a**hole move" and "there's still an appearance of lapse of ethics here" (and that's just within the first half-dozen comments or so". What is particularly interesting is the response from (someone I assume to be) one of the blog's owners:

lol. if we only posted things that companies gave us permission to post this would be a press release site and none of you would be here. News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write. The rest is advertising.

This comment disturbs me on several levels—it's only news if it's "stuff someone doesn't want you to write"? That's a pretty shallow and narrowly-defined sense of the term, if you ask me, and it puts periodicals like National Enquirer and Star magazines on the same level as the New York Times and CNN. (Although, and I'll freely admit this, having just come through the Michael Jackson media blitz, sometimes it feels difficult to tell the difference between all four of those.)

At the same time, though, it's clear from our own history that journalism has served the public good by shining a bright light into shady corners that some powers-that-be would prefer left unexposed. The abuses described by Upton Sinclair in the turn-of-the-century factories, the rampant sexual harassment in the military exposed by the Tailhook scandal, and certainly the outright blatantly violent suppression of Civil Rights movement of the 60's in the South were all shining examples of journalism at its finest, showing off dark and ugly parts of the world and—either implicitly or explicitly—demanding society to acknowledge it and either openly accept it or strive to change it (with all three of my examples seeing society choosing the latter).

What is "journalistic responsibility" here?

In our chosen field—that of computer science and software—there is clearly a responsibility for those "in the know" to reveal scenarios where information is being purloined or made available that violates individuals' rights to privacy. It's one thing if I trade my personal sales habits to a grocery store chain in exchange for a percentage off the final sale. That's a choice I'm making, consciously and knowingly. (By this point, if you haven't figured that out, you're just deliberately hiding from the fact.) But for somebody else to disclose my purchasing history without my consent to another party, that's brushing a very ugly moral dark area. And if a company is choosing to take its customers' personal data and make it available for anyone else to use as they see fit—for whatever purpose that third party can imagine—then cheers and kudos to the whistle-blower who brings media attention on that behavior.

But Twitter doesn't have much of my personal data, and they certainly didn't give it away to anybody—it was stolen from them, according to what I've read so far. What's more, I don't really have that much personal data stored with them—certainly no credit cards, birthdates, financial or medical information, or even family notes. What's there is actually pretty tame, as a Twitter customer.

(Twitter employees are a totally different matter. Admittedly. But let's just stick with the Twitter customer data for now.)

So where is the "journalistic responsibility" in publishing this material?

And are bloggers journalists? Should they be held to the same standards as journalists? And if not, then with all these formerly print-only media moving to the Internet and putting more and more of their material online, where do we draw that line? What's the difference between Fareed Zakaria writing a column on Middle East affairs for Newsweek.com on a monthly basis and Joe Sixpack posting a monthly rant on the illegal and illicit activities of his hometown rival's sports team? Is it just the domain name? And if Joe Sixpack decides to say, point blank, "TechCrunch paid for that material, they hired the guy who broke into the Twitter offices and stole it" on his blog, what avenues does TechCrunch have to decry and/or reverse that trend?

For the record, I oppose what TechCrunch is doing except if there is some blatantly legal violation of consumers' privacy. Frankly, if the hacker had approached me with those documents, I'd be working with the FBI to see the guy tossed in jail, because folks, if he did it to them, he could just as easily do it to you.

But this still leaves the deeper question about where bloggers sit in the journalistic continuum, and I admit, I have a lot of mixed feelings on the subject.

Google made the announcement on Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

Don't get me wrong—on a number of levels, the operating system needs a little shaking up. Windows7 looks good, granted, Mac OS is a strong contender, and both are clearly popular with the consuming public, but innovation in the operating system seems pretty limited right now, to eye candy graphical window-opening/window-closing effects, different window decorations (title bars and minimize/maximize buttons), and areas along the edges of the screen to store icons. At no point has any of the last three or four OS releases from any of the major vendors—Microsoft, Apple, or the various Linux distros—really introduced anything novel, just infinite variations on a theme. Filesystems are still hierarchical, users still install and manage applications, and so on. In fact, arguably the most interesting development in operating systems has been the iPhone, and most of its innovations center around two things: the two-finger interface, and the complete mental reboot of what user interface looks and acts like.

Seriously, that's the best we can do?

I see a lot of room for improvements in the operating system experience; for starters, let's do away with the "browser" and just call Firefox, IE and Chrome what they're (far too slowly) evolving into: a generic application host. Get that story right—the acquisition of applications onto the device, the updating of those applications when new versions are available, the offline application experience, and so on—and the operating system and the browser will mesh into a seamless whole. But we're not there yet, not by a long ways, and the first competitor to create such an environment will have a huge advantage over its rivals. Arguably Apple got there first with the iPhone and AppStore, and yet the iPhone still needs iTunes running on a computer to make the experience seamless, and iTunes is definitely not what I call a seamless user experience.

(Besides, the iPhone is hamstrung on a number of levels—I would absolutely despise trying to write this blog post on it, for example.)

Despite the clear window of opportunity for an innovative operating system to step in and make some serious waves in the industry, Google producing an OS really doesn't make sense to me, for a number of reasons.

• Challenging your opponent on your opponent's turf is never a good idea. A maxim of battle says that one should only battle on favorable terrain, yet Google's deliberately choosing to "cross the line", as it were, into territory that is clearly foreign to them. They have no expertise in marketing it, selling it, researching it, or developing it, while their competitors in this—Microsoft, Apple being the principal two—have been doing it for decades. Literally. I realize that Google has a number of smart people working for them, but it seems pretty presumptuous and arrogant to think they can get this story better, particularly in any kind of short term.
• This is a difficult problem to tackle. Microsoft's known it for decades, Apple is discovering it all over again, and Linuxers have either wallowed in it as a sign of prowess or just accepted the problem as intractable—it's really hard to get an operating system to recognize the billions of different devices out there. Apple solved it by jealously and zealously chasing anyone who ever tried to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware. Linux consumers found themselves recompiling kernels or in some cases, having to build device drivers themselves. Microsoft just suffered through it. For a new OS, the only path possible in the beginning is to support the 20% of the devices that 80% of the people use, and hope that nobody else tries a device that isn't on that list and blogs to tell about it. Unfortunately, the chosen target market (consumer netbooks) works against them here in a big way. With developers, it's pretty easy to say, "Sorry, guys, you know how it is, give us a few years, or contribute the patch yourself!"; with consumers, if their BuyMart-bargain-bin web cam doesn't work, it's Google's fault and they'll be up in the acne-spackled BuyMart counter boy's face about it. This will not persuade BuyMart to stock the Chrome-installed netbook for much longer.
• Is this really the company that swore to "do no evil"? Google's announcement is vague on so many levels, it's almost a FUD play, or else they're trying to blatantly cash in on their "geek cred" to convince investors and analysts that they've finally found a new source of revenue to supplement AdWords. (Well, modulo the fact that this new OS will be open-source, which means it's not really a revenue play, but I'm sure they've got that figured out somehow, too.) Seriously, this doesn't make sense: if you're doing an open-source OS, then where is the source? Where is the transparency? Where is my ability to contribute despite my status as a non-Google developer? What part of this project is open-source in any sense of the term?
• Netbooks? I realize that netbooks are the new hotness to a lot of people, a compromise between a phone/PDA and a laptop, and that the price point of the netbook means that for the first time, consumers can get into computing for under $250 (rivalling the price of game consoles) that addresses their fundamental needs—email, web surfing and maybe an application or two—but the timing here is just too late. Google's announcement says that "netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010". Which means that the major competitors (mostly Windows) will have twelve months to convince netbook consumers that Windows (and Windows7, in particular) is the right choice to run the netbook, and Google will be starting from some distance behind the 8-ball. Chrome needs to be available now if they're going to avoid a long and entrenched battle starting from a position of weakness.
• It's a distraction from their strength. Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying. "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong", but this represents Google's third or fourth effort into a space that really isn't leveraging their core strength (their ability to scale). Even if the money and resources spent on Chrome (and Android, for that matter) have zero effect on the budgeting and resourcing for Google App Engine and other server plays, the message and story that Google presents to the world is now as disjoint and multifaceted (and therefore harder to grasp) as Microsoft's.
• Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it almost a decade ago when another company announced a plan to unify the browser and the desktop? In that case, the world either yawned, rejected it outright ("I don't want to browse my desktop, damnit" was how one friend of mine put it), or sued them over it. Even if Google doesn't run afoul of the DOJ directly, Microsoft is going to love pointing to Chrome OS as clear indication of non-monopoly status the next time DOJ comes calling. If Google does manage somehow to annoy the DOJ antitrust personalities, well... let IBM and Microsoft tell you all about how much fun it is to try to innovate and bring products to market with lawyers looking over your shoulders.
• Haven't we seen this before? Not too long ago, another vendor tried to go after the "you don't need an operating system" story... except they called it "The Network Is the Computer". All you Java developers, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have their hand raised, ask what happened to that vendor from any of the people with their hand in the air. Or ask an Oracle DBA.
• Haven't we seen this before? Even more recently, another vendor made a play for the netbook+cloud story. All those who've heard of Cloud OS, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have your hand raised.... well, I wish I could tell you to go talk to the people with their hand raised, except I don't think anybody does.

