Take a gander at this little channel 9 video and Hear Scott Guthrie announce Microsoft's interest in bringing the Dot Net Framework to the Mac, I know its old but still promising.

Utah, They have a brilliant legislature.  Utah recently banned Keyword advertising on trademarked terms.  I am sure Microsoft and Google look forward to dealing with this.  The full stories are here and here.

I have no idea what Twitter is, I don't want to know.  But I hear they have scalability issues which raises a question at what time does a love for a language/platform interfere with your core business goals?  further more when should we as developers care?  Twitter seems to be infatuated with Ruby on Rails to the extent that Ruby is slow causes performance and scalability issues but Twitter seems to stick with it.

5 Question Interview with Twitter Developer Alex Payne

How has Ruby on Rails been holding up to the increased load?

By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right
now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues -
issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner
than I think we would on another framework.

The common wisdom in the Rails community at this time is that scaling
Rails is a matter of cost: just throw more CPUs at it. The problem
is that more instances of Rails (running as part of a Mongrel
cluster, in our case) means more requests to your database. At this
point in time there’s no facility in Rails to talk to more than one
database at a time. The solutions to this are caching the hell out
of everything and setting up multiple read-only slave databases,
neither of which are quick fixes to implement. So it’s not just
cost, it’s time, and time is that much more precious when people can[’t]
reach your site.

None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing
for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise. Once you hit a certain threshold of
traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that
Rails does for you (RJS, ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, etc.) or move
the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both.

It’s also worth mentioning that there shouldn’t be doubt in anybody’s
mind at this point that Ruby itself is slow. It’s great that people
are hard at work on faster implementations of the language, but right
now, it’s tough. If you’re looking to deploy a big web application
and you’re language-agnostic, realize that the same operation in Ruby
will take less time in Python. All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

Poor Ruby Slow But cool.  Twitter does seem to be looking for a Senior Engineer so maybe they will find their way off of the tracks and back into the boring but scalable world of DotNet and Java.  Job postings via blogs are interesting.  Especial when your end users us it. 

Anonymous said...

Could someone please take this job? The current team obviously has no idea how to solve twitter's scaling issues, despite saying they were working on it a week ago.

Even if Twitter finds some one tomorrow they are looking at months to correct this issue(if they are lucky).  I wonder how many, if any users this will cost them.

Does time to market matter more then performance and or usability?  It seems to me that having a lot of pissed off customers is not a good thing.  Assuming Twitter's developers knew they had issues when they started with this architecture.

It sounds like Microsoft's Consulting Services has extended  Mr.Walker's OR-LOS for Commercial Lending.  If you have the time (28 minutes) its worth a look but my overall impression is this could only be useful for a supper huge bank/lender that has the IT staff to pull it off otherwise its just overly complicated.  The question still remains how scalable and dependable this framework would be.

Video: Loan Origination Commercial Extension

Also according to Mr. Walker Microsoft will increase its participation with industry standards ( ie MISMO)

I found this query on Google Groups,

select sum(length) from syscolumns where id = object_id('Table Name')

Microsoft has announced that Expression Web is now available for all MSDN Premium subscribers.  Further more Expression Blend will be available shortly after the Expression Studio release.  Its been a long time coming but it's fantastic to see Microsoft change there mind based on our feed back.

You can find out more at

Scott Gu's blog or Somasegar's weblog ( who broke the news.)

I wanted to take a moment to point out my new favorite DotNet Function.  At VSLive in San Francisco I was introduced to System.IO.Path.Combine( path1, path2) as string.  I no longer have to deal with the logic of adding a trailing or leading slash when combing  file and directory locations.

I was taking a look at Scott Guthrie's Developing Data-Driven Web Applications using LINQ.  This is going to make life a little less dreary.

I like the second to the  last line results.Skip(startRow).Take(10);

If your in to "notepad" replacements TextPad is pretty good and as of March 6th 2007 they now have version 5.0 better yet is a free update for all 4.x users.

Download

Release Notes

BrokerUnivers reports

IBM Offering Origination Services

IBM has formed a new business unit that will specialize in mortgage origination services. IBM Lender Business Process Services Inc. "will enable mortgage lenders to replace the fixed costs associated with typical loan fulfillment operations with a variable cost framework," the company said. Services it will offer include loan application, underwriting, processing, vendor management, document preparation and loan closing, according to IBM.