School day

Elias went to school today, and even though there were just a few dramatic declarations of "I don't want to go to school!" early on, he ended up voluntarily leaving the house, getting into the car, and (Amy tells me, because I wasn't there) entering the classroom, all without a single tear. Well, the parents may have shed a few.

From his and the guide's report, Elias was involved and happy in class. We had been preparing for the worst -- and apparently there was at least one other child who cried his heart out when left in that Mommy-less environment -- so we are on the moon that the very first day went so well. I'm very proud of Elias for being so brave and excited about school!

Out, out damn carpet wrinkle!

I've been skeptical of LINQ to SQL from the beginning. There is quite a bit of history (to understate) of attempts to "solve" the problem of the impedance mismatch between object-oriented applications and relational databases, and, like pushing down a carpet wrinkle, the problem never seems to go away, it just pops up somewhere else.

Now that the evidence is starting to come in, I can stop nursing my irresponsible speculation. And the web is confirming my suspicions:

1 - Scott Guthrie's most excellent introduction to LINQ to SQL is not one long post, nor three or even five long posts, but NINE long posts. Cancel my meetings, I've got a sharper axe!

2 - The stuff hasn't shipped and here's a very nice "gotchas" post. Turns out you have to know what's happening behind the scenes or your pleasant-looking C# will translate into horrendous SQL, after all.

3 - There seem to be about 3000 sessions on LINQ and the Entity Framework at this year's Dev Connections conference in Vegas.

Not to say LINQ to SQL isn't perhaps an improvement over classic (tempus fugit!) ADO.NET for many situations. But when I see a new subculture of support forming for an upcoming technology, I may just wonder if the previous stuff I'm used too isn't so bad.

To my mind, even more exciting than expressing queries in C# so that at run-time they can be automagically mapped to SQL queries, is expressing queries in C# that don't get mapped or translated at all, they just are what they are and do what they say.

Trojan Horse 1.0 released

Silverlight 1.0 is released, and official Microsoft-Novell support for Silverlight on Linux is announced. From my point of view 1.0 is not exciting, because it's for building media players, not "real" applications. But version 1.1 is coming up fast, which means .NET+XAML will soon be running on the client. Every client: XP, Vista, Mac, Linux, and mobile devices -- if Scott Guthrie is to be believed, and he seems to be the single most dependable developer-liason Microsoft has.

Bottom line: in two years AJAX apps will seem about as flashy and hip as a 1995 web site feels today. I still wonder if/when Google will stick a toe in the .NET water.