This whole idea just feels badly-planned and not well thought-out. Let's see how it executes, so let's meet back here in a year and compare notes, but in the meantime, I'm not hanging up my Java or .NET tools any time soon.

OK, OK, I admit it. Maybe significant whitespace isn't all bad. (But don't let me ever catch you quoting me say that.)

The reason for my (maybe) shift in thinking? Manning Publications sent me a copy of Iron Python in Action, and I have to say, I like the book and its approach. Getting me to like Python as a primary language for development will probably take more than just one book can give, but... *shrug* Who knows?

Bear in mind, I have plenty of reasons to like IronPython (Microsoft's Python implementation for the .NET environment):

• A good friend of mine, Harry Pierson (aka @DevHawk), is the PM on the IPy project, and I'm generally prejudiced in favor of those things that people I know and respect.
• I'm generally a fan of dynamic languages, particularly those that let you do strange and twisted things to the type system and its instances at runtime. (Yes, I'm looking at you, ECMAScript...)
• I spent some quality time with IronPython Studio last year while researching a Visual Studio Extensibility "Deep Dive" paper.
• I've known Jim Hugunin (the creator of IronPython, and Jython before that) for some years, ever since his days working on AspectJ, and he's one of those scary-smart guys that, despite knowing they're scary-smart, still render me stunned when I listen to them.
• I'm a huge fan of the DLR. It's like having Parrot, but without having to wait a decade (give or take).

But, just to counterbalance the scales, I have plenty of good reasons to dislike IronPython, too:

• Significant whitespace.
• The "There's only one way to do it" oath that Pythonistas seem to hold as religion. (Somebody told me that building C-Python—the original implementation—only works for you if you swear a holy oath to The One True Way on the One True Way Bible. Needless to say, I believe them, and have never tried to build C-Python from sources as a result.)
• Significant whitespace.
• Uh.... did I mention significant whitespace yet?

I admit, it was with some hesitation that I cracked open the book. Actually, to be honest, I was really ready to just take out all my dislike of significant whitespace and pour it into a heated, vitriolic diatribe on everything that was just wrong with Python.

And...?

Well, OK, I admit it. Maybe significant whitespace isn't all bad.

But this is a review of the book, not the technology. So, on we go.

What I liked about the book

• The focus is on both .NET and Python, and doesn't try to short-change either the "Python"-ness or the ".NET'-ness by trying to be a "Python book (that happens to run on .NET)" or a ".NET book (that happens to use Python for code samples)". The authors, I think, did a very good job of balancing the two, making this the book to get if you're in that area on the Venn diagram where "Python" overlaps with ".NET".
• Part 2, "Core development techniques", starts down the "feed you the Python Kool-Ade" pretty quickly, heading straight into Chapter 4 ("Writing an application and design patterns with IronPython") without much of a pause for breath. The authors get into duck typing, protocols, and Model-View-Controller within the first four pages, and begin working on a running example to highlight some of the ideas. (Interestingly enough, they also take a few moments to point out that IronPython on Mono works, and include a couple of screen shots to that effect as we go, though I personally wonder just how many people are really going down this path.) I like the no-holds-barred, show-you-the-code style, but only because they also take time throughout the prose to talk about some of the concepts at work underneath and laced throughout the code. "Show me then tell me" is a time-honored tradition, but too many authors forget the "tell me" part and stop with code. These guys do a good job of following through.
• The chapters in Part 3, "IronPython and advanced .NET", form an interesting collection of how IronPython can fit into the rest of the .NET stack, demonstrating how to use IronPython with WPF, ASP.NET, and IronPython's crowning glory, Silverlight. If you're into front-end stuff, this is the section where I think you're going to have the most fun.
• The chapters in Part 4, "Reaching out with IronPython", is I think the most important part of the book, showing how to extend IronPython (chapter 14) with C#/VB extensions (similar to how a C-Python developer would extend Python by writing C code, but much much simpler) and the opposite—how to embed IronPython inside of existing C#/VB applications (chapter 15), which is really an exercise in using the DLR Hosting APIs. While the discussion in chapter 15 is good, I wish it'd had a bit more thorough discussion of how the DLR could be hosted regardless of the scripting language, though I admit that's pretty beyond the scope of this book (which is focused, after all, entirely on IronPython, and as a result should stay focused on how to host IPy).

What I found "Meh" about the book

• Part 1 ("A new language for .NET", "Introduction to Python", and ".NET objects and IronPythong") does a good job of bringing the rank beginner up to speed, getting some basic Python ideas across in the same breath that they bring .NET home. The only problem is, it only works well if you're neither a Python programmer nor a .NET programmer. Chapter 1, for example, does a sort of Cannonball-into-the-pool kind of dive into Python, but dives equally into the "Iron" parts as it does the "Python" parts. If you're either a Pythonista or a .NETter, I suspect you're going to be tempted to flip pages pretty quickly, and (I suspect) miss a few things. Chapter 2 is all about Python (meaning .NETters will probably spend some time here), but it certainly doesn't feel like an exhaustive reference, nor does Chapter 3 stand as an exhaustive discussion about all things .NET, either. I almost wish all three chapters had been collapsed into one—suffice it to say, I don't feel like I know the Python language, and don't feel like this book could be my Python reference next to me as I learn it, and I know that it's not a great .NET reference, either. Fortunately, the goal of these three chapters feels pretty clearly to be "Teach you just enough to make you dangerous (and able to understand the rest of the book)", and once we hit Part 2, rubber meets road pretty quickly.
• By the time you hit Chapter 7, less than halfway through the book, the authors have created a fairly nice, if simplistic, application for later dissection, but it's not until you hit Chapter 7 that they begin to start unit-testing, even though they insist (on page 17) that "Dynamic language programmers are often proponents of strong testing rather than strong typing" (a quote they attribute to Bruce Eckel, though I'm relatively certain I heard Dave Thomas and Neal Ford say it with respect to Ruby, long before Eckel started "Thinking in Python... or Flex... or whatever"). If unit-testing is that important, why wait three chapters into the application's development before writing a single unit-test? This doesn't jibe with me, somehow.
• If you're into back-end stuff, chapter 12 on "Databases and web services" is pretty bland. The fact that the two are combined into a single chapter is indicative, all by itself, of how deep or intensive the coverage goes, and there's zero mention of anything beyond basic ADO.NET. The coverage on web services covers REST relatively well, but there's zero coverage of WCF, and the whole of SOAP-based services is all of four or five pages. And Workflow? Doesn't exist, isn't even mentioned (except for an appearance in a table, "The major new APIs of .NET 3.0"). Yikes.

What I actively disliked about the book

Actually, not much. Manning did their usual superb job of arrowed callouts to point out particular concepts in the code listings, the copyediting is professional (meaning there's no obvious typos or misspellings that just break up the flow of prose, something that not all publishers seem to take seriously), and the graphics flow nicely alongside the prose, not dominating the page but accentuating it.

In fact, about the only thing I'd care to criticize is the huge number of footnotes, particularly in the first chapter. (By page 20 in the book, there have already been 30 footnotes.) When you have three footnotes per page, on average (and sometimes more), it does tend to distract, at least to me it does. It feels like there were ways, for most of them, to inject the idea or concept into the main prose, or leave it out entirely, but that could just be a difference of writing style, too.

Summation

If you're a .NET developer interested in learning/using IronPython on your next project, this is a definite winner. If you're a Python developer looking to see how to break into .NET, I'm not so sure this is your book, but I say that mostly because I'm not a Pythonista and can't really speak to how that mindset will find this as an introduction to the .NET space. My intuition tells me that this would be a good springboard into another book on .NET for the Python programmer, but I'll have to leave that to Pythonistas who've read this book to comment one way or another.

(Disclaimer: In the spirit of full disclosure, Stu is a friend, fellow NFJS speaker, and former co-worker of mine from DevelopMentor.)

