DonXML Blog

It seems that a lot of people have heard about attribute based programming, but never really get a chance to use it.  I started a thread over on GDN looking for different things people have done with it, but to my surprise most haven’t added it to their set of tools.  So I was asked to document one of the ways that I use attribute based programming. 

I know that the majority of readers are developers, but sometimes it is good to look around and check out some IT management articles.  I subscribe to the quarterly McKinsey Reports, and they usually have one article on IT management trends.  This quarter’s article focuses on Recentralizing IT.  It’s a good read, especially in light of the previous Longhorn discussions I’ve had.

Matthew Nolton reminded me that I never followed up on what happened with my MSDN Subscription Renewal.  I wound up purchasing a license from vLane, via their eBay auction (it was a couple bucks cheaper from their eBay auction versus the price on their site).  It went really smooth.  I was wondering how I was going to pay because I bought thru eBay, but all they did is give me a discount number to enter into their site.  After about 72 hours, I still hadn’t received an email from MSDN, so I gave them a call, and seems that MSDN has some problems with emails and renewals, you might not always get one.  But they did confirm that I was good thru next year, and later that day I got an email from MSDN welcoming me.  Funny thing is that even later in the day, I got another from MSDN reminding me that my license was going to expire the end of the month.  I logged into the MSDN Subscription site without a problem on the 1st, so everything looks good.

Well, I’m not at TechEd this year, but home and busy working.  The current project at the moment is trying to abstract out SAS and make it look and act like a regular data provider.  For those of you that don’t have to interop with SAS, consider yourself lucky.  It’s about the most closed, prominent, business software that I can think of.  If it wasn’t for the FDA basically requiring Pharmas to use the thing, I can’t see how they would ever be able to stay in business.  Not that it is a bad piece of software, it just does not play well with others.  As long as you stay in the SAS world, it is fine, but to try to integrate it into another platform and you are in for trouble.  So, to remove most of the development related issues, I’m busy trying to make it look like a regular data provider to the .Net developer.  This means creating Connection, Command, Parameter, and DataAdpater classes that inherit from the base System.Data interfaces, and then implementing all the interop code.  These classes are then abstracted again by my Data Access Layer, so that the business object developers don’t need to learn specific data providers.  After I get this done, I’ll eventually create a web service wrapper for the DAL so that even non .Net developers can work with SAS, and not have to learn how to handle the interop.

If you are taking advantage of the new skinable properties of ScottW’s weblog engine, you have to thank him for embracing CSS based layouts, instead of the old Table based layouts.  It is not always easy to unlearn old habits, and by ScottW actions, a lot more people are learning the beauty of CSS based layouts.

Just a reminder that the Software Legends Night is coming to Morris Plains, NJ, tonight.

Well, he did respond to the posts Rob Green, Frans Bouma and I made, but his answer is more vague than my initial response (if that’s possible):

Ron Green (SlightlyBent) asks this question on his blog, and Robert Scoble is going to try to get an official answer from Microsoft.  But I’m going to go out on a limb here and tell you what I think.  Basically, it’s as dead as COM is.  Now I know that the answer may seem pretty cut and dry, but it really isn’t.  You really have to go back to Don Box’s December 2000 House of COM MSDN article to get an answer to the question, “Is COM dead?”  The last paragraph sums it up: