Fingers Crossed for Microsoft's Oslo

As more details appear on Oslo I am hoping that Microsoft finally releases a true end to end SOA development platform that is productive and supports accepted best practice. Historically, Visual Studio tools, particularly on the web site, have been great for knocking up simple sites quickly but full short on the productivity front when building n-tier applications. Hopefully, the web service tier(s) it creates will be more than a simple re-presentation of the database. One thing that gives me hope is that both Don Box and Chris Sells are involved.

Biting the bullet

After much cajoling from friends I bowed to the pressure and agreed to start a blog to share some of my work, ideas and thoughts - however few and far between they are. I have resisted because I feel that, often, the subject cannot be justified in byte sized chunks and also misinterpretations can be read from print which would not have held as much weight if being delivered in a more interactive forum. A good example of this is this post by Eric Nelson(http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/archive/2008/07/25/the-reddit-effect.aspx). Knowing Eric I can see where he is coming from, but also how it can be (mis)read by others. Another reluctance to blog on my part is that, in my opinion, IT is overly testosterone-led with developer A saying why his tribe (using technology X) is better than developer B's tribe (with technology Y) and attempting to be the alpha male rather than providing reasoned arguments. Blogging encourages the sharing of ideas and knowledge because of the feeling of anonymity but exposes you more because you are not necessarily amongst friends.

Whatever happened to C@?

When C# was first announced by Microsoft it reminded me, in name at least, of C@ (pronounced 'cat') produced (if my memory serves me correctly) by AT&T. It must be almost 20 years since I saw a whitepaper on it and my memory is quite sketchy. The main feature that I remember is that it was designed to be portable across multiple platforms. I occasionally get reminded of it and attempt to locate any information about it with a couple of quick searches which are probably being flumoxed by containing the '@' symbol. Clearly, it never took off as a language but I would love to get hold of that whitepaper again for old time's sake.