.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

From Monday to Thursday I'll be in Chicago getting some deep Team System training, courtesy of Microsoft and IMG, given the short notice and being August my trip will be long: Quito-Bogotá-Miami-Chicago but I'm sure the training will be well worth the effort (besides I'll get some miles...) I'll try to blog about the training as it goes.

Now this is a place I would really like to work at. First thing that came to my mind: PHP as a front-end to a WCF business backend, second thing: Mono 2.0. I really hope Port 25 thrives!

is an object oriented dynamic language which has became popular of late (along with Ruby). Beta 2 of Python 2.5, the official implementation, has just been released. Further, beta 9 of IronPython, a .NET implementation, has also been released, on schedule with the plans of having a 1.0 release this summer. It seems like, more sooner than later, we'll have to learn a dynamic language so it's going to be a good idea to download IronPython and give it a try.

Richard Monson-Haefel is a noted J2EE author, in this article he says:

This is actually Beta 3 of Mono 1.2, some highlights (according to the official announcement):

Say you're away from home and just have to compile some lines of code to prove a theory, how do you do? Easy: browse to http://www.caller.me.uk/Compilr/, type or paste your lines and the code is compiled in a far and away server. It sounds like a strange proposition to me, but who knows, may be there are reams of programmers with Internet access that don't have a compiler at hand... Where's the money in the site? Advertising of course (Google is now generating some really weird spawn.) For the time being, they offer you C#, VB.NET, C, and Fortran compilers. Come to think of it, if they offer a few exotic languages like Lisp, Prolog, or APL, I may very well give it a try...

You would imagine that topics like authentication (who you are) and authorization (what you are allowed to do), should be by now: a) solved and easily explained; b) standardized. In truth, the latter is a little more truth than the former, but at any rate if you want to understand these subjects you face a real alphabet soup and an entangled concept diversity, with each such concept apparently entitled to a tome by itself. Being 2006, authentication and authorization are still complex and not well understood topics, and, as a consequence, more than a few systems re-invent (poorly and weakly) the wheel.

This is not really news as the driver has been available since April: Npgsql is an ADO.NET data provider written in C# that enables any .NET application to work with Postgresql 7.x and 8.x. You can download the provider from here.