Satter Ramblings

Gartner MAG

Gartner Inc, one of the leading information technology research and advisory companies, has defined a construct they refer to as a Multi-Channel Application Gateway (MAG).  Gartner believes that utilizing MAG architecture makes development of mobile applications easy and deployable to any device.

Application Architecture Archetypes

Application architecture whether it is for mobile, server or desktop application can be broken into 3 major archetypes - standalone, connected and occasionally connected. Each has a long history and many implementations. Lets look at how these architectures can be implemented in the mobile space.

Spam and Blogs

Have you ever wonder why I ask for login credentials for comments? Have you wondered why your comment does not immediately show up? The answer is due to spam comments and trackbacks. With junk mail filters getting pretty good, blogs have become the target of spammers. To give you an idea of how bad it has become I have gotten 40 bogus trackbacks since Friday.

With the amount growing steadily I am looking at turning off comments and trackbacks. I would like to know what other think so leave me a comment should I turn them off or leave them on? Or do you have another idea on how to combat the spam.

Buying Open Source Technology

Today Sun announced it bought MySQL. Ok so this brings up a lot of questions. If a technology is developed by a community of people who gets the money? Or is it the reality that a company owned the technology and duped the community into being cheap/free labor?

No MEDC

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that the rumors are true and MEDC will not be held in 2008 or in the future. The good news is that instead in a sign of mobility becoming mainstream that there will be a mobility track at Tech Ed. Hope to see you at Tech·Ed.

MacWorld 2008

So the keynote for MacWorld this year looks well a non-event or may be a bad event judging by the drop in the stock 10 points to 168.50. And down almost 20% from from its 52 week high at 202.96.

Wii and C#!!!

Some people have time to do some very cool things. Take the case of PhD Graduate Student - Johnny Chung Lee. He has taken a Wiimote and turned it into an input device for computers. This was done using C#.

SQL Server CE 3.5

SQL Server CE 3.5 is the supported version of the database in VS2008. What that means is the designers like Server Explorer only work if the database is SSCE v3.5 (Note: I am talking about SSCE accessed by Server Explorer. Server Explorer can talk to other databases).

Mobile Web Development

With mobile development one can build many types of application with .Net. Just like the desktop and laptop world these applications can be broken down into two types of applications WinForms or Web based. A lot of the entries on the blog are about the Compact Framework, so what about the web. This entry looks at web development with ASP.Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Performance

I have been working on several projects. One of the things I have been using for those projects is the Mobile Line of Business Accelerator. In public presentations some developers have asked why when displaying information does the LOB Accelerator end up looping through the data twice. Once for building the data objects and then again to display the newly created data objects. So the last couple of days I have looked at the performance implications of looping twice.