Archives for : Uncategorized

FormatException.com – Now on Azure

For the past year this blog has been getting been getting slower and slower.  I hosted on bluehost, which had been my hosting provider since I first started this blog six years ago.  Now, I never contacted bluehost to see if they could resolve the slow response issues.  For the five years prior to the slow down they were a wonderful, cheap provider.  And maybe if I had sent an email their way they could have helped me.  But I figured as a .NET developer maybe it was time to go Azure.  I have a few web projects in the planning stages and wanted to start with a low-entry point penetration into Azure.  The biggest issue I had in the port over to Azure was a problem with Azure detecting that I had changed my cname entry at my domain provider.  It took roughly 24 hours for them to pick up the change.

Now, everybody warns you that when you make changes to your DNS entries it could take as many as 3 days to propagate.  In reality, however, I’ve never had it take more then an hour, until now.  So that’s why I’ve been down for 24 hours.  But I’m back with a new, cooler look.  I’m still playing around with the css a bit but I like the new look and feel.

The cname taking a while to update is an issue that other people have had with some reports I say taking as much as 4 or 5 days.  Scott Hanselman has been a very obvious proponent of Azure and what it can provide for you.  He did a great session with us here at the Tucson .NET Users Group.  I let him know of my troubles.  They may seem rather mild but I couldn’t imagine being down even longer then I was.

So thanks for your continued patronage and here’s to another six years,

Brian

Oracle to Sun Customers

Oracle’s statement to Sun Customers.

What? No mention of Java.  I really couldn’t care about Solaris or SPARC.  What is the future of Java?

My thoughts on Oracle, Sun and Java

Over at Oren’s Blog there was the following comment:
Alberto:

So what. I don’t care much what the writer says. Java is open source, so Oracle can’t “own” it in the sense they can’t control it.

to which I responded:

@Alberto,
Java itself is not opensource only the JDK. This means if you want to help to make changes to the core libraries you can but if you got a wild hair for some reason and wanted to figure out how to add LINQ to Java you couldn’t. See http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/java/faq.jsp#b8

This is an important distinction. The JDK is opensource, not Java. This means the future of Java is in the hands of Oracle and it scares me. Development on the Oracle DB itself has been rather stagnant. I’m not saying that there haven’t been new features added, just that Oracle hasn’t been making any big leaps forward.

I’ve had the unique opportunity for the last 6 years to develop professionally in Java and the last 5 years in C#, a man of both worlds. When C# first came out I was thinking, so what? I can do that in Java and do it easier and cleaner. C# had a lot of catching up to do. Fast forward 5 years and Java is so far behind the curve now. Development of the Java language has become stagnant. Like the Oracle DB, new features are added sure, but there haven’t been any significant leaps forward. Java has simply fallen behind. I just hope Oracle doesn’t do to Java what it has done to it’s DB and let it die a slow death. As pointed out by Andrew nearly all of Oracle’s business is with the government, and having worked on some government contracts I can tell you that is starting to slip.

As a new generation of IT moves into places of power they simply are not as enamored with Oracle as the old guard were and they are willing to look to other solutions.

So what does this mean? C, C++ and Perl haven’t had any new features for a long time. Does a language need to make leaps forward? C, C++ and Perl live in different worlds with different purposes then Java and .Net. Sure there are some cross purposes but for the most part they are separate. Java has to continue to innovate if it wants to stay a viable mainstream language. I hope that Oracle can bring innovation back to Java and yet worry that it doesn’t really care.

Brian

In thinking back, the only part of my comment I disagree with is:

having worked on some government contracts I can tell you that is starting to slip.

The reason I disagree with it is because, at this moment, the federal government and the DOD are still firmly entrenched in the idea that Oracle is the only way to go. So basically I’m saying that things aren’t starting to slip, at least not right now.

But I do firmly believe the next part of my comment:

As a new generation of IT moves into places of power they simply are not as enamored with Oracle as the old guard were and they are willing to look to other solutions.

