On page 3 of a an eweek article about an OOPSLA roundtable discussion with Don Box, Anders Hejlsberg, and leads at Sun and IBM, Anders states that he's “spending a large portion of my time trying to figure out how to solve” “the enormous impedance mismatch between databases and enterprise programming languages.”
Now, it's possible that he's working on ObjectSpaces; but I think, rather, that he's looking at how to migrate features from C-Omega into C#.
Don has some funny comments about the discussion here.
Correction:
The "workaround" actually has the correct behavior.
If you select the document hyperlink, you get a choice to open or save the document. If you choose to open it, the document comes up in the browser. If you choose "Edit in Microsoft Office PowerPoint" up pops PowerPoint with the document from the web site in tow (after authenticating, of course).
Windows SharePoint Services is a fine collaboration platform. Unfortunately, it appears that Microsoft did not track any repository use cases. When a user clicks on an Office document, they expect to view the document when the Document Library is focused as a document repository rather than a collaboration device. Unfortunately, SharePoint Services attempts to edit the document. If the user has anonymous access, this produces a series of authentication request windows that must be canceled to get the document in read-only mode. I would argue that a most documents are created precisely as repositories of information rather than a work-flow or interaction tool. This begs the question as to why Microsoft hasn't fixed this yet.
I did find a Knowledge Base article that fixes this problem. Actually it is more of a workaround. The procedure causes the Office document to be viewed in the web browser and makes editing impossible! (Well you can download it and edit it.) Bad! Worse is that the workaround effects all SharePoint Sites on the machine. Very bad!
I want the default behavior to view the document but a menu option to edit the document. Is that so hard to conceive?
Workaround link here: KB823553