.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

I just received an e-mail from Sybase inviting me to the Beta Program of its DataWindow for .NET, I don't know in the rest of the world, but in Ecuador PowerBuilder created a significant amount of followers in the years of C/S applications, mainly due to the power and flexibility of its DataWindow object. To this days in Ecuador, there is a lot of people using PB (or "Power" as it's usual called down here); when we show them our datagrid they react with diverse degrees and flavors of "but the DataWindow does it (better) already", so it'll be interesting to see how the .NET implementation comes.

In English, anyway: http://dotnetjunkies.net/Tutorial/77D4AFDC-585D-4539-A364-30028327FF14.dcik I'd love to have feedback!

I was discussing with a customer about the best way to design, code and use business validation logic. First of all, there were a number of decisions already made:

HP is about to launch Itanium down here in Ecuador. The MS subsidiary would like to show Whidbey on it, I've got the Whidbey and Yukon PDC bits but I don't know whether they run on Itanium. I want an Itanium :-(

I asked some friends what WinForms libraries they have used and which one they like the most. I didn't get that many answers but so far it seems like Developer Express is the favorite, followed closely by Janus (my personal pick). The key differentiator? With DevEx you can buy the source code. Infragistics, while mentioned, doesn't seem to have that many fans... Which one do you use?

I know, I know, micro-benchmarks are questionable, besides we are talking about early betas, etc. But I just couldn't resist making some small testing. First of all, a generic list of integers in Whidbey C#:

At PDC 2003 Anders Hejlsberg presentation on C# new features, somebody made a question like this "Can C# generics be used to implement covariance?" I didn't understand the question so I didn't pay too much attention to the answer. So what is covariance? Yesterday I remembered the incident (go figure why) and today I googled over and found this very nice although somewath old cow-based explanation. Ah, that is covariance, interesting concept. Now I remember the begining of Anders answer "Well, yes to a certain extent..." To what extent I'm not sure but I least now I understand the question...

I just downloaded from the Microsoft Beta site the Java Language Conversion Assistant 3.0 bits. Version 2 did a very decent job at converting "pure" business classes, not so much with front-end elements (servlets and JSP). JLCA 3.0 is reported to enhance this a lot, and also add support for things like JMS and EJBs. You can find some more info here. Hopefully I will find some time to play with it (alas, C# 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 and the rest of the Whidbey stuff is ahead on the queue...)