It appears that Xen will live on! Mary Jo Foley gives us the scoop that Xen will continue to be developed by MSR. It will be picked up by academic institutions and may even make its way into Windows code. It will be extended with Polyphonic C#. It will also sport a new name. There seems to be confusion whether it's X Omega or C Omega. Yes, that's XO or CO. Boy, C# is hard enough to search for. Will they start calling C#, C Octothorp?
Microsoft released a new protocol that allows devices that plug in at different locations to announce their new location. EWeek article
here. Spec,
here.
At least for US firms, the .NET story leads them down the garden path. They say, Oh great, I use resx's and, when I need to, I can advertise that my app works in multiple languages.
I remember when I first encountered the problem during the Beta2 days, I argued, dutifully, for using culture ID's (e.g., en-US) grabbed from the UI culture for choosing the phrases. I am glad that I lost the argument. As I've architected other applications for US companies, I've seen this issue come up every time. I've worked lately with Financial Services companies. Usually when they speak of internationalization, they really mean multilingual. They're crestfallen every time I explain they have to create a custom solution for the problem.
Now, if .NET would allow custom cultures such as es-US for Puerto Rico, for example, then we'd have no problems, though I think it would throw the current architecture out of whack, since it doesn't appear to be extensible at the AppDomain level that we're speaking of here. I'm not sure what the model should be, but there is a problem here. I know it is mostly a CLR issue, but this issue most consciously impacts the UI.
Summary:
- Multilingual != Localization
- There is a large need to support multilingual
- Perhaps, a need larger than for localization for US companies.
I was really disappointed that the
Whitehorse demo is advertised as SOA but uses RPC services. It seems even Microsoft is confused as to what
SOA is. (
Slides)
Microsoft has posted a good explanation of the WS-I business transaction protocols that Indigo will be built on, WS-BusinessActivity. I know that you're rushing to gulp down every word. Don't worry, since Indigo won't be out until 2005, you have a whole year to digest it. Relax!
Rico Mariani, the CLR's performance guru, has some useful guidelines on profiling and instrumentation. Be sure to read the comments section.
This is timely information for us as our team considers instrumentation as it relates to supportable code.