I present this review to you in two parts.

Short version: If you want to learn Clojure, and you're familiar with at least one programming language, you'll find this a great resource. If you don't already know a programming language, or if you already know Clojure, or if you're looking for "best practices" to cut-and-paste, you're going to be disappointed.

Long version: Recently, fellow NFJS speaker Stu Halloway decided to take up a new language, and came to Clojure. He found the language interesting enough to write a book on it, something he hasn't done since his Java days, and the result is a nice walk through the language and its environment for experienced Java developers who want to understand Clojure's language, concurrency concepts, and programming model.

Now, let's be 100% honest about this: if you're coming at this book expecting it to be a language reference, you will probably be disappointed (as this guy obviously is). Stu's not like that—he's not going to re-create material that's available elsewhere, or that can be found with an easy Google search. Stu will not waste your time that way—he wants to tell you a story, one that takes you from "I'm a Java guy, but clueless about Lisp, dynamic languages, functional programming, concurrency, or macros" to "Wow. I know kung-fu." in the shortest path possible, but without trying to lobotomize you. He wants—no, expects—the readers of his book to be propping the text open with a cell phone on one side and the dinner plate on the other, craning your neck over to scan the pages and type in the examples into the REPL shell to try them out, see them work, then spend a few minutes experimenting with them before moving on to the next paragraph or page.

(Oh, I suppose you could just cut and paste them from the PDF version of the book, but where's the fun in that?)

The fact is, the concepts behind Clojure make up what's important to learn here, and readers of this book will come away like the panda from the movie, realizing that "There is no Secret Ingredient", that the power of Clojure comes not from its super-secret language sauce or special libraries, but in the way Clojure programmers approach problems and think about programming. And for that reason, if you're a programmer—even if you don't program on the JVM—you really want to take a look at what Stu's talking about (and Rich Hickey is creating).

Just remember, cellphone and dinner plate. Otherwise you'll be missing out on so much.

Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of "edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch, this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip the next block paragraph.

Yesterday's afternoon keynote is this guy named Hoss Gifford — I believe his major claim to fame is that viral "spank the monkey" thing that went around a few years back.  Highlights of his talk:

• He opens his keynote with one of those "Ignite"-esque presentations — where you have 5-minutes and 20 slides to tell a story — and the first and last are a close-up of a woman's lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say "drink me," with Hoss's Photoshopped, upward-looking face placed below it.
• He later demos a drawing tool he has created (admittedly with someone else's code) and invites a woman to come up to try it.  After she sits back down, he points out that in her doodles she's drawn a "cock."
• Then he decides he wants to give a try at using the tool to draw a "cock" (he loves this word) — and draws a face, then a giant dick (he redraws it three times) that ultimately cums all over the face.
• A multitude of references to penises and lots of swearing — and also "If you are easily offended, fuck you!"
• And then, to top it off, a self-made flash movie of an animated woman's face, positioned as if she's having sex with you, who gradually orgasms based on the speed of your mouse movement on the page.

Wow. Just... wow. To call this unprofessional smacks of calling Hitler a "socially awkward individual"... or using a euphemism like "mild medical condition" to refer to death. This is so far "over the line" that it's unbelievable. Even Mr. Aimonetti's "CouchDB" presentation, as bad as it was, at least tried to tie the analogy together in a meaningful, if offensive, way. This is just male posturing at its worst. (I'm shocked Hoss didn't whip off his pants and demand the women in the room bow down in worship to his obviously superior manhood.)

Fortunately, according to the source, the conference organizer seems to be pretty responsive, so kudos to the one adult in the room, but....

What's worse, apparently the presenter and more than a few of his pals are (in the best traditions of assholery) blatantly unrepentant about the whole thing, claiming the moral high ground in much the same way that the Rails idiots did—it's all in good fun, if you don't find it funny you're a prude, and so on:

I checked Twitter (hashtag #flashbelt) to see what the responses were.  Here are some notable remarks:

• Fonx is reading the #flashbelt rants on Hoss offending the ladies w/ a few swear words & a penis drawing - r u really that prudish & sexist?
• nthitz lol @hoss69 "If you are easily offended, fuck you" #flashbelt
• livenootrac Ladies of #flashbelt , I am sorry for the Hoss preso, but in the flash community he gets a pass, kinda like Don Rickles - that's just Hoss.
• CujoJpn @livenootrac And there were many ladies at #flashbelt who were offended by Hoss' Preso some were thick skinned and took it as is.

So, if you didn't like it then
a) you are a prude - and sexist (?)
b) fuck you
c) suck it because Hoss gets a pass here in the boy's club known as "the flash community" and
d) you are a wimpy girl who isn't strong enough / man enough / "thick-skinned" enough  to deal with it.

Even more... wow. Talk about justification and marginalization. Amazing.

Before I figuratively smack this Hoss guy around the blog for a while, let's take a brief moment for reflection—what's going on here? Why all the misogynistic presentations recently? Is this reflective of a general trend in the programming industry? Of society in general? Is the world coming to an end?

A few possibilities present themselves:

• The lack of women in the IT industry means there's nobody around to act as a "gender filter" to keep things on an even keel. In other words, the genders constantly filter themselves based on the company they keep, and because the boys who put these presentations together don't have female input, they simply don't know where to draw the line for mixed company. This theory also presumes that an industry that's made up primarily of women will also lack such a filter and "girls will be girls" as a result. Unfortunately I have no good counterexamples at hand to examine—anybody know of an industry populated primarily by women, and can weigh in with experience there? The closest I get is my brief experience working in a restaurant with an almost-all-woman serving staff, and from that brief experience, yep, the theory holds. Solution? Easy: get more women in IT, and things will re-balance themselves naturally.
• Programmers are principally males who have no redeeming social skills. In other words, the industry gathers up exactly the kind of men who find objectifying women and reveling in late-acquired testosterone overdoses to be gratifying, and this kind of behavior is the result. If true, it leads to the conclusion that programmers are no more evolved than the Navy sailors involved in the Tailhook scandal of a few years ago. So go ahead, smack your wives and girlfriends around a little if they get a little "uppity", it's OK, 'cuz u r a l33t d00d. Personally? I find the idea ludicrous—there is definitely a strong antisocial streak that runs through the IT ecosystem (how many of you met your friends via World of Warcraft again?), but like all stereotypes, there's some elements of truth to it, and a lot of exaggeration. And frankly, anybody who believes in this theory is welcome to come with me to dinner at a No Fluff Just Stuff show and meet the other speakers, and listen in on our "boys club" conversations, including questions like, "Which movie best represents the book it was made after?" and "If given a mandate to create a programming language, what language would your language most resemble?". Oh, and the odd fart joke. We are boys, after all.
• We're hypersensitive to the subject right now. In other words, these kind of presentations have always been going on, and it's just that we notice them now, in the same way that you notice a particular brand of car on the road a lot more when you're thinking about buying that brand and model of car. Frankly, I don't buy this argument—I've been to a lot of presentations over the past decade, and I've never seen any that were anything like this.
• This is the YouTube generation, with access to everything the Internet has to offer, and this is "just how they do things". After all, how much maturity, sexual discretion and adult behavior can we expect of the generation that gave us "Girls Gone Wild" and its ilk? It's just a "generation gap" thing, and we old fogies who didn't grow up with Internet porn just a browser-click away just don't "get it". Hmm.... somehow, I just don't buy it. Sure, there may be some elements of this involved here (I'm really curious to see what all these "Girls Gone Wild" girls are going to say to their own daughters in a decade or so...), but I think that's too easy an answer, and an eminently unhelpful one.
• We have copycatters out there trying to follow the path of people they respect. If you're looking up at this Hoss character and thinking, "I want to be just like him!", you really should see a therapist and develop a sense of self, before you find yourself without friends. Hoss gets a pass because of your misguided fan-boi hero-worship. So does Paris Hilton. You want to be the Paris Hilton of your social circle? Go for it. After all, she's highly respected and loved, right? Take a clue from the next car wreck you drive past—everybody's slowing to look not because they wish they were in the body bag, folks, but because we have a ghoulish fascination with it. In the case of Ms. Hilton, that ghoulish fascination is with those who self-destruct in spectacular fashion. (Me, I'd love to be the fly on the wall at the Hoss residence when he tries to explain this whole thing to his daughter or his date/girlfriend/wife, if he ever finds one.)
• The presenters taking this tack are looking for an easy path to fame. In the grand traditions of Andrew Dice Clay ("Oh!"), the easiest way for a presenter to "stand out" from the rest of the crowd of presenters is to do something outrageous and call it "edgy", and stake out a claim on the edge of the civilization, rather than try to integrate with the rest of the crowd and build something up slowly. Don Box has already claimed "HTTP is dead", I made the analogy between a technology and a military conflict, and Matt Aimonetti claimed a data storage framework "performs like a pr0n star", so what's left but to stake out ground even further out on the fringe and just be misogynistic? Fortunately, history suggests that people with content-free/shock-heavy presentations (or even content-heavy/shock-heavy ones) don't go the distance, so to speak, and that once there's nowhere more shocking left to go, the audience comes back to the content-heavy/shock-light discussions and stays there for a while. Unfortunately, this means we're going to have to suffer through somebody's "Live YouPorn filming" talk first, which I'm not looking forward to.

