Trying to understand the versioning “mess” that is .NET 2015

Right now there is a lot of talk about the next iteration of the .NET platform, and the different versions and runtimes that is about to be released. Unfortunately, it has turned into a quite complicated situation when it comes to the versions of things being released.

I get quite a few question about how it all fits together, and I try answering them as best as I can. However, as the question keeps popping up over and over again, I thought I would sum up the situation as I have understood it.

Disclaimer: Everything in this post is “as I have understood it”. I am not working for Microsoft, and I am in no way or form guaranteeing that this is the right description. This is just how I understand the situation. Hopefully it is fairly close to the real world.

More...

Another conference, another keynote…

Ok, so I have just been at my first TechEd keynote on the nothern hemisphere and probably my 50th keynote all in all…and to be honest, it doesn’t get that much better… And by that, I don’t mean that keynotes don’t get better than the one I just saw. I mean that they don’t get better with time… Ler

In this case, it was pretty uneventful. A lot of IT-Pro stuff, which is to be expected at TechEd, but also a bit of Dev-Div stuff from Scott Gu. So even if most of it was out of my interest zone, there were a few cool things. Such as the announcement of pricing changes on Azure, as well as changes in licensing for using MSDN licenses in Azure for dev/test.

The biggest announcement being that shut down instances in Azure will not be charged in the future, and charging will be done per minute instead of per hour. So this makes for a great dev/test platform that won’t rack up too much cost as one can shut down instances when not in use, without having to delete them and thus cause long startup times…

Ok, that was about all I could get out of the keynote… Sorry if it wasn’t a lot, but at least it was something…

Next up on my personal schedule is to run off to the Microsoft Solution Experience stand and answer questions about Windows 8 development…

Where are we going?

Yesterday I saw a few blog posts coming online, talking about the future of Microsoft’s development sphere. There was one from Scott at OdeToCode that talked about the future of .NET, and that open source might be the the thing that “saves” it. And then there was another one called “The Dying Platform: .NET”. I decided to highlight the later one on Twitter and Facebook, and got a few different replies. All of them more or less solidifying my beliefs, so I decided to write this post about it… And by that, I mean that people with a close connection with Microsoft and/or long experience of the Microsoft spehere, said it was wrong, and the more “regular Joe” developers said that it was spot on…

First of all, due to the fact that a couple of people fairly close to me told me that it was wrong, I will start off by explaining what parts of that second blog post I agree with, and why.

More...

A Rant About Unit Testing and Stuff

I think it is time for another rant. Actually I really don’t, as my blog is supposed to be about coding, not about me ranting… It seems like my blog has slowly gone from code centric posts, to ramblings of a grumpy Microsoft developer. Sorry about that, and I promise to focus more on code in the future…

Lately I have travelled around and talked at a bunch of conferences, and heard a lot of really smart people talk about a lot of really cool things. This got me thinking a bit about my own way of dealing with new technology, as well as about my own way of doing things today… The result of this thinking is that I am going to try and make 2 changes. First, I am going to try and get out and about and try more new stuff. More frameworks, technologies and maybe even more languages… Hopefully this will fuel my blog with more code related posts as well as interesting revelations and thoughts. Secondly, I might have revisit my stance on unit testing and TDD…

More...

Another good conference at an end

So, here I am sitting at the speakers lounge at DevConnections at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas after another great conference. It is amazing the level American conferences keep. The speakers are great, the conferences are well organized and everything just flows. And it is pretty cool to be able to share the speakers lounge with people like John Papa, Dan Wahlin, Paul Litvin, Juval Löwy and Scott Hanselman. It is also very humbling. These presenters are really the cream of the crop, and I am still kind of wondering what I did here. But I got to do it, and had a lot of fun, so I won’t complain.

More...

Software Passion Summit – The Second Day

The second day of the Software Passion Summit started with an inspiring talk by Gojko Adzic. He talked about a lot of different areas including software developments and requirements gathering. A few of his points were very interesting and lingered in my mind…

Gojko said that absence of bugs is not a guarantee for software quality, and good software quality doesn’t mean that the software is bug free. I find this very interesting, and true. I love that someone stands up and says it out loud. Perceived quality, which is the most important thing, is not dependent on the software being bug free. I think that if you deliver an awesome experience and a good set of features, most user are willing to ignore a lot of bugs as long as they aren’t showstoppers.

More...

Software Passion Summit

So…the conference has started, and first up to talk was Jan Bosch, who spoke about software development from a business point of view, sort of. Jan is a professor of software engineering at Chalmers University of Technology here in Gothenburg.

His talk was quite interesting and entertaining, and focused on one really important point. A point that seems to be re-occurring in a lot of IT talks today. And that point is speed. Speed is key in software development today.

There are a lot of players out there, and being first or at least early, and staying there, is really important. And unless you are moving as fast as the rest of the industry, or faster, you are already dead, you just don’t know it yet.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to have the best product, or be first to succeed, but as long as you have an adequate product and you are up at the front with the others, or ahead, you have a great chance of winning. If you on the other hand have a great product, but release it to late, you are screwed…

More...

Software Passion Summit

I have just arrived in Gothenburg to speak at the Software Passion Summit conference. It is an interesting conference with a very “wide” selection of content, covering everything from testing to cloud and methodology to mobile as well as from JavaScript and C# to RegEx and Java.

I’m really looking forward to attending a bunch of the sessions, and I will try to add some of my comments here on the blog at the end of the day.

More...

Windows 8 TTT First Day Summary

Ok, so the first day of the TT has passed, and I guess it is time to sum it all up… Well, my impressions of the first day is that I feel that both VS11 and Windows 8 has matured a lot between the releases. It feels a lot more solid, and I am actually going to switch my private laptop, and maybe even my work one over to Windows 8 as soon as I get back.

It is hard to pinpoint what exactly make me say this, but it just feels a lot more solid. It seems to have a lot less “quirks” and the errors you get while coding against it seems a WHOLE lot better. Having that said, we haven’t actually coded a whole lot today. It has mostly been walkthroughs of features and design and so on. Basically covering the same thing that was covered during BUILD last year…

So unfortunately there isn’t a whole lot to sum up. Nothing really new at all…

More...

On the way again…

I barely managed to get back from this years MVP Summit before I am on my way again. I landed in Stockholm yesterday at 11:30, and it is now 15:30 and I am back on the train to the airport…

This time I am headed to Amsterdam for a “Train the Trainer” for Windows 8. For those of you who do not know what TTT events are, they are basically a way for Microsoft to educate trainers on their new platforms, making sure that there are trainers out there ready to educate people when their new platforms launches. I personally think this TTT is going to be extra interesting as it is covering the next version of Microsoft’s biggest product (Windows…duh), which just a couple of days ago was released as a “consumer preview” version. And this time, Microsoft is handling the whole thing a bit differently than normal, so it is quite exciting…

More...