“Visual Studio Magazine” Merges Print Operations with “Redmond Developer News”

According to Michael Desmond, founding editor of Redmond Developer News and editor-at-large of Redmond magazine, RDN, the twice-monthly publication for development managers, will be integrating its print operations into VSM commencing in February 2009.

Michael’s Better Together: RDN Merges with Visual Studio Magazine post of 1/30/2009 for RDN’s Desmond File blog explains:

[Y]ou'll see a lot of RDN content in future issues of VSM. RDN Senior Editor Kathleen Richards (krichards@1105media.com) will be in charge of running the RDN Web site, RedDevNews.com. Tuned to the needs of software development managers, RDN online will continue to offer a unique blend of news, opinion and technology guidance. I expect good things out of that site in the weeks and months to come. …

VSM, of course, is the leading publication for enterprise-oriented professional developers. The publication actually dates clear back to 1991, when it was launched as Basic Pro Magazine and later became Visual Basic Programmers Journal. Today, VSM delivers practical, proven and unbiased how-to articles and insight for enterprise development professionals working with Microsoft tools and technologies. VSM and RDN have been sibling publications since 2007, after 1105 Media purchased VSM's parent company, FTP.

The decision to combine RDN with the VSM print publication reflects the fact that developers need context. They need to know about the tools they are mastering so they can make better decisions on how to use them. To that end, future issues of VSM will deliver the kind of in-depth features, timely technology and product news, and expert insight that you've seen in RDN since 2006.

My 1105 Media Acquires Fawcette Technical Publications' Assets post of 1/3/2007 covered 1105 Media’s purchase of FTP operating assets, which included VSM, the VSLive!, Software Architecture Summit, Web Design World, and Web Builder 2.0 conferences, and Java Pro, Window Server System Magazine, and Enterprise Architect online magazines, and Insight newsletters, including .NETInsight, JAVAInsight, XML & Web Services Insight, Software Architecture Insight, and Web Design & Development Insight.

I’ve been a VBPJ and VSM contributing editor for about 10 years and have written 21 VSM cover stories and countless other Database Design and related articles over the past five years. I’ll miss my close relationship with former VSM editor-in-chief Pat Meader, about whom Michael writes:

Finally, those of you who are VSM readers are likely familiar with outgoing Editor in Chief Patrick Meader and Managing Editor Guy Wright. It's been my pleasure to work on occasion with Patrick over the past two years, and I've respected him deeply for his intelligence, composure and commitment to principle. Patrick is as dedicated and forthright a person as I've ever run across in my 16 years in IT publishing, and his success over the years at VSM is testament to that.

RDN’s Kathleen Richards will serve as VSM’s executive editor. I’ve written several RDN stories for Kate and have enjoyed the chance to publish occasional RDM-style technology news pieces in addition to VSM’s traditional “how-to” programming articles with fully functional Windows and Web forms sample projects, such as the OakLeaf Systems Azure Table Services Sample Project (for the February 2009 VSM issue) and OakLeaf Systems Azure Blob Services Test Harness (for a later 2009 issue.) VSM founder Jim Fawcette paraphrased Steve Ballmer’s “Developers! Developers! Developers!” rant with his demand for “Code! Code! Code!” in VSM stories.

It will be interesting to see how code-centric VSM readers react to RDN content juxtaposed with C# and VB articles as in the January 2009 issue’s “Partition Web Apps Intelligently” cover story by Steve Michelotti and “Connect to the Cloud” interview with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Robert Wahbe by Jeffrey Schwartz and Michael Desmond. Let me have your reaction to this event in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio Magazine,VSM,Redmond Developer News,1105 Media,Cloud Computing,Windows Azure,Azure Storage Services,Azure Table Services

Tech●Ed 2007 Coverage from FTPOnline

Redmond Media Group's FTPOnline columnists (including me) are covering Tech●Ed 2007—the 15th Anniversary of Microsoft's yearly technical conference—for the .NET Insight newsletter's "Tech●Ed Show Daily" issues. (Updated June 8, 2007.)

