Mark Fussell's WebLog : PDC

Anders Hejlsberg on XML and Programming Languages

mfussell — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 10:36:00 GMT

One good reason to sign up for PDC 2005 is to hear Anders elaborate more on this work

Data Access ROX. An article on the Data Access Support in "Whidbey"

mfussell — Fri, 21 Nov 2003 11:46:00 GMT

I wrote this article on the Data Access Support in Visual Studio.NET code named “Whidbey” in order to provide and overall positioning paper to describe the data access technologies introduced at the PDC. It describes the strenghs and the primary target scenarios for each data acces technology that has been incorporated into ADO.NET - Relational, Objects and XML. It is in effect a distillation of the Data Access Design Patterns: Navigating the Data Access Maze talk given by Mike Pizzo.

In reality applications will start to use a combination of data access technologies depending on the business problems being addressed. There is a clear trend where the data access is layer is evolving to provide better levels of abstraction, to ease the data model impedence mismatch and continue to provide powerful features for ultimate control. The data access layer still continues to be the pivotal point of development for the majority of applications today.

My favorite highlights of the "Whidbey" data access technologies in ADO.NET are;

Streaming based XML queries over data stored in SQL Server. This provides the ease of heirachary data visualization using an XML schema without requiring to know the complexities of the SQL query language.
XPathDocument as a better DOM. The XPathDocument has faster queries, significantly improved load and save times, typed storage and the sexist bit - databinding to UI controls.
Objectspaces. This and SQLXML in ADO.NET are simply manifestations of the same technology. One is Object-Relational and the other is XML-Relational. Beneath the API facade lies a single common mapping and querying engine. They are twins, born from the same genetics.
Paging support in ADO.NET. One of my first UI pieces of code that I wrote (after having spent 2 years on VAX systems) was paging code for a listbox control on the Windows 3.1 platform. The code became complex to achieve smooth scrolling and caching just the right amount so as to not hit the server whilst remaining responsive. It was horrible code to write. Now it is a simple matter of calling the ExecutePageReader method and you are able to page results sets back to the client. Superb!

Comments on this article are welcomed. I am also writing a more detailed article to cover the XML support in "Whidbey".

XML Support in "Whidbey"

mfussell — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 10:34:00 GMT

Now that I have finally made it back home and got through most of my mail, I thought I would give an overview of the PDC. Drew provided a great overview of my talk capturing details such as the demise of the XmlDocument (DOM) in preference to the XPathDocument. This is in effect a "finishing off" the job started in V1.x of .NET with the XPathDocument and the XPathNavigator classes which have turned out to be very significant in the light of XQuery.

For those who want an interactive forum for post PDC discussion go to the XML "Whidbey" newsgroup which is in this list of Whidbey newsgroups. SQL Server "Yukon" has a new site which includes details of the XML support in the DB. This is one of the best ways to influence the product groups, since public discussion of features is the best way to provide feedback. The beauty of this PDC is that the products has been released early enough that there is still time to influence their development.

I was great to be able to meet people such as Kirk and Bryant to be able to discuss the XML in support in "Whidbey". Yes, SQLXML is still very much alive and I would love to hear more opinions of what is good and bad about the work that has been done in System.Xml.

PDC acronym counting

mfussell — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 11:57:00 GMT

Now that I have been offiically hyped ready for PDC at the speakers briefing, I declare the top acronymn for this years PDC is SOA, whereas 3 years ago it was XML. Each time a speaker says "SOA", attendees should take a swig of water, or some other beverage, and whoop loudly. For real die hards, go to an "Indigo" talk with several bottles at the ready.

One of most exiting features based upon real customer feedback is the XML datatype support in "Yukon" the next release of SQL Server. Taking all those Office documents, loading them into your database as XML and then having the ability to query over them is very compelling. You can end up with some very funky examples, such as querying Visio documents for a give shape, since these are stored as SVG or XML. In my System.Xml PDC talk I will also cover the concept of XML Views over SQL Server, which provide query support across tables from the middle-tier with a schema defining the contract, aka SOA. "Whoohoo".

Finally is you live your life by RSS, then there is a list of PDC sessions here

XQuery BOF is ON

mfussell — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 10:11:00 GMT

Christoph Schittko got his XQuery BOF approved for PDC! Excellent news. Now we can have a big discussion on what XQuery is and is not useful for. Come with plenty of questions and issues.

"Whidbey" Publishers Summit

mfussell — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:32:00 GMT

I talked about the XML support in VS.NET "Whidbey" at a publishers summit hosted here in Redmond yesterday, which prompted some good feedback. Now that I have been caught up in the machinery of publishing it amazes me how much effort it takes to generate a book through authoring, editing and marketing. There are supposedly around 4000+ books on .NET with about 280 of those on VB.NET alone. Dare, Joshua, Arpan and me hosted an XML round table to talk with some authors on their projects. In an attempt to make their titles standout more I talked to one author who was relating his book to Route 66. Personnally I would have chosen "Samurai Jack cuts VB.NET code". Certainly a title like "The guru's guide to VB.NET" is now considered a non-starter.

I notice that the full abstracts for the PDC talks have now been posted here. If you are totally confused by all these code names this is a brief biased description of each one;

"WinFS"- The digital aid meets meta data. Store all your "stuff" and find it seemlessly with hundreds of rules.
"Indigo" - SOAP 1.2 + WS-*. The future of distributed computing
"Avalon" - Cool UI graphics, no Windows message pump and a declarative programming model.
"Yukon" - SQL Server next with the beauty of an XML data type to store all those XML documents.
"Whidbey" - VS.NET next with some great innovations in the XML programming model.

My life's work

mfussell — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 10:03:00 GMT

Alex Homer sent me a mail a couple of nights ago indicating that our book that we have been writing, has finally seen the light of day - A First Look at ADO.NET and System.Xml V2. Since my last foray into writing was a single chapter in an XQuery book that disappeared into obscurity as fast as a W3C XQuery draft, I was not prepared for the agony this entailed. The proceeds from the sale of the book will go to "paying my wife off" and clothing my four children. Then I will blow what's left on a good bottle of 1999 Valpolicella and some Stilton cheese. I wrote this book to get some decent documentation into the hands of early adopters ready for the PDC, so if you want to express an opinion I would like to know what can be improved about it. Expect a future even more detailed version to emerge.

PDC forced me to do this

mfussell — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 05:26:00 GMT

The PDC is now less than two months away and since system.xml has had a significant number of features added I decided that it was time to kick start a blog. I have worked on System.Xml for just over 3 years now and along with Chris Lovett was the PM who helped design the V1 implementation.

My favorite API in the V1 stack has to be the XPathNavigator due to the innovation of using a cursor API and the break away from the cursed implied DOM data model. The fact that it exists is due to a significant change of direction within the project and also resulted in the creation of the XPathDocument. These both turned out to be wise choices especially in System.Xml V2 that will be revealed at PDC. I will be doing a talk at PDC on the Architecture track on What's new in System.Xml for Whidbey which will be packed with new stuff. I will post some more once I get used to this whole blogging thing and have seen my children for at least 10 minutes.