And now for the smacking around... but you know, I suddenly realize that the volume of comments on the original post leave with nothing to do or say that's not already being said, so to just "pile on" would only serve to let me vent, and I have other outlets for that. But it would be inappropriate to just "walk away", so to speak, so with that in mind....

Hoss, you're an idiot. Like any sprinter, you're going to head up the pack for a bit, but soon enough, your "shtick" is going to flame out and you'll be left behind with all the other "shock jocks" of the 80's who found their material unwelcome after a while. So enjoy the spotlight (such as it is) while you can. In the meantime, I'm off to revise a few presentations, and stick with solid ideas and analogies, and maybe dropping the odd F-bomb when I want to make a point, just for emphasis, because I know something you apparently don't:

Shock makes a point because of the contrast to the rest of the talk, not because of its inherent "edginess".

Meanwhile, by all means, continue to be an idiot. You just make me look better by comparison, for which I thank you.

These are the things I think as I wing my way out of LA fresh from this year's TechEd 2009 conference:

• I think I owe the attendees at DTL309 ("Busy .NET Developer's Guide to F#") an explanation. It's always embarrassing when your brain freezes during a presentation, and that's precisely what happened during the F# talk—I completely spaced on the syntax for implementing an interface on a class in F#. (To the attendees who commented "consider preparing a bit better so you dont forget the sintax :)" and "Not remembering the language syntax sorta comes across bad doesn't it?", you're absolutely right, which prompts this next sentence.) I apologize profusely to those who were there—I just blew it. For the record, the missing syntax looks like this:

  #light
  
  type IStudy =
      abstract Study: string -> unit
  
  type Person(firstName : string, lastName : string, age : int) =
      member p.FirstName = firstName
      member p.LastName = lastName
      member p.Age = age
      override p.ToString() = 
          System.String.Format("[Person: firstName={0}, lastName={1}, age={2}]",
              p.FirstName, p.LastName, p.Age);
              
  type Student(firstName : string, lastName : string, age : int, subject : string) =
      inherit Person(firstName, lastName, age)
      interface IStudy with
          member s.Study(sub : string) =
              System.Console.WriteLine("Hey, Ma, I'm studying {0}!", sub)
      member s.Subject = subject
      override s.ToString() =
          System.String.Format("[Student: " + base.ToString() + " subject={0}]", s.Subject);
  

  
  
  Truth is, though, right now not a lot of people (myself included) are writing types that formally implement a given interface—the current common practice appears to be an object expression instead, something along these lines:

  let monkey =
      { new IStudy with
          member p.Study(subject : string) =
              System.Console.WriteLine("Oook eeek aah aah {0}!", subject) }
  monkey.Study("Visual Basic")
  

  
  
  In this way, the object handed back still implements the interface type that the client wants to call through, but the defined type remains anonymous (and thus provides an extra layer of encapsulation against implementation details leaking out). The most frustrating part about that particular snafu? I had a Notepad window open with some prepared code snippets waiting for me (a fully-defined Person type, a fully-defined Student type inheriting from Person, and so on) if I needed to grab that code because typing it out was taking too long. Why didn't I use it? I just forgot. Oy.....
• Clearly Microsoft is thinking big things about Azure. There were a lot of sessions around Azure and cloud computing, far more than I'd honestly expected, given how new (and unreleased) the Azure bits are. This is a subject I would have expected to see covered this deeply at PDC, not TechEd.
• TechEd Speaker Idol is a definite win, to me. I watched the final round of Speaker Idol on Thursday night (before catching the redeye out to Atlanta for the NFJS show there this weekend), and quite honestly, I was blown away by the quality of the presentations—they were all of them better than some of the TechEd speakers I'd seen, and it was great to hear that not only will the winner, who did a great presentation on legacy application support in Windows7 (and whose name I didn't catch, sorry) be guaranteed a slot at TechEd, but I overheard that the runner-up, a Polish security expert who demoed how to break Process Explorer (in front of Mark Russinovich, no less!), will also be speaking at TechEd Berlin this year.
• As always, the parties at TechEd were where the real value lay. This may seem like an odd statement to those whose heads are a bit full right now from five days' worth of material (six, if you attended a pre-con), but remember that I'm a speaker, so the sessions aren't always as useful as they are to people who've not seen this content before (or have the kind of easy access to the people building it and/or presenting it that I'm fortunate and privileged to have). Any future attendees should take serious note, though: networking is a serious part of this business, and if you're not going out to the parties (or creating a few of your own while you're there) and handing out business cards left and right, you're missing a valuable opportunity.
• I'm looking forward to TechEd 2010. Particularly because, thanks to a few technical snafus, I had the chance to sit down with the folks who organize and run TechEd and vent for a little bit about everything I found annoying (as a speaker). Not only were my comments not blown off, but it started a really productive discussion about how to make the behind-the-scenes experience for the TechEd speakers a more pleasant and streamlined one. What's more, we're planning to revisit some of these discussions in the months to come as they start their preparations for TechEd 2010 (in New Orleans). I'm looking forward to those conversations and (hopefully) helping them eliminate some of the awkwardness that I've seethed over in the past.

New Orleans in the summer will not be an entirely wonderful experience (I'm told it gets monstrously humid there in the summers, but it can't be any worse than Orlando is/was), but I'm honestly very curious to get back there to see what post-Katrina New Orleans looks and feels like, and to maybe do my (very little) part to help the area claw its way back by maybe staying an extra day or two and taking in some of the sights. (I'm hoping that Sara Ford will be willing to act as tour guide.....)

In the meantime, thanks to all of you who came, and remember—if you attended a talk and you want to say "thanks" to the speaker who gave it, the best way is to take the five minutes to fill out the evals for that talk. (Speaking personally, I don't even care so much about the scores you give me, but the comments are absolutely invaluable.)

See y'all next year!

Since a number of people have been connecting to my blog via my last post on installing Windows 7 into a VMWare image, I thought since the Windows7 RC is now available, I'd update my experiences with installing it.

I downloaded the Windows7 RC ISO image (a freakishly hideous name containing every character on my US keyboard, plus a few in Klingon, I think.... if you can stand it, the full name of the ISO is 7100.0.090421-1700_x86fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRC1CULFRER_EN_DVD) from the Microsoft CONNECT website, not bothering with any of the other images (x64, ia64, and a "server" image I've not explored yet), using Microsoft's File Transfer Manager. (I know, I know, somebody's going to complain again about the ISOs not being available via a straight HTTP download or Torrent, but this is just an RC release, folks, and this is ostensibly to Microsoft-friendly customers who already have the FTM utility installed.) Took about 3+ hours to download on my home connection... or so it claimed. I went to bed after starting it last night. It was done when I woke up. What more do you want from me?

I created a new VMWare image, as a "Windows Vista" VM with 1GB RAM, a 60GB IDE hard disk (by default Fusion wants to create a 40 GB SCSI disk, but IDE seems to play nicer with the early betas of Microsoft OS'es, and I made it all one file rather than Fusion's default "Split into 2GB files" option), with the experimental 3D graphics turned on, battery status turned off, and (this is HUGE) the "Allow your Mac to open applications in the virtual machine" option turned OFF. Can't repeat this enough, for ANY VMWare VM containing Windows inside of it, turn off that option—leaving it on sucks up HUGE amounts of CPU time. (It's barely documented, and only determined Googling found that this was what was rendering my VMWare Fusion 2 images all but unusable.)

