Paul Ballard's WebLog

Since posting my response to Rob's blog in the wee hours this morning I've gotten some pretty good feedback including a response from Rob himself asking me to "Show Him The Money" pointing out that nobody is doing smart clients, at least for consumers.  Before I get into that though, let me try to dispell another web application myth.

My friend and colleague Rob Howard recently posed the question on his blog, “Are Smart Clients a Dumb Idea?”  In his post he recanted his earlier statements regarding the adoption of smart clients and now is convinced that web based applications written with the magic of AJAX are indeed the future.  In this post, I hope to bring him, and the rest of the AJAX Hip-Mo-Tized world back to some semblance of reality.

While doing a bit of reading in preparation for a rather lengthy blog post I'm working on I found this hilarious site that lets you generate your own VC friendly company name and product.  I'm pretty sure this is what the Vonage guys used to come up with their spiffy new name.

There has been quite a bit of noise lately over Microsoft’s recent “Live Services” announcement, most of which was caused by Microsoft’s choice to use AJAX, a cutting edge technology if you happen to be stuck in 1998.  Those of us currently residing in reality, also known as the end of 2005, remember that client-side Javascript is more browser slight-of-hand than an architecture on which to build enterprise applications.  But the fanfare went on and the browser addicts once again felt justified in killing off usability in the name of a myth called “ease of deployment”.  Even Rob Howard, a generally very smart guy, is ready to call for the end of Smart Clients.  But if you take a closer look at the functionality of Microsoft’s Live Services what you’ll find is that the real power comes from Smart Clients, not AJAX.

Let's say that against your better judgement and the urging of your closest family members you do the unthinkable and actually purchase a retail computer from HP.  Make absolutely sure that you take any driver CDs or files from hidden partitions and burn them onto 10 different CDs.  Put one in a bank deposit box, send 5 of them to your closest friends, and bury the rest in your yard!  Because if you ever lose them,  you're going to pay!

The Dallas Visual Studio 2005 Launch Event is going to be held on November 30th at the Dallas Convention Center.  With more than 3,800 attendees this will be the second largest launch event in the country.  Attendees will get to see the latest in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server technologies and might even be able to pick up some goodies as well.  I'll be there in the "Ask The Experts" section, so if you have any questions feel free to drop by and introduce yourself!

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that Parallel activities in Windows Workflow Foundation are not in fact asynchronous.  Since investigating I've seen that several people have mentioned this fact but I thought a more descriptive example might be in order.

I've received quite a few requests for a C# version of the sample code that came with my article.  So, here is a C# version of the 1.1 custom collection.  If I get inundated with requests I'll port the 2.0 version, but otherwise it's probably not necessary.  There are a couple of changes that you should be aware of.