Harry Pierson's DevHawk Weblog

A few months ago, Ted Neward wrote a great article about the history of the Object Relational Impedance Mismatch problem and how LINQ is addressing it in a new way. Basically, LINQ is introducing new language abstractions and complementary libraries to...

Big news from the Game Developers Conference this week is the XNA Framework. From the press release : The XNA Framework contains a custom implementation of the Microsoft® .NET Framework and new game-development-specific libraries designed to help...

I am sick and tired of the warning dialog box for the C# 3.0 preview . Every time you launch VS it pops up a dialog reading "This is an unsupported version of Microsoft Visual C# 3.0. As such many features may not work as expected." You know, this isn...

I mentioned on the first day of the Compiler Dev Lab that Brian Beckman is a hoot. He's also wicked smart. He posted about his demo from Monday where he demonstrates building indexes for use in LINQ queries. In his words: In the terminology of relational...

Day Two of the Compiler Dev Lab was all about scripting. Iron Python was the primary focus of the day, but they also had Phalanger (Managed PHP ) and Monad folks there as well. I hadn't realized just how performant these dynamic languages are on...

Even though I haven't finished my ETech postings, I'm already onto another event. This week, thanks to an invite from Michael Lehman , I'm sitting in on a Compiler Lab discussing implementing other languages for CLR. The first day was about LINQ . Much...

After my marathon blogging session last night and taking notes all day, I'm a bit burnt out on writing. But here are a few quick thoughts. More details to follow. I'm digging the Live.com home page and the integrated Live Search. Since I'm on a...

I still haven’t seen a good general session on microformats . I’m thinking it’s because any one given microformat is so simple that you can’t really fill more than about ten minutes talking about it. So this panel was about six or seven different microformats...

For a while, I really didn’t understand where this session was going. Michael spent a bunch of time on the issues of user experience design that I’m not familiar with. I still don’t know why he was talking about the Cuddle Chimp . But then he started...

This post is a combination of Rod’s short keynote and his breakout session I went to right after lunch. Rod’s meta point is that lots of enterprise applications don’t get built because they aren’t affordable to write. Chris Anderson would call this the...

Jeff Han on Multi-Touch Interfaces This was a cool demo, but was basically a live version of the associated video that made the rounds on the web a few weeks ago. There’s huge potential here, but he kept doing the same zoom in and out demo over an over...

I’m just going to come right out and say I don’t “get” this attention economy. I mean, I understand the problem of information overload which seems to be at the root of this attention stuff. But is it an economy? Whenever someone gets going on attention...

Felix is from last.fm , which I haven’t used. However, I’m definitely going to give it a try after seeing Felix’s talk. Last.fm is all about harnessing collective intelligence for music. The basic idea is that you install a plugin to your music player...

This is a sequel to Dick’s now-famous Identity 2.0 talk. He’s definitely had an influence on this crowd – the two speakers after Dick used a similar presentation style. However, what I didn’t realize from watching the Identity 2.0 talk is that it’s much...

Felipe’s a good guy (I knew him when he was at MSFT) but this session wasn’t anything exciting because it’s all old news. There are some things humans are better at than computers, typically things involving judgment such as “which is the best picture...

Ray has posted extensively about his session this morning, but if you haven’t read it the basic idea is “How do we bring the copy and paste paradigm to the web?” Sure, for this crowd he might have been better off saying “the UNIX pipe paradigm”, but the...

So I ended up writing four and a half pages of thoughts on day two, so instead of one big-ass post, I'm going to break it up. Of course, I was distracted by the death of my laptop during the morning keynotes. Plus, any notes I have of the session up until...

Of course, I my copious notes are on my dead laptop, so this is all from memory. Granted, it was only yesterday and my memory isn't THAT bad (yet). Rael Dornfest on the Attention Economy You know the old saying if you can't say something nice, don...

I flew down to San Diego for the Emerging Technology Conference today. I'm here thru Thursday which is the longest I've been gone from home since TechEd last year. And I'm only home eight days before heading off to SPARK and MIX for an even longer trip...

In preperation for SPARK later this month, we (i.e. the Architecture Strategy Team) has set up a SPARK Blog . So far it's mostly links to a few people talking about SPARK, but it's also appears to be an opportunity to use the work "SPARK" whenever possible...