This article sparked an incredible discussion among a number of women developers that are at the top of their game in our development community. Many of them have, like me, been programming for 20 or more years. Most of them (unlike me) also have kids. Definitely check it out if you have any interest. It’s not about programmers, but about business in general.
Hmmm now which category does this belong in?
I have the alpha of next version of the Tablet PC O/S on my little Acer – it’s called Lonestar.
I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it but did a bit more yesterday when I was testing the deployment of my client app.
There are two things that I want to ooh aah about.
First is the handwriting recognition. It’s completely amazing. Not only does it recognize total chicken scrawl (this will be good for the healthcare market, eh?) but the fact that there is inference built in just blows me away. Plus it has a lot of cool new features. Example: recognizing one word at a time as you write. If it is confused it will show you options based on it’s best guess and then you select that word. And I believe it then stores that choice in a dictionary, much like a lexicon when you use voice recognition software. I did a TON of voice related stuff (text to voice, actually) a few years ago and boy was that challenging.
The other thing that I found interesting is a new use of the TIP (that’s the Tablet PC Input Panel – where you write and it recognizes). Infragistics was out of the gate VERY early with this (and has added a lot more functionality), but the TIP now pops up automatically when I select a text input box – even in my grid. Because I am using the Infragistics Ink enabled tools, I am not sure at this point what Lonestar is doing on it’s own or what is being done by the Infragistics tools. I’ll have to play with that.
I haven’t touched the new SDK yet, but first thing I’ll be playing with when I do is the ink-enabled web controls!! www.inklog.com (an experiment by Arin Goldberg on the tablet team which I think he whipped together in one day) uses this. But you can only see the output, not how they are doing the input.
No need to be jealous – Microsoft IS looking for more commercial tablet application developers to join the alpha program! Check Tabula PC’s blog here for more info (and follow his link to the lonestar FAQ that Chris deHerrera is doing…)
With all the buzz about Newfoundlands because of Josh winning the Westminster Kennel Club show, I am going to add a little google juice to probably the most wonderful book on Newfoundlands ever written….
Amazon has it listed as out of print, but it’s not true. It *was* out of print and selling for over $300 a copy on EBay, so my parents were given the printing rights by the original publisher, Henry Holt, and have republished the book. It’s for sale in a lot of stores and websites or you can buy it directly from Blue Heaven Publishing or Katie’s Bumpers websites.
In the Company of Newfies by Rhoda Lerman
Josh Josh Josh Josh Newfoundland Newfoundland Newfoundland Newfoundland Westminster Westminster Westminster Westminster
Get your ASPNetPro’s email newsletter yet? Here’s what’s in it:
Hi, I’m Jerry Coffey, the new Editor-in-Chief of asp.netPRO magazine and of this e-newsletter. I have the daunting task of replacing Elden Nelsen who has done such a fine job of launching and guiding the publications until now. Elden has taken a position at a Seattle-based software company you may have heard of; he’s the new Developer Audience Product Manager for a new department named Microsoft Learning.
I heard a whisper about this previously, but it looks pretty official to me now!
A hearty welcome to Jerry and big congratulations to Elden, who I’m sure we’ll be hearing a LOT more from in the near future.
anyone notice the cool new fade effects on ASPAdvice.com? Oooh aaah. 🙂
I still have a pile of VS2002 60 day demo dvds to give away at my user group. Still haven’t known of any for the current version.
Greg Robinson bemoans the fact that his magazines are collecting dust on the shelves since he needs to stay focused on .NET development right now and he is seeing to much focus on Longhorn. If you consider that many developers haven’t even made the leap to .NET and most of those that have are busy working away in .NET up to their eyeballs and still need plenty of information. Not sure which mags he is talking about, but I too have noticed more and more articles on VERY future stuff which I don’t have quite as much time to focus on these days. What percentage of subscribers are really ready for all of that?
My problem with many n-tier examples is that while they are getting better at separating the logical tiers, there is nothing about how to separate the tiers physically. It can’t be done easily, because everything is coupled with the web.config file.
In this essay which questions why it seems people are not leveraging .NET to do real scalable enterprise apps, Sam reinforces a point that he has made often and states again in his comments on this post . Too many developers pick up Visual Studio.NET and kind of start where they left off, without looking to see what’s new in there. They get stuck on the IDE improvements or the server controls and don’t look deeper to the stuff that lets you build really awesome applications. Even if you are like me and not in a situation where you are building huge apps, you can still use your smaller apps as a playground for learning how to use these things and STILL realize a great benefit, not only to your skills and understanding of .net, but the applications will benefit. Sam seems to be mourning the fact that people are once again writing client/server apps because this is what the IDE wizards create and also that there are too many samples out there that demonstrate code without middle tiers. Joel Semeniuk talked about this exact same problem this morningin Trivial Samples? How about Patterns?
I am not writing gigantic enterprise apps, yet everything I write for my clients, I write with some type of scalabilty in mind. I have one client that has gone from 15 to 100+ employees in the last 6 years and I think in another 5 they will have operations around the country. Everything that I write for them now, I try to build with that in mind. Even though I fear it will all be legacy code by then… Sometimes I know that what I am doing is overkill. Often I even don’t charge them for some of the extra work I do on their apps that is possibly more for the sake of my education. Reading what Sam says definitely reinforces my justification for this.
Sam and I think very differently and work differently (if he’s reading this, he probably just spit out his coffee). He writes big, I write small. I often get something different out of what he is writing than what his main point is (which tends to make him nutty – especially when I then go write about it in public…). But even I have slowly evolved my own methods as I have gotten deeper into .NET. In the past, yes, I too started out by seeing what’s new in the IDE. I have, in the last 2 years though, learned a LOT about .NET and am working with a lot of pieces of this that always seem terribly daunting at first. BUt I know that by learning them and using them I am taking advantage of what .NET is all about.
Sam knows .NET from the bottom up, not the top down (in my mind) – take heed of his message. It was Sam that inspired me to really want to more than a developer using .NET but to be a .NET developer.
After Rich and I returned from a dog show (where I took these pics of Theo), I looked at our poor 10 year old Newfie, Tasha and realized she looked like a bear. So she got a day of beauty. First we gave her a big haircut (okay, a hack job). Her hair was probably 6 or 7 inches long!!
Here she is standing in front of the cupboard where her cookies are after the first part of her torture. This is SHORT hair!
The best part of the day for her was the ride in the car to the place where we can give her a bath. She LOVES to go in the car.
Then there was the bath.
Lucky for us, we don’t have to clean up the mess!
She’s such a good girl! Afterwards, it took most of the day and night for her to dry off enough to comb her out. Now she’s all beautiful again and smells good too!