Friday Morning Thoughs (on the road edition)
Friday Morning Thoughts
Had a very cool meeting last night with some of the other "influential developers" in the Twin Cities region last night including Rocky, Scott ... We had a conference call with the SQL CLR PM team. Very interesting presentation and they have some very definite thoughts about where and how they wanted to see the technology used. Probably the best way to put, the thoughts about putting all of your application logic into CLR'ed procedures and functions keeps them awake at night. Rocky asked a great question: will how will Reporting Services work UDTs. Rocky could foresee business Analyst types wanting to drag and drop fields with a UDT onto the Report Design Surface. It sounds like we will have write at least expressions to do that. Another thing that I realized last night is that you could write a User Defined Aggregator just as effectively against the native SQL types as well UDTs. Okay, so that's sort of brain dead, I know, it just hadn't sunk in yet.
Dynamic Assembly loading in Yukon got a good bit of discussion too. This kind of can and kind of can't be done. Also, there isn't really a GAC concept for Yukon -- Everything is scoped to a specific database. This behavior might change in the future, but one of the PM talked about a major SQL Server client (on the order of 3000 applications using a large number of servers) who had been able to standardize everything but the amount of database hosted logic shared between applications. After all, it doesn't make sense to write a UDF for computing something like sales taxes and have to register individual copies of the functions in each database. But with Yukon, that'll seem to be the case. There was also discussion about remoting, binary serialization and serviced components. Most of that should work, but the important thing to keep in mind that is that not all of .NET as we know it today will be supported in process. For example, why would you need ASP.NET? Basically, you can expect to the see the core functionality with a tighter security focus. They described the secured model as a "walled garden." I'll have to steal, err, make reuse of that.
Two bummer events. First, I forgot to bring my camera along. Second, I had taken a ton of notes with w.Blogger. Went to save them but managed to hit the new button instead. Oh well, kiss that knowledge goodbye. I'm going to post a suggestion to the developers for a timed auto-save feature. Either that, or I'm going have to start composing in FrontPage... (I'd use Studio if it had near-real-time spell checking.)
Jeff Brand, our Developer Evangelist took the gang out for dinner after the meeting. Went to a fairly nice place called Majors. Pretty good BBQ and Summit's Extra Pale on tap. There's a Chili's by the Day's Inn I stayed at, too. Stopped in one more and to give Janell a call. Little did I realize it was two-fers night. Order one, get two. The most interesting thing they had on tap was Leinie's HoneyWeise. They also had a new (at least to me) AB product: Michelob Golden. It reminds me of just plain old Michelob though. Didn't need more than half of one of those.
I'm off to visit Midwest Supplies and Summit. See you on the other side.