Being Mark Cohen

All up, TechEd has been really enjoyable. It’s been intense, ten hours of stuff happening every day. My top three technologies have been

• Atlas, a Microsoft framework for building Ajax apps in asp.net 2.0 which seems to make Ajax really really easy when doing drag ‘n drop programming. I haven’t really tried Atlas in a nontrivial app yet, but I have a strong suspicion using it will lose the trivial appearance very quickly when doing some real hardcore coding, although o’reilly think it really is that simple
• LINQ, Language Integrated Query. The most potent part of LINQ IMHO is its use in building a data layer. Scott Guthrie did the presentation today, and showed us a demo where he built a search with server-side paging, and the generated SQL was apparently perfect. writing a good search used to be a significant job, this should shave hours off searches on top of all the other simplifications and time savings it will bring to n tier development.
• The .net framework 3.0 is going to be what Microsoft are calling an additive release. It will include all of .net 2.0 basically unchanged and will also include something called WF, or Windows Workflow Foundation. We were lucky enough to have WF presented to us by Paul Andrew, whose blog describes his role as “Windows Workflow Foundation Technical Product Manager at Microsoft”. He presented really well, even if he’s a kiwi and the All Blacks are going to stomp us into the ground on the weekend We have a major component in our flagship product that is essentially a dynamic workflow system. I’m looking forward to trying to rebuild it based on WF soon

In the TechEd keynote address, Anne Kirah presented a whole lot of anthropological research that discussed the concept of Digital Natives versus Digital Immigrants. I was discussing this with Seth last night. Most or all of us at TechEd are Digital Immigrants.

We have moved into a tech world, we were not born into it. No matter how completely we embrace it we’ll always be the immigrants. There is an argument I am not sure I agree with (but I could never refute) that we may well understand the technology in terms of how it hangs together etc but it will never be a part of our lives in the same way as, say, a telephone. That is what distinguishes us from the Digital Natives. To us, Instant Messaging will always be an ip-based messaging system with presence indication and peripheral services like file sharing and voice over IP. To a Digital Native, Instant Messaging will always be IM. We look at it and see a composite. They look at it and see the whole. Transcendental Comprehension.

I’m of to TechEd tomorrow.  Looking forward to it.  So much info, so little time.  It’s a bit disappointing that the really interesting sessions got booked out so quickly.  Next time I’ll have to make sure to jump in and book my sessions ASAP.  It’s a bit disappointing in a sense that so much info will be presented yet it’s only possible to attend a few of them.  I’m looking forward to the Vista – oriented sessions, the location-aware app sessions, and some of the architecture sessions look great.  I’m also really interested to see Scott Guthrie’s session on asp.net 2.0 end to end.  Besides him being such an authority on asp.net I’ve read his articles for long enough that meeting him will be a little bit surreal

New York – July 19, 2005

Media-entertainment giant News Corporation has reached a deal to buy Intermix Media for $US580 million ($A769 million) in cash, gaining a foothold in the arena of news blogs and social networking.

(Story on SMH here)

And thirteen months later (today, 8th August 2006):

Under the terms of the agreement, which will begin in the fourth quarter, Google must guarantee Fox Interactive minimum payments of $900 million over three years, as long as Fox meets certain traffic and other commitments.

(story on cnet here)

So the search box on MySpace is effectively reimbursing News Corp (and more) for their entire purchase. Somewhere in that mix there’s a team of professional businessmen worthy of a lot of respect

The Australian IT reports that:

Some of the world’s biggest technology companies could have to pay royalties to a tiny Tasmanian start-up after it moved to register a patent on a JavaScript compiler.

What these guys are trying to patent according to this article is the ability to write code in another language and have a compiler spit out html and javascript.

Unfortunately, we forgot to tell the Tasmanians to wind their clocks forwards ten years, and so they have totally missed Script# which was written by Nikhil Kothari and has been freely and publically available since May. Watch this space, soon they’ll try patent a novel new technology that allows embedding server-side script in html pages .