Homenaje al Benny

Este 24 de agosto se cumplieron 88 años del natalico de Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré Gutiérrez, o Benny Moré.

LINQ - got a lot done for free?

Many software developers, including myself, working with Microsoft's tools today feel that it is getting more difficult to follow the giant's steps, at least for us who have some system responsibility. We have a large business system and just when we have evaluated and taken the decision to move from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, Microsoft announces the Visual Studio 2008 beta 2. The same is valid for our database server, MS SQL Server, we are about to upgrade our 40 GB database to SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft has already announced the news in SQL Server 2008. The life cycle of development has definitly become shorter.

In the 2008 release of Visual Studio there are news such as C# 3.0, see the C# 3.0 language specification and LINQ.
Right now I'm too busy to get an idea of the possible improvements it could give us at work. So far, I've understood that LINQ is a kind of bridge between the programming and data domains and making it data model independent. Too often Microsoft architects and developers think more widely that we would admit and for that reason I would not say as I did once that this new technology will not be as useful as Microsoft expects. But I see, with a little bit of worry, some behaviour similarities between LINQ and the Delphi TTable component back in old days. Classes that generate SQL code behind the scenes leaving the programmer without any control over them are not much appretiated by me. Of course I hope I'm wrong about this ;-)

But, for those who like such a stuff, there is an interesting article about the impact of LINQ on the C# design can be found here.

Regarding C# 3.0, I will read the news in the language specification and maybe write about some of them.

Buena música además de contestataria

Porno para Ricardo es, seguramente, el grupo más controvertido de Cuba. Hacen muy buena música a pesar de los escasos recursos de que disponen y del silenciamiento oficial en la isla.
Aquí les pongo un par de videos que han hecho, el primero es una canción rusa titulada "Los músicos de Bremen" muy bien interpretada y parece haber sido filmado en los estudios de la televisión cubana cuando la banda aún no había sido bloqueada. El segundo se titula "El cake" y tiene un tono cómico aunque puede ser que haya quien se moleste por alguna que otra palabra en la letra.
Mi disco favorito se titula "A mí no me gusta la política pero yo le gusto a ella compañero". Es un díptico que puede ser adquirido a través del sitio de la banda si sigues el enlace arriba.

Documental sobre mi generación

Un documental de Camila Guzmán Urzúa titulado "El telón de azúcar" trata el tema de mi generación: de los que nos marchamos y de los que optaron por quedarse. He visto el trailer que aquí pongo y me he sentido identificado con su mensaje.
Hoy mismo iniciaré la cacería que culminará con la adquisición del DVD en original.

Reporting Services formatting

I have discovered (lately) that Reporting Services has the capability of formatting values according to items' localization. So if you change the Language property for a table column or a textbox to Swedish, a DateTime value, for example, will be displayed according to the Swedish standard. So will be for other data types too.
By adding a custom format string to the Format property of an item, it is possible to customize the output format.
The issue was that I had developed a library with some classes for among other purposes, checksum handling. Now, when we are about to upgrade our SQL server to 2005 I converted all our system and user reports and replaced all external format calls by embedded Format calls or just by changing the Language property accordingly.
And the new library's core business is more restricted now.

Yet another record

This morning I enhanced my personal average speed record during my daily bike trip to work this time of year. The new record is 27,05 km/h. Not bad I think! Despite the shower that began when I was close to Danderyds sjukhus I could keep my body warm and my head cold and break the two-day old record.

Some of the greatest guitar solos

A list of The 20 Greatest Guitar Solos has been published by The Q Daily. Good to see David Gilmour, Brian May and Jimmy Page at the very top. Surprisingly (sadly) ACDC fell to the 15th place.

Speed record

Yesterday I achieved a personal record of 26,74 km/h average speed on my bike during the daily summer trip from my house in Täby to my work in Sundbyberg. The total one-way distance varies from 18,5 to 19,7 km depending on which way I take.