Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : .NET

Programming languages

pooyad — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:29:00 GMT

I always get asked by our customers about market share of the major programming languages and what percentage of people are programming in .NET vs. Java or PHP or ... . Technically .NET should be broken into the specific language as the .NET framework supports multiple languages. There is no perfect way to come up with these numbers, you can do surveys but the pool you choose tends to be biased, you can check the languages used on websites but that only covers one aspect of applications. One of the ways that is pretty good at estimating (not necessarily market share but trends) is to use books written on each language (and how many copies are sold).

Oreilly recently published the state of the computer book market, check out the results for yourself. It's good to see so much interest in Python (and powershell) recently and also interesting to see the trends of Java, .NET languages and C# in particular.

I'm a big believer in learning more than 1 language and feel that a programmer can pick up a new language pretty quickly (the basics, libraries and the rest will come in time). It's actually very useful to know multiple languages so that you can choose the right one for each project rather than going with the one you're comfortable with that can be bent to solve the problem.

Java and .NET interoperability session at Egypt Java Developers Conference

pooyad — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:49:00 GMT

I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2nd annual Java Developers Conference being held in Cairo (where Microsoft was a gold sponsor) by the Egyptian Java User group. The session was about interoperability, specifically interoperability at the application layer between Java and .NET and the many ways you can achieve interop, but really the one that stands out is web services. Most of my work is done around SOA these days and usually we talk about reusability, but it's also about platform and language indepent implementations that are interoperable, all because of webservices and XML.

This session for about 600 Java developers also gave me the chance to change some perceptions of Microsoft and show off some of our cool new technologies where I focused mainly on the web. After just coming back from MIX, there was no shortage of demos and I only wish I had more time in the session.

The audience was great and asked some good questions, they were very interested but as happens with people who are not in the "Microsoft world" they were'nt aware of many of the new aspects of .NET and the path that Microsoft is on with our work in open source.

Update: In a timely manner, Kirk Allen Evans posts on Java and .NET interoperability from a slightly different angel, pointing out fast infoset and the .NET and Biztalk implementations for JMS. Incidentally, Kirk's blog was the first place I learned what an Architect Evangelist does at Microsoft even before joining the company myself.

Watch this LINQ video

pooyad — Thu, 10 May 2007 22:04:00 GMT

If you're at all interested LINQ, watch this video.

Even if you're not interested in LINQ, watch the video and you probably will be.

This was Anders' presentation at MIX. It shows some very impressive capabilities of LINQ for XML queries which I plan to use in a few mashups soon. This was one of the more difficult things to accomplish before (imagine a join across 2 XML documents) but has been made as trivial as a SQL statement.

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) - great news for .NET development

pooyad — Wed, 02 May 2007 16:17:00 GMT

Check out Jim Hugunin's blog post about the new Dynamic Language Runtime, better support for dynamic languages (Python, Ruby, ...) on .NET. This is huge for me, .NET already had support for dynamic languages but this takes it to a new level with a better security model and more real integration with the full .NET platform. I've always been a big fan of dynamic languages and think they're incredibly productive when used the proper way and for the appropriate development. I've been following Jim's work since his days before Microsoft on IronPython.

Read his post for more details and keep an eye on his blog in the next few weeks as more details of the DLR will be discussed.