I attached the ISO to the VMWare CD and turned the thing loose. It takes a while, but so long as the ISO file and the VMWare VMDK disk file are on separate drives, the perf isn't too bad—roughly twenty minutes later (or, as I measure things, one randomly-generated map game of Pax Galaxia later), the image had installed all the core files on the VM disk, restarted itself, finished the installation, and restarted itself again. (I have no idea why Win7 wants to reboot itself twice during the install—if I remember the Vista installs correctly, it only restarts once). As I write this, I'm starting at the "Setup is preparing your computer for first use" screen with the funky Cylon-like flashing bar underneath the text (I'm serious, it really looks like the graphic artists at Microsoft are paying homage to BSG during that Setup screen). Whoops, I take it back—got through that screen rather quickly, and now we're into the username/password/product key stage. Plug that in, set the Update policy, the date and time, the network defaults (Public Location for all my VMs, just because), and.... "Welcome".

There's no Step Four. Although, according to Windows Update, there's already an update for Windows7 that should be downloaded and installed. *grin* Actually, it seems like the driver it installed was for the VMWare virtual sound device, which normally doesn't kick in until I install the VMWare Tools. It tells me that this is an "Unsupported Creative Sound Device", however, so maybe it's an older driver. *shrug* Not sure, don't care, because my next step is....

Install the VMWare Tools. I install VMWare Tools in the image, after the Update is complete. (No restart was required, so why not?) Actually, let me rephrase that—I tried to install the VMWare tools, but when I selected it from the Fusion menu bar... nothing happened. Hmm. OK, let's do the restart and see what happens. VM shuts down quickly enough (no having to wait for updates to finish, which was somewhat annoying with Vista), and when I restart, it seems to restart quickly enough (again, no obvious updates to be installed), so I get to a working desktop (640x480, how did we ever think this was reasonable?!?), and try the Install VMWare Tools option from the Fusion menubar again. It thinks for a bit, and the cursor flashes to the "pointer-with-CD" icon for a second before flashing back, but after a few seconds, the "What do you want to do?" (Autoplay) menu pops up as if I'd slipped the CD into the drive, so all looks good. Go through the UAC "Continue/Cancel" dialog (see below), choose "Complete" for the VMWare Tools install options, and let 'er rip. Disks spin, lights flicker, and a "VMWare Shared Tools" network folder shows up on the Win7 desktop, indicating that it's suddenly discovered the Shared Folder (to my MacOS user account) is there. But now we're back to the Windows-display-exercise program, which leads me to believe that it's the VMWare driver that's doing the exercise, not Windows itself. (VMWare? Anybody listening and care to comment?)

And now I'm into Win7 desktop customization steps, things like display sizing and desktop icon selection, background image, and all that other jazz that you probably don't care about. (If you do, then I'm a bit worried about you—be an individual! Choose your own settings!) All in all, pretty flawless and smooth.

Thoughts on the process:

• It feels like we're getting away from the "minimal install" process that Vista tried to create. For a while, there was a meme that said that installing Windows was too hard for the average person, and Microsoft promised to reduce the number of steps it had to go through to install the OS. Take the date/time screen, for example: it picked up the defaults from the underlying (virtual) hardware, why not just assume those and skip that step? Users can always change it later.
• I still have to set a Administrator password. I know that Microsoft is trying to find that sweet-spot balance between "too secure" and "unsecure" for desktop operating systems, but I have to hand it to the Ubuntu folks here—the "passwordless root" idea that they use is pretty slick. MacOS uses it (for the most part) in places, as well. I like the balance that approach achieves: it forces the user to enter "superuser" mode to do something sensitive, but it isn't challenging for a password (unless the superuser installs one) every time.
• It's not going through display-screen calesthenics on each startup with this build. My previous Win7 image, every time I restart the VM, goes through every possible video/monitor size combination before settling in on the resolution I established in the last session. That was a bit disconcerting, until I realized that it's Windows trying to get some exercise in to be less overweight. *grin*
• What, no PowerShell installed by default? Either it's not there, or it's buried pretty deeply. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) is right where it's always been, under Accessories, but no PowerShell.... Whoops, no, I take it back, it's in a folder underneath Accessories, forcing one more click to get to it. Hey Microsoft: do me a favor and pin that guy to the Start Menu. Make it easy for me to use, if you really want me to believe that this is supposed to replace Command Prompt someday.
• On that note, though, the PowerShell "ISE" (Interactive Scripting Environment) is an interesting and new toy to play with.
• "Pin to Taskbar" is an interesting option that I'm going to have to play around with. Not being a huge MacOS Dock fan (which is pretty clearly the inspiration for the new Taskbar), I'm not sure how well I'll like the new "it's the QuickLaunch and the Taskbar combined" idea.

Overall, I'm looking forward to putting a few things into this image (VS 2008, VS 2010, Office, and so on) and seeing how it reacts. As always, your mileage may vary, no implied warranties with this blog post, blah blah blah, but if you do anything with the Windows OS, you really should get hold of the RC (build 7100) and put it into a Virtual PC, VMWare, VirtualBox, Xen or some other virtualized box to play with. Like it or not, it's entirely reasonable to believe that Windows7 is going to win a few folks back from the Vista "less-than-I-expected" crowd.

As always, caveat emptor, and feel free to comment....

I'm getting *hammered* by the Google "Windows7 VMware" hits, which I can only assume is from people looking for hints and advice on installing Windows7 into a VMWare image, and I feel compelled to point out that there's already a pre-built VMWare VM available from the "Virtual Appliance" pages at VMware.com; currently, it resides here. Note that you will need to BitTorrent it down, I haven't found a straight HTTP download link from that (off-vmware.com) site.

I wish I knew the full legalities of making said VM available; I only hope that the guys who are doing it have checked, but if you're at all concerned about such things, trust me, it's pretty painless to install Win7 into your own VM of your own making.

For a couple of years now, I've been going around the world and giving a talk entitled "Pragmatic Architecture", talking both about what architecture is (and what architects really do), and ending the talk with my own "catalog" of architectural elements and ideas, in an attempt to take some of the mystery and "cloud" nature of architecture out of the discussion. If you've read Effective Enterprise Java, then you've read the first version of that discussion, where Pragmatic Architecture was a second-generation thought process.

Recently, the patterns & practices group at Microsoft went back and refined their Application Architecture Guide, and while there's a lot about it that I wish they'd done differently (less of a Microsoft-centric focus, for one), I think it's a great book for Microsoft-centric architects to pick up and have nearby. In a lot of ways, this is something similar to what I had in mind when I thought about the architectural catalog, though I'll admit that I'd prefer to go one level "deeper" and find more of the "atoms" that make up an architecture.

Nevertheless, I think this is a good PDF to pull down and put somewhere on your reference list.

Notes and caveats: Firstly, this is a book for solution architects; if you're the VP or CTO, don't bother with it, just hand it to somebody further on down the food chain. Secondly, if you're not an architect, this is not the book to pick up to learn how to be one. It's more in the way of a reference guide for existing architects. In fact, my vision is that an architect faced with a new project (that is, a new architecture to create) will think about the problem, sketch out a rough solution in his head, then look at the book to find both potential alternatives (to see if they fit better or worse than the one s/he has in her/his head), and potential consequences (to the one s/he has in her/his head). Thirdly, even if you're a Java or Ruby architect, most of the book is pretty technology-neutral. Just take a black Sharpie to the parts that have the Microsoft trademark around them, and you'll find it a pretty decent reference, too. Fourthly, in the spirit of full disclosure, the p&p guys brought me in for a day of discussion on the Guide, so I can't say that I'm completely unbiased, but I can honestly say that I didn't write any of it, just offered critique (in case that matters to any potential readers).

Dustin Campbell, a self-professed "IDE guy", is speaking at the .NET Developer's Association of Redmond this evening, on the future of Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2010, and I feel compelled, based on my earlier "dissing" of VB in my thoughts of PDC post, to give VB a little love here.

First of all, he notes publicly that the VB and C# teams have been brought together under one roof, organizationally, so that the two languages can evolve in parallel to one another. I have my concerns about this. Frankly, I think the Managed Languages team at Microsoft is making a mistake by making these two languages mirror images of one another, no matter what their customers are telling them; it's creating an artificial competition between them, because if you can't differentiate between the two on a technical level, then the only thing left to differentiate them on is an aesthetic level (do you prefer curly braces and semicolons, or keywords?). Unfortunately, the market has already done so, to the tune of "C# developers make more than VB developers do (on average)", leaving little doubt in the minds of VB developers where they'd rather be... and even less doubt in the minds of C# developers where they'd rather the VB developers remain, lest the supply and demand curves shift and move the equilibrium point of C# developer salaries further south.