My point here is that I think Oracle cares about Java because their tools are written in Java. But that is it’s only extent. Now that the JDK is opensourced I’m sure we’ll see some movement in the JDK but very little, if not nothing, in the Java language itself. This is really a shame.

There is no doubt that Java rules in the web application market against .Net and ASP.Net, just as there is no doubt that Apache rules in the web server market against IIS. Maybe that is fine for Java. Maybe Sun wants it to be consigned to a subset of the development market. But there are some heavy hitters in that market, Ruby, PHP, and Perl to name a few.

So why not try and carve out a significant share in all markets? Java has never truly had a significant share in the desktop application market. I feel it was held back by how bad AWT and then Swing were. In Java 6 it seems like they’ve tried to make some steps forward with the new desktop APIs but it doesn’t seem like that is enough.

6 years ago Java was an innovation. Now it’s merely stagnant. It’s APIs can’t keep up, it’s language features can’t keep up. With every new release of .Net I find it easier and easier to do everything. With every new release of Java I think, “That’s kind of cool but that doesn’t help me.”

There is a definite flaw there. I hope Oracle dumps a bunch of money into Java and really gets the development platform, from both the JDK and the language features perspective, kicked into high gear. It’s just that it seems that Oracle actually likes stagnation. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is their attitude. The problem is that, while that may work for the Oracle DB with their heavy paying government projects, it doesn’t work for Java.

Later,
Brian

Too many good movies this summer

<off_topic>

This is going to be a busy summer 🙂

Watchmen (sorry, couldn’t find an embedded player of this one)

</off_topic>

Post stats after one month

I have done zero real advertising about this site other then Facebook, setting up google sitemaps and mentioning it to friends. No pingbacks, trackbacks or putting up my url anywhere really. Some how, however, I managed to get 185 unique hits for the month of October. That is without my hits from the three locations I would go to it from and without any bots. That’s right, 185 people went to my website and they weren’t me!

Here is a rundown of the top 10 most popular pages. These are not unique hits but represent the total number of hits per page.

Page Number of visits
My RSS feed 6348 (wow, a lot of you added me to your rss viewer)
Home Page 1126
UpdateOrInsert (Upsert) 37
About Page 20
WPF and MousePosition 19
WPF – ContentProperty, it’s that simple 17
Assert Yourself! 13
T1, T2, T3, T4, TResult, Hut, Hut, Hike 13
xaml attach WPF – ContentProperty post 7
C# Category 6

So how did people even find the site? Well, google really. Here is a partial list of google terms that led to this site:

61 different keyphrases Number to site from Search
get mouse position to screen in wpf 6
hibernate upsert 4
formatexception 3
format exception 3
wpf contentproperty 3
cannot implicitly convert type system.linq.iorderedenumerable 2
contentproperty wpf 2
postgres insertorupdate 2
c# sql server upsert 2
upsert postgresql 2
Other phrases 53

Anyways, I’d like to have one significant post a week and one trivial post a week. As I saw with October that’s not an easy task but I think I’m up for the challenge. I don’t profess to be an expert on anything. Anywhere I might sound like an expert I try to link to a real expert. I’m just trying to pass on the knowledge I gain in the form of ramblings on developing in the Windows(tm MS i’m sure) world.

My next step is to try and generate some contriversey. I think my posts so far have been too “tutorial” in nature. I’ll try to keep those going since I have fun writing them but I think some topics intented to spawn debate need to be next. So any recommendations from those of you who stop by on a regular basis would be nice. I have allowed anonymous comments so tell me how you really feel. Of course I reserve the right to delete and edit posts as necessary but don’t let that stop you 🙂

Thanks to all of you that stop by and don’t be afraid to say, “Hi!” (and yes, i mean literally 🙂
Brian

Did You Know?

Interesting video here.

http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=x7aVOMrlfkkijQwcLllwk6WjB5JE0zrF

I haven’t fact checked everything in this (since it’s obviously not mine) so use your own head in accepting the facts as they are portrayed. It’s still interesting.

Brian

Hug a coder

Funny stuff, 🙂