The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Whidbey and Yukon delayed...again

Whidbey and Yukon delayed...again

http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5172166.html?tag=st_lh

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Apart from the 3 year upgrade licence debacle, and its unlikely any MIS manager will look favourably on signing a similar deal again, it raises the issue of the product lifetime again in that SQL 2005 will only just be getting established before support is removed for SQL 2000.

If products are going to die in this way then its going to seem reasonable to some large organisations that they get critical source view of those products.

Simon Lucy
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Now if they had told me three months back I would've saved that MSDN subscription fee for 2004...

Chris Nahr
Thursday, March 11, 2004

I wouldn't worry on the MSDN front, I'm pretty sure there will be another beta this year. My guess is July for TechEd europe.

Peter Ibbotson
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Maybe it is time to decouple the schedules for Whidbey from Yukon if that would help. I can live with SQL Server 2000, but I would love to have Whidbey out sooner.

I know I know, it would probably lead to .NET 2.1 coming out 6 months after .NET 2.0, which has its downsides also.

Just me (Sir to you)
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Oooh, this morning I just attended Whidbey and Yukon introduction at Microsoft Singapore. They said that the release date would be announced this week. I don't believe that it will come up this fast. I like the new features from Yukon, the integration of SQL Server and dotnet framework. Therefore I can use C# class to manipulate the data directly in SQL Server (no longer have to depend on T-SQL). For the whidbey, most of the improvements are cosmetic. They have applied some features from Webmatrix, where now you can work directly on the code (no longer code behind), also built-in webserver, etc. They also give code snippets (about 200-300 snippets) to make the life of developer easier. The master page template is also useful (although it is not fantastic)

Too bad!

Richard Sunarto
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Maybe if they marketed less and coded more.

Krag
Thursday, March 11, 2004

That's an intelligent statement Krag, because I bet the coder's are the ones doing the marketing.

Elephant
Thursday, March 11, 2004

The presentation and code will be posted on www.activedevelop.com

By the way, I am not associated with those trainers. They are Independent Software Consultant who often do presentation in Microsoft Singapore to evangelize dotnet.

note: If you visit the website, you will find a picture of of cruise liner. Yes, they will have training on the ship for 4 days. Any takers???

Richard Sunarto
Thursday, March 11, 2004

"Maybe if they marketed less and coded more."

They meaning Microsoft as an entity.

Krag
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Indeed, a cynic might note the fact that when delays are announced, the new date is just about a year off -- so don't delay signing up for another year of SA, or getting an MSDN subscription, or signing up for Empower...then 8 months later it's delayed for...but will come out in about 12 months. Microsoft has a very long history of overreaching and then underdelivering (relative to what they initially promised).

The tight coupling of Whidbey and Yukon is a questionable choice -- while it's nice that SQL Server shops that immediately upgrade will have the new functionality, the reality is that

-A lot of VS.Net users target Oracle, or non-database backed systems altogether, but they'd love a lot of the enhanced functionality of Whidbey.

-Of the SQL Server shops, the vast majority won't upgrade to Yukon for at least a year (especially given that it is vastly changed from SQL Server 2000, while 2000 was a mild improvement of 7). There are a tremendous number of shops still running SQL Server 7.

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, March 11, 2004

If the marketers at MS did any part of the coding I would guess the delays would be much, much longer.

Or are you proposing the "hiring 9 women to get that baby in one month" solution?

Thursday, March 11, 2004

"I bet the coder's are the ones doing the marketing."

The coders aren't doing the marketing, but a lot of the development work they do is to support the marketing. Now I've got to go use that voice recognition feature of Office XP that was so heavily promoted...

Dennis Forbes
Thursday, March 11, 2004

"Maybe if they marketed less and coded more."

Way OT here, but I heard an interesting comment once that Microsoft is actually not a brilliant marketing company, but rather is a brilliant merchandising company. I guess meaning that they don't employ brilliant advertising psychology to make consumers *desire* their products (everyone I know dismisses their addspeak as hype anyway), instead they are able to position their products as the strongest competitor in their relevent channels of consumption--witness buying a new PC at <insert big box retailer>, for example.

Sorry... it's early for me.

MacSqueeb
Thursday, March 11, 2004

It's worth it to me as long as they solidify the best feature in whidbey:

ObjectSpaces

Steve
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Whidbey is my favorite island here in the NW. AFAIK, it has been around here since the ice age, and has beatiful open sandy beaches to walk on. Unlike the San Juans where beaches and tide waters are "owned" privately and snobbery prevails. Also, Whidbey is easily accessible, whereas the SJ's are a pain in the a$$ on a holiday.

If you want some Whidbey, its right here and not going anywhere soon. :)

hoser
Thursday, March 11, 2004

Why the fuck do I have to wait for generics because SQL Server isn't ready yet? This infuriates me.

Right now I use my own strongly-typed collections. However, it's a laborious process. It stings to know that when .NET 2.0 is released, all the custom strongly-typed collections I've been making will be wasted effort.

Richard P
Thursday, March 11, 2004

At the risk of repeating myself...
http://www.ericjsmith.net/codesmith/

Chris Nahr
Friday, March 12, 2004

Yay. I already have a macro recorded and fine-tuned for generating strongly-typed collections.

The problem is that for each strongly-typed collection, I still have to add an additional class. That class takes up space in the documentation and in the developer's RAM, so-to-speak. It's another class that the developer has to learn.

Furthermore, since CollectionBase implements IList, there's nothing you can do to stop people from trying to add any Object they want at run-time. You can implement IList.Add(Object) yourself, but you either have to throw an exception (runtime error) or silently not add the Object the caller just added.

Generics will be a huge, huge help here. I'm pissed that I have to wait for generics because MS doesn't have SQL Server ready.

Richard P
Friday, March 12, 2004

Richard, did you look at CodeSmith?

CodeSmith collection templates do NOT use CollectionBase, they're built from scratch and they don't accept objects that are incompatible with the collection type. You'll get an InvalidCastException if you try that.

And while you do have to generate & add a separate class for every element type, they all work identically so I'm not sure why the developer would be bothered. 20 differently typed ArrayLists aren't any harder to use than a single untyped ArrayList.

Chris Nahr
Saturday, March 13, 2004

"That's an intelligent statement Krag, because I bet the coder's are the ones doing the marketing."

Speaking of intelligence, why would you post something so incredibly antagonistic? You know what he meant. Stop trying to boost your own ego by out of context "nit-picking".

Anonymous
Sunday, March 21, 2004