Besides, think about this for a moment: how much time and energy has Microsoft (and other .NET authors) had to invest in making sure that every SDK and every article ever written has both C# and VB sample code? All because Microsoft refuses to simply draw a line in the sand and say, once and for all, "C# is the best statically-typed object-oriented language for the CLR on the planet, and Visual Basic is the best dynamically-typed object-oriented language for the CLR on the planet", and run with it. Then at least there would be solid technical reasons for using one or the other, and at least we could take this out of the realm of aesthetics.

Or, contrarily, do the logical thing and create one language with two parsers, switching between them based on the file extension. That guarantees that the two evolve in parallel, and releases resources from the languages team to work on other things.

Next, he shows some simple spin-off-a-thread code, with the Thread constructor taking a parameter to a function name, traditional delegate kinds of stuff, then notes the disjoint nature of referencing a method defined elsewhere in the class but only to be used once. Yes, he's setting up for the punchline: VB gets anonymous methods, and "VB's support for lambda (expressions) reaches parity with C#'s" in this next release. I don't know if this was a feature that VB really needed to get, since I don't know that the target audience for VB is really one that cares about such things (and, before the VB community tries to lynch me, let me be honest and say that I'm not sure the target audience for C# does, either), but at least it's nice that such a powerful feature is now present in the VB language. Subject to the concerns of last paragraph, of course.

Look, at the end of the day, I want C# and VB to be full-featured languages each with their own raison d'etre, as the French say, their own "reason to be". Having these two "evolve in parallel" or "evolve in concert" with one another is only bound to keep the C#-vs-VB language wars going for far too long.

Along the way, he's showing off some IDE features, which presumably will be in place for both C# and VB (since the teams are now unified under a single banner), what he's calling "highlights": they'll do the moral equivalent of brace matching/highlighting, for both method names (usage as well as declaration/definition) and blocks of code. There's also "pretty listing", where the IDE will format code appropriately, particularly for the anonymous methods syntax. Nice, but not something I'm personally going to get incredibly excited about--to me, IDE features like this aren't as important as language features, but I realize I'm in something of the minority there, and that's OK.

He demonstrates VB calling PLINQ (Parallel LINQ), pointing out some of the inherent benefits (and drawbacks) to parallelism. This isn't really a VB "feature" per se. <<MORE>>

Now he gets into some more interesting stuff: he begins by saying, "Now let's talk about the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)." He shows some VB code hosting the IronPython runtime, simple boilerplate to get the IronPython bits up and running inside this CLR process. (See the DLR Hosting Spec for details, it's pretty straightforward stuff: call IronPython.Hosting.Python.CreateRuntime, then call GetEngine("python") and SetSearchPaths() to tell IPy where to find the Python libs and code.) Where he's going with this is to demonstrate using VB's late-binding capabilities to get hold of a Python file ("random.py", using the DLR UseFile() call), and he dynamically calls the "shuffle" function from that Python file against the array of Ints he set up earlier.

(We get into a discussion as to why the IDE can't give Intellisense on the methods he's calling in the Python code. I won't go into the details, but essentially, no, VS isn't going to be able to do that, at least not for this scenario, any time soon. Maybe if the Python code was used directly from within VS, but not in this hosted sense--that would be a bit much for the IDE to analyze and understand.)

Next he points out some of the "ceremony" remaining in Visual Basic, essentially showing how VB's type inferencing is getting better, such as with array literals, including a background compilation warning where the VB compiler finds that it can't find a common type in the array literal declaration and assumes it to be an array of Object (which is a nice "catch" when the wrong type shows up in the array by accident or typo). He shows off multidimensional array literal and jagged array literal syntax (which requires the internal array literals in the jagged array to be wrapped up in parentheses, a la "{({1,2,3}), ({1, 2, 3, 4, 5})}", which I find a touch awkward and counterintuitive, quite frankly), while he's at it.

(We get into a discussion of finer-granularity color syntax highlighting options, such as colorizing different keywords differently, as well as colorizing different identifiers based on their type. Now that's an interesting idea.)

By the way, one thing that I've always found interesting about VB is its "With" keyword, a la "New Student With {.Id=101, .Name="bart", .Score=53, .Gender="male"}".

He then shows how VB 10 has auto-implemented properties: "Property Gender As String" does exactly what .NET programmers have had to do by hand for so long: create a field, generate simple Get and Set blocks and so on. Another nice feature of this: the autogenerated properties can have defaults, as in, "Public Property Age As Integer = 1". That's kinda nice, and something that VB should have had years ago.

And wahoo! THE UNDERSCORE IS (almost) HISTORY! "Implicit line completion" is a feature of VB 10. This has always plagued me like... well... the plague... when writing VB code. It's not gone completely, there's a few cases where ambiguity would reign without it, but it appears to be gone for 95% of the cases. Because this is such a radical change, they've even gone out and created a website to help the underscores that no longer find themselves necessary: www.unemployedunderscores.com .

He goes into a bit about co- and contravariance in generic types, which VB now supports more readily. (His example is about trying to pass a List(Of Student) into a method taking a List(Of Person), which neither he nor I can remember if it's co- or contra-. Sorry.) The solution is to change the method to take an IEnumerable(Of Person), instead. Not a great solution, but not a bad one, either.

Having created a Window7 VMWare image (which I then later cloned and installed the Windows7 SDK into, successfully, wahoo!), I turned to the Visual Studio 2010 bits they provided on the hard drive. Not surprisingly, though a bit frustratingly, they didn't give us an install image that I could put into a VMWare image of my own creation, but instead gave us a VPC with everything pre-installed in it.

I know that Microsoft prefers to promote its own products, and that it's probably a bit much to ask them to provide both a VMWare image and a VirtualPC image for these kind of pre-alpha things, but it's a bit of a pain considering that Virtual PC doesn't run anymore on the Mac, that I'm aware of. Please, Microsoft, a lot of .NET devs are carrying around MacBookPro machines these days, and if you're really focused on trying to get bits in the hands of developers, it would be quite the bold move to provide a VMWare image right next to the VPC image. Particularly since over half the drive was unused.

So... I don't want to have to carry around a PC (though I do at the moment) just to run VirtualPC just to be able to explore VS 2010, but fortunately VMWare provides a Converter application that can take a VPC image and flip it over to a VMWare image. Sounds like a plan. I fire up the Converter, point it at the VPC, and after the world's... slowest... wizard... takes... my... settings... and... begins... I discover that it will take upwards of 3 hours to convert. Dear God.

I decided to go to bed at that point.

When I woke up, the image had been converted successfully, but I wasn't quite finished yet. First of all, fire it up to make sure it runs, which it does without a problem, but at 640x480 in black-and-white mode (no, seriously, it's not much more than that). Install the VMWare Tools, reboot, and...

... the mouse cursor disappears. WTF?!?

Turns out this has been a nagging problem with several versions of VMWare over the years, and I vaguely remember running into the problem the last time I tried to create a Windows Server 2003/2008 image, too. Ugh. Hunting around the Web doesn't reveal an easy solution, but a couple of things do show up a few times: disconnect the CD-ROM, change the mouse pointer acceleration, delete the VMWare Mouse driver and let Windows rediscover the standard PS/2 mouse driver, or change the display hardware acceleration.

Not being really interested in debugging the problem (I know, my chance at making everybody's life better is now forever lost), I decided to take a bit of a shotgun approach to the problem. I explicitly deleted the VMWare Mouse driver, fiddled with the display settings (including resizing it to a more respectable 1400x1050), turned display hardware acceleration down, couldn't find mouse hardware acceleration settings, allowed it to reboot, and...

... yay. I have a mouse pointer again.

Now I have a VS2010 image on my Drive-o'-Virtual-Machines, and with it I plan on exploring the VS2010/C# 4.0/C++ 10/VB 10 bits some more. I fire up Visual Studio 2010, intending to poke around C# 4.0's new "dynamic" keyword and see if and how it builds on top of the DLR (as a few people have suggested in comments in prior posts). VS comes up pretty quickly (not bad for a pre-alpha), the new interface seems snappy, and I create the ubiquitous "ConsoleApplicationX" C# app.

Wait a minute...

Something niggled at the back of my head, and I went back to File | New Project, and ... something's missing.

There's no "Visual F#" tab. There's an item in the "Project types:" box on the left for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, WiX, Modeling Projects, Database Projects, Other Project Types, and Test Projects, but no Visual F#. (And no, it doesn't show up under "Other Project Types" either, I checked.) Considering that my understanding was that F# was going to ship with VS 2010, I'm a little puzzled as to its absence. Hopefully this is just a temporary oversight.

In the meantime, I'm off to play with "dynamic" a bit more and see what comes out of it. But guys, please, let's see some F# love out of the box? Surely, if you can ship WiX with it, shipping F# can't be hard?

