SBC DotNet Weblog

Sahil Malik's post on the performance of Reflection raises some issues. While Reflection can bring in the power of extensibility ('loose coupling via Interfaces') it comes at the cost of performance (as pointed out by Sahil). Justin Gehtland's example of extensibility using Factory methods and XML config files concludes with -  "That means you shouldn't do everything via reflection, but its judicious use for something like loading a dynamically assigned class at runtime (but binding it statically to a known interface) is perfectly reasonable, especially if you are talking about a modern distributed application, where the two more important criteria for boosting performance are limiting round trips on the network and minimizing hits to the database. If you can solve those problems, then maybe you can think about how a little reflection affects performance. I find that extensibility is usually a more important factor for me."

The March '05 issue of INETA Newsletter has a nice short interview with C++ Guru Kate Gregory. Kate shares some of her opinions on C++ in a managed world -  "I actually prefer VB to C# because I never drift off into C++ by accident." I can relate to that!

My favorite Irish blogger Paschal has expressed some discontent about the recent MVP awards. With tech volunteering: there is much to learn in addition to giving it back to the community - improving leadership and communications skills, to name a few. One of my most enjoyable volunteer jobs was to teach senior citizens how to use the Internet at my local library. To see them do and learn how to send emails to their grand-kids, track their pension investments or a retired art school-teacher surf to the Louvre website brought an inner joy. But I learned a lot from that experience as well - it improved my communications skills. For me to translate technical knowledge in very simple English terms was something tremendous.

OReilly has a new book out - Visual Studio Hacks 'Tips and Tools for turbocharging the IDE'. With 5 example hacks shown (in pdf).

 ZDNET reports: An ex-Groove Networks executive suffered a legal setback on Friday in his bid to block Microsoft's takeover of his former company. [via Glenn Roncal in Gv3 Developer Groove Space].

  A short (6-ques) INETA Survey on Interop may also win you a $100 ThinkGeek certificate [via The ServerSide.Net].

There is an ongoing battle in the world of SOA - it primarily hovers around the competing architectures of ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and SOA Fabric. LooselyCoupled follows the battle with some insightful posts and on the other side Dave Chappell debunks some of the myths pertaining to ESB. Dave also explains Microsoft's position on ESB.

With reference to a prior posting - here's an update on CodeZone from Chris Pels (INETA Board Member). There is a bigger picture and the use of Federated Community Services which puts it all under one umbrella.