Where is the holistic vision?

Microsoft is needs a holistic view of their platforms and development tools. I didn't see that this week, I doubt any of us will.

What I did see was 7 data access techniques in various stages of ready now, coming soon, and coming much later:

  • Use a DataAdapter to issue SQL  or stored procedures. Useful for working with a DataSet and doing optimistic updates.
  • Use a DataReader to issue a SELECT or stored procedure to walk through rows 1 at a time. Used for fast streaming of read only data.
  • SqlDataSources. From what I can tell, this is a terrible thing. I've seen this in two places so I'm not sure they are the same. The first demo I saw of this it was just called a “Data Source“ It was in a windows forms application and it looks  like a typed dataset (and in fact is/uses them) but it also embeds SQL queries (and updates, inserts and deletes) into the actual typed dataset. But I use datasets through the various tiers of my application from UI to data access and I don't want this marshaled throughout the application. I talked to Paul Yuknewicz from the VB team about this. I told him it would be okay in the design time to do this - but you have to split these out into two classes. He said I could, but he couldn't show me. He said the typed data set and the data access classes could be in separate namespaces. When I told him I needed them in separately assemblies because my datasets go down to the win forms client, but the data access sits in my middle tier and hits the database. He took this as a good feature request, but he didn't give me a good feeling about it. I mentioned this to another guy on the Data team and he said that these Data Sources would not be for me. I suppose if you're building a dog house, it doesn't have to be well architected like a sky scraper. Unfortunately I've had to do many renovations of dog houses in the past.
  • You can now embed some of the logic you'd do post retrieval to massage some data into the database. Yes, create a C# stored proc and return the data that way. You probably want to do this if the processing reduces the amount of ASCII (or the visibility - plain text - no encryption) to be sent along the wire.
  • SQLXML - not new but improved and gaining momentum. Can you say new language to learn? XQuery, XPath. This is nice if the data you deal with outside of the database is in XML. Also good for doing master/detail updates in 1 round trip. I like this.
  • ObjectSpaces. I saw a preview of this at PDC 2 years ago. I'm going to another session to learn more details in an hour. It's changed since then but the message is the same. It's an Object to Relational mapping scheme. You define how your tables relate to your objects - and then you merrily use your objects and ObjectSpaces figures out the SQL to send to the database. Why would you do this? Well if your app embeds a lot of business logic in your objects - which it should damn it. This technique lacks SQL fidelity and you have little direct control over the SQL emitted. Hmm. If I don't know what SQL will be issued how will I determine the best indices? How does the SQL Server team feel about this? I've already heard from Michael Pizzo that you can't expect the same performance as native SQL.
  • WinFS. Longhorn includes a new file system. My interpretation is that it's less of a file system and more of an intermediate object model that sits over top of NTFS and the next version of SQL. WinFS let's you view your SQL data as files. A record is a file. Not all files become records though. (I can hear DBAs everywhere sighing). The idea here is to “give users excellent windows experiences“ by getting data out of the silos of applications and bringing it to the shell to be integrated between applications the way users want it. I like the idea in theory but the security aspects scare me a bit. The nice thing is that this is coming in Longhorn - a long time from now so we have time to think about this more...and for MS to try and get it right. You can bind controls in your forms to properties on files (which are records - so those are just columns). Where is the business logic in that tier? Welcome back client server. Not sure how this all works on a LAN.

I was also saw at least 3 user interface models:

  • Traditional Smart Client Window Forms. These don't' change much in Whidbey.
  • ASP.NET Web Forms. Changing a bit. Still HTML coded into an aspx file.
  • Avalon XAML Forms. See my previous post about this. The key point is that it attempts to bring the benefits of Web Forms to Windows Forms and vice versa.

Let's not get into Pocket PC, Smart Phones, WML, Tablet Ink or Media Center. That would make this blog more ridiculous than it already is. Suffice it say that each of these 3 user interfaces all have their own databinding techniques and they are all different. I saw some of the ASP.NET Whidbey two-way databinding today and its nothing like WinForms binding. It's like that team never talks to the windows team. Sigh.

What I didn't see was anything about COM+, Enterprise Services. Where the hell was COM+. Does that all disappear with Indigo? Indigo is only supposed to be a communication platform right?

I guess it's my job as an architectural consultant to value each of these technologies, how they fit together ultimately - and a road map for doing something useful today - that will be useful tomorrow. Nobody at Microsoft has done this yet.

The scary thing is that it seems like all these teams are working in silos and not talking to each other enough. Seems to be a theme. Don't get me wrong, the are doing fabulous stuff but everybody has a different way of doing things. It seems like they spend lots of time developing their technology but not enough time building real applications that sit on top of them.

The good news is that its early for a lot of this stuff and lots of time to fix it and get it right. A lot of Microsoft guys were seeing some of this stuff for the first time themselves.

I suspect that the MSDN Prescriptive Architecture Group has some work cut out for them.