So the first thing I do when I get back from PDC? After taking my youngest trick-or-treating at the Redmond Town Center, and settling down into the weekend, I pull out the PDC hard drive and have a look around.

Obviously, I'm going to eventually spend a lot of time in the "Developer" subdirectory--lots of yummy PDC goodness in there, like the "Oslo_Dublin_WF_WCF_4" subdirectory in which we'll find a Virtual PC image of the latest CSD bits pre-installed, or the Visual_Studio_2010 subdirectory (another VirtualPC image), but before I start trying to covert those over to VMWare images (so I can run them on my Mac), I figured I'd take a wild shot at playing with Windows 7.

That, of course, means installing it into a VMWare image. So here goes.

First step, create the VMWare virtual machine. Because this is clearly not going to be a stock install, I choose the custom option, and set the operating system to be "Windows Server 2008 (experimental)". Not because I think there's anything really different about that option (except the default options that follow), but because it feels like the right homage to the pre-alpha nature of Windows 7. I set RAM to 512MB, chose to give it a 24GB IDE disk (not SCSI, as the default suggested--Windows sometimes has a tentative relationship with SCSI drives, and this way it's just one less thing to worry about), chose a single network adapter set to NAT, pointed the CD to the smaller of the two ISO images on the drive (which I believe to be the non-checked build version), and fired 'er up, not expecting much.

Kudos to the Windows 7 team.

The CD ISO boots, and I get the install screen, and bloody damn fast, at that. I choose the usual options, choose to do a Custom install (since I'm not really doing an Upgrade), and off it starts to churn. As I write this, it's 74% through the "Expanding files" step of the install, but for the record, Vista never got this far installing into VMWare with its first build. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, Vista (then Longhorn) didn't even boot to the first installation screen, and then when it finally did it took about a half-hour or so.

I'll post this now, and update it as I find more information as I go, but if you were curious about installing Windows 7 into VMWare, so far the prognosis looks good. Assuming this all goes well, the next step will be to install the Windows 7 SDK and see what I can build with it. After that, probably either VS 2008 or VS 2010, depending on what ISOs they've given me. (I think VS 2010 is just a VHD, so it'll probably have to be 2008.) But before I do any of that, I'll make a backup, just so that I can avoid having to start over from scratch in the event that there's some kind dependency between the two that I haven't discovered so far.

Update: Well, it got through "Expanding files", and going into "Starting Windows...", and now "Setup is starting services".... So far this really looks good.

Update: Uh, oh, possible snag: "Setup is checking video performance".... Nope! Apparently it's OK with whatever crappy video perf numbers VMWare is going to put up. (No, I didn't enable the experimental DirectX support for VMWare--I've had zero luck with that so far, in any VMWare image.)

Update: Woo-hoo! I'm sitting at the "Windows 7 Ultimate" screen, choosing a username and computername for the VM. This was so frickin flawless, I'm waiting for the shoe to drop. Choosing password, time zone, networking setting (Public), and now we're at the final lap....

Update: Un-FRICKIN-believable. Flawless. Absolutely flawless. I'm in the "System and Security" Control Panel applet, and of course the first thing I select is "User Account Control settings", because I want to see what they did here, and it's brilliant--they set up a 4-point slider to control how much you want UAC to bug you when you or another program changes Windows settings. I select the level that says, "Only notify me when programs try to make changes to my computer", which has as a note to it, "Don't notify me when I make changes to Windows settings. Note: You will still be notified if a program tries to make changes to your computer, including Windows settings", which seems like the right level to work from.

But that's beyond the point right now--the point is, folks, Windows 7 installs into a VMWare image flawlessly, which means it's trivial to start playing with this now. Granted, it still kinda looks like Vista at the moment, which may turn some folks off who didn't like its look and feel, but remember that Longhorn went through a few iterations at the UI level before it shipped as Vista, too, and that this is a pre-alpha release of Win7, so....

I tip my hat to the Windows 7 team, at least so far. This is a great start.

Update: Even better--VMWare Tools (the additions to the guest OS that enable better video, sound, etc) installs and works flawlessly, too. I am impressed. Really, really impressed.

The full list is here. It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some pretty big names.

In homage to Ms. Sally Fields, of so many years ago... "You like me, you really like me". Having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog is second on my list of "fun things to happen to me at a conference", right behind having somebody come up to me at a conference and tell me how much they like my blog, except for that one entry, where I said something totally ridiculous (and here's why) ....

What I find most fascinating about the list was the means by which it was constructed--the various calculations behind page rank, technorati rating, and so on. Very cool stuff.

Perhaps it's trite to say it, but it's still true: readers are what make writing blogs worthwhile. Thanks to all of you.

This crossed my Inbox, and I have to say, I'm stunned at this incredible display of teamwork. Frankly... well, see for yourself.

I've been asked to put together a list of the "best" Java resources that every up-and-coming Java developer should have, and I'd like this list to be as comprehensive as possible and, more importantly, reflect more than just my own opinion. So, either through comments or through email, let me know what you think the best Java resources are in the following categories:

• Websites and developer Web portals
• Weblogs/RSS feeds. (Not all have to be hand-authored blogs--if you find an RSS feed for news on java.net projects, for example, that would count as well.)
• Java packages and/or libaries. (Either those within Java Standard Edition--a la Reflection or the Scripting API--or from Enterprise Edition--a la JMS--or even third-party packages, a la Spring.)
• Conferences, even including those that I don't speak at.
• Books.
• Tools. (IDEs, build tools, static analysis tools, either commercial or open source.)
• Future trends you think bear watching.

There is, of course, no prize to be won here, and I'd please ask the vendors (commercial or open source) who watch my blog to avoid outright advertisements in comments (though you are free to rattle off the various advantages of your product in an email to me), in order to avoid turning this weblog into a gigantic row of billboards along the freeway. I am interested in peoples' opinions, however, and more importantly, why you think X should be on that list, or even why Y shouldn't. Keep it civil, though, please--I'll delete any comments that get too vindictive or offensive. (That doesn't mean that you have to agree with me--just avoid calling anybody names. Basic 'Netiquette.)

Oh, and if you want to be mentioned in the article (which will be published on an international developer site), please indicate how you'd like to be accredited. Or not. Whatever you prefer.

Recently, a former student asked me,

I was in a .NET web services training class that you gave probably 4 or so years ago on-site at a [company name] office in [city], north of Atlanta.  At that time I asked you for a list of the technical blogs that you read, and I am curious which blogs you are reading now.  I am now with a small company where I have to be a jack of all trades, in the last year I have worked in C++ and Perl backend type projects and web frontend projects with Java, C#, and RoR, so I find your perspective interesting since you also work with various technologies and aren't a zealot for a specific one.

Any way, please either respond by email or in your blog, because I think that others may be interested in the list also.

As one might expect, my blog list is a bit eclectic, but I suppose that's part of the charm of somebody looking to study Java, .NET, C++, Smalltalk, Ruby, Parrot, LLVM, and other languages and environments. So, without further ado, I've pasted in the contents of my OPML file for cut&paste and easy import.

Having said that, though, I would strongly suggest not just blindly importing the whole set of feeds into your nearest RSS reader, but take a moment and go visit each one before you add it. It takes longer, granted, but the time spent is a worthy investment--you don't want to have to declare "blog bankruptcy".

Editor's note: We pause here as readers look at each other and go... "WTF?!?"

"Blog bankruptcy" is a condition similar to "email bankruptcy", when otherwise perfectly high-functioning people give up on trying to catch up to the flood of messages in their email client's Inbox and delete the whole mess (usually with some kind of public apology explaining why and asking those who've emailed them in the past to resend something if it was really important), effectively trying to "start over" with their email in much the same way that Chapter Seven or Chapter Eleven allows companies to "start over" with their creditors, or declaring bankruptcy allows private citizens to do the same with theirs. "Blog bankruptcy" is a similar kind of condition: your RSS reader becomes so full of stuff that you can't keep up, and you can't even remember which blogs were the interesting ones, so you nuke the whole thing and get away from the blog-reading thing for a while.

This happened to me, in fact: a few years ago, when I became the editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.NET, I asked a few folks for their OPML lists, so that I could quickly and easily build a list of blogs that would "tune me in" to the software industry around me, and many of them quite agreeably complied. I took my RSS reader (Newsgator, at the time) and dutifully imported all of them, and ended up with a collection of blogs that was easily into the hundreds of feeds long. And, over time, I found myself reading fewer and fewer blogs, mostly because the whole set was so... intimidating. I mean, I would pick at the list of blogs and their entries in the same way that I picked at vegetables on my plate as a child--half-heartedly, with no real enthusiasm, as if this was something my parents were forcing me to do. That just ruined the experience of blog-reading for me, and eventually (after I left TSS.NET for other pastures), I nuked the whole thing--even going so far as to uninstall my copy of Newsgator--and gave up.

