Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• PDC05 - An Introduction to MSBuild

  Faisal Mohamood, a good friend, former colleague and more recently PM on the MS Build team, gave a great lunch session on the new MS Build System. It was originally scheduled for Day 1, but moved because the keynote ran so long. MS Build is the new build engine that ships with VS.NET 2005. It is based on a fully open and published XML file format and is completely customizable. You can extend the build process with managed code - adding your own tasks & loggers, for example. And more importantly, you no longer need VS.NET to build projects. (While it's true you could compile with just the SDK in the past, you couldn't compile existing projects). MS Build is built around three core concepts: Items Properties Targets Items are build artifacts on disk that can have rich metadata. Properties are statically defined scalars that can be used throughout the build process. The engine itself exposes a lot of built-in metadata. Targets are actions that can happen. You can use a predefined set... Posted Oct 08 2005, 08:17 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, PDC05

• What do you think about LINQ?

  Leon points out some LINQ love . Well, the article may be great, but I'm a bit more torn on the technology itself. The computer scientist part of me finds this very cool from an implementation perspective. The combination of anonymous types, lambda expressions, method extensions and a bit of compiler magic is a really neat do all of this. On the other hand, I'm still not sure I see the practical side of things. I cringe when I think of all the query logic that is going to be embedded in code. Actually, from this perspective my real problem is with DLINQ, not the LINQ syntax itself. That is, I really have no problem with a syntactic nicety on in-memory objects, I'm just a little more concerned when your code is so tied to an external data source. Yes, having the query as typed objects in code is better than having the query as a string. But really isn't the goal not to have the query in there at all? This is just terrible practice for any enterprise development. There is a reason we have... Posted Oct 07 2005, 08:49 AM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, PDC05