Here. From Hun Boon Teo: Article by Dominik Gruntz from Journal of Object Technology (Nov-Dec 2002 Issue), this article shows some of the subtle difference between C# and Java.

Here. From cn: The W3C's updated a whole bunch of specs lately: - XPointer: Proposed Recommendation - XForms: Candidate Recommendation - RDF Primer, Schema, Abstract Syntax, and more An XForms tech preview is available from Novell/SilverStream (of all places).

Here. From Andrew Webb: The whitepaper (a Word file) is now available. And the Demo Files link, previously dead, now works.

Here. Sam Gentile's got the scoop on the Everett release updates to VC++, which he lists as: -98% ANSI/ISO Compliance -Forms Designer for Managed C++ -Security Features -Optimizer Improvements particuarly in floating point He's got the details. Check it out.

Sun, November 11, 2002

I was just chatting with a friend of mine and he said that he really wanted to write a namespace extension so that he could expose a hierarchy of data in the shell. Back when namespace extensions were introduced with Win95, I thought that everything could be integrated into the shell, making the shell the last application. Sometime in the last seven years, I’ve come to hate that idea. As a hardcore computer geek, I’ve embraced the hierarchy organizational styles in three major applications:

1. Email folders (I keep things filed in a multi-level hierarchy and use my Inbox as a to do list)
2. The file system (I keep things filed in a multi-level hierarchy and use my Desktop as a to do list)
3. Free-form outline program (I keep things filed in a multi-level hierarchy and use a file called todo.txt as a to do list)

As anal as I am about arranging and categorizing things into their various hierarchies (and as many places as I’ve spread my to do list to, apparently), the hierarchy only helps me about 50% of the time. I spend just as much time searching for things as I do going right to where it “should” be.

The hierarchy used to be lots more helpful, but as the data I keep around grows over the years, it becomes less and less possible to remember where something really “belongs” and to find it there. In fact, I’ve come to believe that a hierarchy is a terrible way to keep data organized at all. A hierarchy is really just a way to associate key words (called “folder” names) with hunks of data (called “files”) and then only showing them in a very limited way. Searching is a possibility, but it either takes a long time (because file indexing is turned off) or it misses files (because file indexing is turned on —  what’s with that, anyway?). Searching creates an ad hoc logical folder, but there’s no way in the shell to create a permanent logical folder with custom content.

The basic hierarchy structure is easy to understand, but things become much more powerful if I can keep one hunk of data in multiple locations. Some versions of the Windows file system support this , but the shell doesn’t (although it can be simulated with shortcuts). Also, the same kind of “pivot table” capability that Excel provides, mixed with a much faster, more flexibly searching capability of a database, is much closer to what I’m after. Hopefully Longhorn will provide something like this.

Also, being able to search all three of my hierarchical  data sources at the same time would be pretty damn useful, but one thing at a time…

Discuss

Here. Just fun stuff like Pool and Tic Tac Toe, but it makes me pine for a TablePC all the more...

Here. "On November 7th, at the OOPSLA Conference in Seattle, WA, C# creator Anders Hejlsberg unveiled several potential language features for the next major release of Visual C# .NET. The four primary features Anders spoke about were: -Generics, a form of C++ templates that makes reusing existing code easier -Iterators, a construct that makes traversing collections of data significantly faster and easier -Anonymous methods, an easier way to perform simple tasks using delegates -Partial types, a means for programmers to split code across multiple files" All of these features sound really cool (not just generics), but unfortunately the presentation included no mention of when they'd actually ship...

Here. Shawn Wildermuth's new book, Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World, is awailable now. Shawn's a long-time friend of mine and I wrote the forward to the book, so I'm hardly unbiased, but it rocks! Enjoy.