Saturday, December 16, 2006

What's in a name?

And as long as I'm rambling. WinFx, Avalon, Atlas, and Indigo sounded a lot more hip and bleeding-edge than the stodgy names that are so long I don't even care to type them (okay, I really mean I don't care to look them up to make sure I get them right).

And Atlas didn't even make the cut for inclusion in the otherwise technically irrelevant grouping of .Net 3.0. Can we dump the hype for Workflow Foundation and swap in Atlas?

Go read No Silver Bullet and then run screaming when your boss mentions Workflow Foundation. I am perhaps biased by the multi-million, multi-year boondoggle that my company chased with BEA's Weblogic Integration 8.x. And the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". But neither is "unfounded opinion" the equivalent of "experience". Nor does a technology evangelist have your best interests at heart.

My ego was in no little way stroked that I got to say "I told you so" when our Architects eventually got chewed out for drinking BEA's Kool-Aid.

Oh please let this be the start of the end of web-enabled everything.

I'm excited about Avalon... err Windows Presentation Foundation. The advent of Ajax has and will continue to go a long way toward deadening the pain of web-based interfaces, but I'm still clinging tenaciously to the opinion that there are way too many web apps out there that have no business being web apps.

The New York Times has the perfect excuse for being a web site, and they never really tried to be a web app, but they've done a beautiful thing with the NYT Reader. Go check it out, even if you don't care for the paper. There need to be more apps like this. Good for you, NYT. Sorry the bottom is falling out of your business model.

And here's the beauty of the system. It requires "stuff" on your system to be installed for it to work. And it will handle it automagically and securely.

(Okay, "stuff" is the dubiously-named .Net 3.0 framework. But grandma doesn't need to even know that "stuff" is required. It "just works".)

Having less than a stellar experience with Vista 64

Haven't figured out what to call it yet. x64 Vista? 64-bit Vista? Vista 64? Eventually we'll just be calling it Windows, I suppose.

Anywho, I'm actually getting instant cold restarts (twice so far, just had it installed for a few days). And many, many apps just don't run right.

Sounds like this is going to be a slow, painful experience bringing the rest of the world up to 64 bits. I'm going to try reinstalling at 32 bits and see how many problems go away, or if it's just the hard-core security stuff built into Vista now. (I blame the cold boots on the 64-to-32 conversion it has to do, probably some device driver misbehaving....) But it seems that if the software wasn't written by Microsoft, it just doesn't behave right.

Interesting too that by default they have me running the 32-bit version of IE. I can run the 64-bit version, but it doesn't appear that I can make that my default program for web pages.

Quite the disappointing experience.