December 2007 - Posts
A timely article appeared in the NY Times today (link) regarding Parallel computing as the next key factor in keeping up with the ever demanding needs of getting things done faster. As the article points out, the single CPU processor can't address our needs for faster computational capability without literally burning up or melting. I've seen this personally with Vista and the stressing of the GPU on some older notebooks.
So, what's the solution, well, it's been around for decades, it's just now getting great support in .NET with the Parallel Extensions to .NET now in CTP form
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E848DC1D-5BE3-4941-8705-024BC7F180BA&displaylang=en
Check out the teams Blog here: http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam/
More importantly, check out Daniel Moth's screen casts (this guy rocks)...
http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/11/parallel-extensions.html
Now, what application will benefit from parallel processing? Physics still rules here, and all the issues of cross thread synchronization, concurrency, race conditions, deadlock, etc. - well, they all still exists. But the library is making some of the decisions (partitioning, communication, synchronization, etc.) for you and optimizing based upon the task at hand vs. the hardware present.
One thing to note is they've done tight integration with LINQ, which can provide strong candidates for parallel tasks against sets where the greatest results are gained with in memory processing.
Well, Verizon seems to be high jacking the search part of my web experience. And this is not just failed DNS lookup - these are 404 errors (not found) as well.
Which to me is really going to screw up support for all. I can see my 77 year Old Mother complaining that some web site that I know exists seems be lost in the ether when the "Can find - did you mean" crappy Yahoo search results comes back.
Really BAD Verizon - Wake UP!!!!
You can work-around it by changing the auto-assigned DNS servers in your router. That means you need to switch to static DNS and using the known dynamically assigned static DNS ip addresses, you just up the last octet by 1
So, in my configuration shown below my new "static" DNS servers would be 71.250.0.14 and 68.238.96.14 respectively - and to be sure "ping" the addresses or do a lookup with nslookup or a similar tool. You want to make sure they're listening or you'll have more frustrations. I had at first, used 13 as the final octet - didn't ping and no lookups worked...
Instructions here:
http://netservices.verizon.net/portal/link/help/item?case=dns_assist&partner=verizon&product=fios
Here's a cool tool that provides an interactive LINQ environment that you can use to develop queries against LINQ sources (SQL, Objects, XML, etc.).
If you're working with LINQ and need an environment that supports both expression and language statements in C# or VB.NET, this tool can handle both. The below shot is using C# statements.
A few bonus items included:
1. provides a view of both the resulting SQL and Lambda expressions used in the query.
2. Provides SQL execution as well
3. A whole bunch of samples for learning LINQ
http://www.linqpad.net/
Conceivably, you could leverage this in place of SQL Management Studio or for those still stuck on 2K, Query Analyzer....
What's up with the huge update? Turns out the biggest is Office 2007 SP1 at 390 Meg...
I'm guessing the Vista SP1 will be 3 Gig at this rate...
If you're installing Windows Server 2008 RC1 and expected to use WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 you'll need to wait until 12/11/2007...
It's blocked from running - I read somewhere it's due (WSS & MOSS SP1) December 11, 2007.
One thing I can say about SharePoint (WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007)development is it sucks. The tools are weak from creating to debugging. Something that literally took about 15 minutes in straight ASP.NET took 3+ hours yesterday.
So, I'm rethinking my perspective on SharePoint as an Application Platform when the applications are more complex than just managing lists or data direct in SharePoint, or Workflow involving SharePoint objects such as Lists, Documents, etc.
I'm coming away from this thinking that we perhaps build certain features straight on ASP.NET.
The biggest issue is the tools. They are not well integrated and productive and there is no debug support (simple) nor design time support. Basically, code - deploy - then look for errors - re-code - redeploy - then look for errors. Sucks. Feel like I'm back doing printf or debug.write statements all over again - which is what I'm doing.