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From the June 5, 2007 .NET Insight "Tech●Ed Show Daily" issue:

Muglia Maps Microsoft's 'Journey Towards Dynamic IT'

The traditional "vision" keynote gives way to optimization, virtualization and standardization of existing IT infrastructure along with new agile business processes and modeling to reverse the 70/30 ratio of IT maintenance to new solution spending at Tech●Ed's 15th anniversary.

Hot at Tech●Ed 2007: SQL Server 2008

The next version of SQL Server will deliver native data types for documents, filestreams and geocoding, provide policy-based management, support the Entity Data Model (EDM) and Language Integrated Query (LINQ), and integrate with Microsoft's enhanced business intelligence (BI) offerings.

Click here for a table of Tech●Ed sessions about SQL Server 2008 and implementing business intelligence projects.

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From the June 7, 2007 .NET Insight "Tech●Ed Show Daily" issue:

Hot at Tech●Ed 2007: Introducing the Entity Framework and LINQ

The Entity Framework (EF) and Language Integrated Query (LINQ) are two new technologies in Visual Studio 2008 that form one of the Pillars of SQL Server 2008 (formerly "Katmai"): Dynamic Development. Both play nicely with SQL Server 2005 and 2000, too.

Click here for a table of Tech●Ed sessions about the Entity Framework and LINQ.

Exploit SQL Server Compact Edition and Occasionally Connected Systems

SQL Server Compact Edition v3.1 and v3.5's free license covers deployment on Windows PC clients as well as devices, so you can take advantage of this lightweight, in-process relational database as a local data cache and automatically synchronize its data with a back-end SQL Server 200x instance.

Click here for a table of Tech●Ed sessions about SQL Server Compact Edition, data synchronization, and occasionally connected systems.

Video: Preview SQL Server 2008's Database Engine (01:04:00)

Christian Kleinerman, group program manager of Microsoft's Relational Engine Team, offers a first look at SQL Server 2008, formerly code named "Katmai." Specifically, his presentation at VS Live! Orlando delivers a high-level overview of enhancements to the relational database engine. (Taped May 8, 2007.)

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Note: Visual Studio Magazine has become a controlled-circulation publication. Sign up now for your free subscription.

Click here to sign up for any or all of Redmond Media Group's Insight Newsletters:

• .NET Insight—Takes subscribers through the maze of Visual Studio and .NET technologies, from development tools and platforms to hosted Web services and migration strategies. Published weekly.
• Java Insight—Delivers the latest news, trends and techniques for creating enterprise Java applications, including technologies like J2EE, Web services, JSP, wireless systems and much more. Published weekly.
• Web Design & Development Insight—Delivers proven tactics for creating intuitive and reliable sites. Published monthly.
• Enterprise Architect Insight—Provides enterprise architects with information on technologies and techniques that are shaping the design and integration of enterprise systems today. Published twice monthly.
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Technorati tags: TechEd 2007, SQL Server Katmai, SQL Server 2008, LINQ, LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, Entity SQL, eSQL, RedDevNews, 1105 Media, SQL Server Compact Edition, SSCE, Occasionally Connected Systems, OCS, Data Synchronization, Sync Services, Synchronization

LINQ Featured in Redmond Developer News

"Looking to LINQ: Will Microsoft's Language Integrated Query transform programmatic data access?" is the cover story for the April 2007 issue of Redmond Developer News. The story by Jeffrey Schwartz and Michael Desmond leads with a quote from Julie Lerman, who gained her introduction to LINQ at the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles:

"I was jumping up and down," recalls Lerman, who describes herself as an old FoxPro hand. ... "It's very powerful and it's a really important addition to the languages and to .NET," Lerman says.

