How up to date a programmer are you? Why are you lagging behind?

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I realise that the most important factor is the work that you do and the project that you or your company are involved in. Some people have mature projects, consequently they are restricted to the technological constraints of their version etc.

 

With VS2008 there are a host of new technologies, most importantly though are new ways of doing things. WCF, WPF, WWF, Linq et al.

 

It is this new way of doing things that interests me most. Personally I have found very Linq easy to grasp. Lambda expressions take some getting used to but I now love them and will try and use then wherever possible. I love WCF, which is very easy to learn and implement. VS2008 makes it a doddle to implement (was a bit painful with the command line Svcutil.exe and the orcas beta 2 bugs). WCF is easily implementable with Linq in an n-tier scenario. I admit you haven't the separation stipulated here, but you get used to the fact that your business rules i.e. validation now lives in partial classes and within the WCF service.dll you create and not as seperate .dll's.

 

This new way of doing things, also requires a new way of thinking about problems, approaching and solving them. The people most resistant to change will be the dyed-in-the-wool, can't teach an old dog new tricks developer. Their wisdom is always valuable, but the problem with taking up computing as a career, is that every once in a while, to remain current at least, you have to ditch profuse investment in one technology(ies) and the time spent learning it, and adapt. If you get a compting degree and are out of work for 5 years through illness for example, you have a greater challenge getting employment than an accountant or mathemetician for instance.

 

Obviously database adminstrators deplore this architecture, and will prefer stored procedures, but I find them ( some DBA's) like aristocratic land owners. The last thing you will find is them (aristocrats) relinquishing any of their land for sale or otherwise. DBA's are the same in that they will not have their stored procedures taken away, and will much prefer you 'linq to them instead'.

 

I find WPF a-ma-zing. Look at the carousel by Karsten Januszewski. This is what presentation layer heavyweights Infragistics are copying implementing in their WPFBeta. I think the carousel will present a new refined way of navigating data. The implementation possibilities are endless. I think that will will be taken up in line of business applications as well. If you look at Infragistics, Devexpress, Component Source, Component Factory, Syncfusion, Janus sys etc, they all have had an easy ride. Mimick the latest Office offerings and sell them at a markup. I won't diminish their efforts here because it takes oodles of code to acheive the rendering of a datagrid view for instance, but they have not been creative here. They have merely augmented the available controls. The rules of the game are changing with WPF and they are going to have to come up with new interface designs on their own, not just rely on an Outlook collapsable navigation bar (a few nicely coloured buttons that collapse and hold a tree view), and an enhanced datagrid view.

 

WWF has been less easy to implement. I agree with the idea in principle, and everything I am doing seems to fit in the workflow paradigm. The only problem is that even creating a hello world application commences with an anonymous delegate. WWF is not really exciting to learn, albeit at a more abstract, less imperative level. I cannot think of a single redeeming feature apart from it's an excellent programming model. Are there many of you implementing this in production? Couple this with the Model View Controller here and here, even as an architect there is a lot to get your head around. Some of this stuff is really quite dull and difficult to get excited about (learning wise), however powerful it may me.Parellel Computing is inescapable as we are all going to have to adapt to it and then early adopters will have more performant code. Retailers no longer sell single core machines.

 

Are your up to date, or are you lagging behind?

 

 

 

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