Naturally, I missed it, and slowly over time began to rebuild the list, this time, taking each feed one at a time, carefully weighing what value the feed was to me and selecting only those that I thought had a high signal-to-noise ratio. (This is partly why I don't include much "personal" info in this blog--I found myself routinely stripping away those blogs that had more personal content and less technical content, and I figured if I didn't want to read it, others probably felt the same way.) Over the last year or two, I've rebuilt the list to the point where I probably need to prune a bit and close a few of them back down, but for now, I'm happy with the list I've got.

And speaking of which....

   1: <?xml version="1.0"?>

   2: <opml version="1.0">

   3:  <head>

   4:   <title>OPML exported from Outlook</title>

   5:   <dateCreated>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateCreated>

   6:   <dateModified>Thu, 15 May 2008 20:55:19 -0700</dateModified>

   7:  </head>

   8:  <body>

   9:   <outline text="If broken it is, fix it you should" type="rss"

  10:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/rss.xml"/>

  11:   <outline text="Artima Developer Buzz" type="rss"

  12:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/news/feeds/news.rss"/>

  13:   <outline text="Artima Weblogs" type="rss"

  14:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/weblogs/feeds/weblogs.rss"/>

  15:   <outline text="Artima Chapters Library" type="rss"

  16:   xmlUrl="http://www.artima.com/chapters/feeds/chapters.rss"/>

  17:   <outline text="Neal Gafter's blog" type="rss"

  18:   xmlUrl="http://gafter.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  19:   <outline text="Room 101" type="rss"

  20:   xmlUrl="http://gbracha.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  21:   <outline text="Kelly O'Hair's Blog" type="rss"

  22:   xmlUrl="http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kellyohair/index.rdf"/>

  23:   <outline text="John Rose @ Sun" type="rss"

  24:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.sun.com/jrose/feed/entries/atom"/>

  25:   <outline text="The Daily WTF" type="rss"

  26:   xmlUrl="http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf"/>

  27:   <outline text="Brad Wilson" type="rss"

  28:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/BradWilson"/>

  29:   <outline text="Mike Stall's .NET Debugging Blog" type="rss"

  30:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jmstall/rss.xml"/>

  31:   <outline text="Stevey's Blog Rants" type="rss"

  32:   xmlUrl="http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml"/>

  33:   <outline text="Brendan's Roadmap Updates" type="rss"

  34:   xmlUrl="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/index.rdf"/>

  35:   <outline text="pl patterns" type="rss"

  36:   xmlUrl="http://plpatterns.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  37:   <outline text="Joel Pobar's weblog" type="rss"

  38:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/callvirt"/>

  39:   <outline text="Let&amp;#39;s Kill Dave!" type="rss"

  40:   xmlUrl="http://letskilldave.com/rss.aspx"/>

  41:   <outline text="Why does everything suck?" type="rss"

  42:   xmlUrl="http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  43:   <outline text="cdiggins.com" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://cdiggins.com/feed"/>

  44:   <outline text="LukeH's WebLog" type="rss"

  45:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/lukeh/rss.xml"/>

  46:   <outline text="Jomo Fisher -- Sharp Things" type="rss"

  47:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jomo_fisher/rss.xml"/>

  48:   <outline text="Chance Coble" type="rss"

  49:   xmlUrl="http://leibnizdream.wordpress.com/feed/"/>

  50:   <outline text="Don Syme's WebLog on F# and Other Research Projects" type="rss"

  51:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/dsyme/rss.xml"/>

  52:   <outline text="David Broman's CLR Profiling API Blog" type="rss"

  53:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/davbr/rss.xml"/>

  54:   <outline text="JScript Blog" type="rss"

  55:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/rss.xml"/>

  56:   <outline text="Yet Another Language Geek" type="rss"

  57:   xmlUrl="http://blogs.msdn.com/wesdyer/rss.xml"/>

  58:   <outline text=".NET Languages Weblog" type="rss"

  59:   xmlUrl="http://www.dotnetlanguages.net/DNL/Rss.aspx"/>

  60:   <outline text="DevHawk" type="rss"

  61:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Devhawk"/>

  62:   <outline text="The Cobra Programming Language" type="rss"

  63:   xmlUrl="http://cobralang.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  64:   <outline text="Code Miscellany" type="rss"

  65:   xmlUrl="http://codemiscellany.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  66:   <outline text="Fred, Let it go!" type="rss"

  67:   xmlUrl="http://freddy33.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  68:   <outline text="Codedependent" type="rss"

  69:   xmlUrl="http://graphics-geek.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"/>

  70:   <outline text="Presentation Zen" type="rss"

  71:   xmlUrl="http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/index.rdf"/>

  72:   <outline text="The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method" type="rss"

  73:   xmlUrl="http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/index.rdf"/>

  74:   <outline text="ZapThink" type="rss"

  75:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/zapthink"/>

  76:   <outline text="Chris Smith's completely unique view" type="rss"

  77:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChrisSmithsCompletelyUniqueView"/>

  78:   <outline text="Code Commit" type="rss"

  79:   xmlUrl="http://feeds.codecommit.com/codecommit"/>

  80:   <outline

  81:   text="Comments on Ola Bini: Programming Language Synchronicity: A New Hope: Polyglotism"

  82:   type="rss"

  83:   xmlUrl="http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/feeds/5778383724683099288/comments/default"/>

  84:  </body>

  85: </opml>

Happy reading.....

Apparently, I'm drawing enough of an audience through this blog that various folks have started to send me press releases and notifications and requests for... well, I dunno exactly, but I'm assuming some blogging love of some kind. I'm always a little leery about that particular subject, because it always has this dangerous potential to turn the blog into a less-credible marketing device, but people at conferences have suggested that they really are interested in what I think about various products and tools, so perhaps it's time to amend my stance on this.

With that in mind, if you are a vendor and have a product that you'd like me to take a look at and (possibly) offer up a review here, here's the basic rules:

1. No guarantees. Sending me something will in no way guarantee that I will review your product, for several reasons, two of which being (a) I get really busy sometimes, and (b) I may have no interest whatsoever in your product and I refuse to pretend to do so. (Readers can usually tell when the reviewer isn't all that excited about the subject, I've found.)
2. If you're not going to send me a "real" version (meaning not the time-locked or feature-crippled demo), don't bother. I have no idea when I will get around to a review, and I have no desire to review something that isn't "the real deal". I will in turn promise that the licensed version you send me (if necessary) will not be used for any purpose other than my own research and exploration (signing contract if necessary to give you that "fresh-from-the-lawyer's-office" warm and fuzzy feeling).
3. I say what I think, pro and con. I will not edit my review to suit your marketing purpose, and if you ask me to do so I will simply note in the review that you have asked me to do so. I retain full editorial control over what I say about your product.
4. Having established #1, I will try to be as fair as I can about your product, and point out things that I liked and things that I didn't. (Of course, if I hated it from top to bottom, I may end up with the only positive thing being "It didn't set the atmosphere on fire when I started the app", but hey, that's something positive, right?)
5. Also in the spirit of #1, if you send me mail answering questions or complaints in my review, I will of course amend the review with your comments. You are always welcome to post comments to the blog entry itself, too. Unless you insult my grandmother, then I will have to get all DELETE-key on you.

The reason I'm posting this here is twofold: one, so my faithful audience of four blog readers will know the rules under which I'm looking at these products and (hopefully) realize that I'm not financially vested in any of these products, and two, so the various vendor folks can read this and know what the rules are up front before even asking.

I know it sounds a little cheeky to lay this out. The image I get in my head is that of the kid at Christmas declaring to his grandparents as they walk through the door, presents in hand, "Make sure it's not a scratchy sweater, I hate scratchy sweaters. And G.I. Joe was only popular when my Dad was a kid. And if you give me another lunchbox I will scream until you buy me something cool, like a new GameBoy." Ugh. But I value the trust that people seem to have in me, and so I risk the perception of cheekiness for this tiny window in time in order to (hopefully) establish full disclosure over the reviews that come to pass (which, by the way, will always have the category "review" applied to them, so you know which is an official review and which is just me exploring, like the LLVM and Parrot posts of recent time).

We now return you to the regularly-scheduled blog.