If you don't catch the significance of "an old FoxPro hand" in the preceding quotation, you might not be aware that FoxPro, dBASE, Clipper and all other early xBase dialects supported query reserved words such as USE, LIST [ALL], REPLACE [ALL], and FOR as elements of the programming language in commands like the following:

USE employees
REPLACE ALL salary WITH salary * 1.1 FOR supervises > 0
LIST ALL fname, lname, salary TO PRINT

SELECT, FROM, WHERE, ORDER, BY, IN, and JOIN later became reserved words in Visual FoxPro's more expansive xBase dialect.

Similarly, LINQ supports SQL-like From, In, Join, Select, Where, and Order By instructions as C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 reserved words. One of the reasons I'm partial to LINQ is that I started my database programming career with dBASE III+ and later moved to Clipper.

"The View Beyond Redmond" section quotes Curt Cotner, an IBM Fellow and CTO for database servers:

"I don't think there's anything along the same lines in the Java world," he says. "I think this is an area Microsoft has innovated and gone in a direction that is different than a lot of the other programming languages have gone."

That praise comes from someone who would know. Regarded as one of the early innovators of relational database technology, Cotner is the chief architect of IBM's mainframe-based DB2 and the architect of database connectivity for IBM's WebSphere application server line.

The article also includes a LINQ FAQ by—and quotes from an interview with—Anders Hejlsberg.

Update 4/5/2007: Julie Lerman added her own post about the article.

Technorati tags: LINQ, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML, Anders Hejlsberg, RedDevNews, 1105 Media

Erik Meijer to Keynote QCon London Conference

Erik Meijer will deliver the "Democratizing the Cloud" keynote to the QCon Conference to be held March 12 - 16, 2007 in London. Erik, whom the conference management calls "the creator of LINQ," describes democratizing as:

[T]rying to stretch the .NET framework to cover the Cloud such that it will become possible to incrementally and seamlessly design, develop, and debug complex distributed applications using your favorite existing and unmodified .NET compiler and deploy these applications anywhere.

The Democratizing Backstory

You can preview Erik's keynote in a eponymous January 13, 2007 Channel9 video, and read a seminal January 24, 2006 post in Lambda the Ultimate: "Beyond LINQ: A Manifesto For Distributed Data-Intensive Programming." This post marks Erik's first known public use of the term democratizing in the context of programming distributed systems.

Erik runs Microsoft's Tesla incubation team that's tasked with democratizing the Cloud, "like Visual Basic democratized programming Windows many years ago." Erik chose VB as the project's language because "it's uniquely positioned" between strict, static-typed languages like C# and Java and loose lenient, dynamic-typed languages, such as Ruby and Python. The goal is to enable static typing when necessary and dynamic typing when appropriate.

One approach the Tesla team is investigating to give democratized VB applications greater reach is compiling CLR IL to JavaScript. An alternative is to compile IL to Perl 6 and then compile Perl to JavaScript with an existing implementation. The Perl 6 group also is working on compiling Perl 6 to the CLR IL.

Note: Another Tesla team incubation project is LINQ to XSD.

Update 3/16/2007: Read "LINQ 2.0" in Early Returns from QCon 2007, London, which provides links to reviews of Erik's keynote.

Update 4/24/2007: Read Mary Jo Foley's ‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? article about the "Live development platform" that Soma Somasegar plans to divulge at MIX 07. Read desicriptions of the four sessions that contain LINQ content in LINQ-Related Sessions at MIX 07.

Presentation: "Introduction to Microsoft Language Integrated Query (LINQ)"

Erik also will present a one-hour sales pitch for technical presentation about LINQ and Visual Studio vNext as part of the .NET Enterprise Development Track hosted by Ted Neward.

Note: Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for posting "Why the Sharp languages still matter" on her ZDNet All about Microsoft blog. The post includes links to her "Sharp Words with Microsoft's Erik Meijer" interview and "Look Sharp: How C#, F# and other experimental programming languages are driving next-generation development" article for Redmond Developer News.

Update 2/24/2007: Minor corrections.

Technorati tags: Erik Meijer, Democratizing the Cloud, LINQ, Tesla, QCon, VB 9.0