JonoW

I find the whole JSON vs XML debate pretty tedious. Just use what ever is best for the job.

If you just need a light-weight API that is only ever going to be REST orientated, then use JSON.

If you're building a very complex Enterprise SOA system, use XML as the associated technologies (xsd, xsl, soap+ws-* etc) will be very useful.

If people are starting to invent XML like technologies for JSON (namespaces or schemas etc), then why not just use XML? It's already been done and works well.

On the speed front, I'm talking specifically about MSE (that I don't notice it's affect) - I've had bad experiences with Norton grinding my PC down, horrible invasive product that one! Can't comment on Mac v PC speed impact.

I agree with you on the App Store front, think it will help to reduce viruses/malware (I think Windows 8 app store will be a huge win too), but it's unlikely that an app store will be the sole place to get software for some time to come. So until it's impossible to manually install software off the internet, I think we're going to need anti-malware/virus software.

I run MSE, I barely notice it speed wise, and haven't had any malware or viruses.

On your comment: > the proper solution is to have better security on the machine.

Strongly disagree; if you look at this MacDefender issue, there is no flaw in OSX that is causing infection, users are installing it on their own accord. But what anti-malware/virus software can do here is warn or prevent the user from installing this in the first place, as it should detect the virus/malware signature.

This is why you need it even if the underlying OS is secure, to try protect users from themselves.

I think people buy phones more on manufacturer than anything else. I really don't think your average man on the street really cares whether their phone runs Android or WP7, to them they have a Samsung, an HTC or a Motorola.

My friend got a WP7 phone without really realizing it; it was sold to his as a new HTC model (he's happy with it BTW).

> In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack

Well you don't have to. If I was just writing services to only return JSON to a web-page, I would just use ASP.NET MVC which has good built in support for this, e.g.

public class MyController : Controller { public ActionResult MyJsonAction(){ return Json(new { Id = 1, Name = "MyName" }); } }

Now you have a url /MyController/MyJsonAction which will return the JSON string { Id: 1, Name: "MyName" }, no stress.

WCF is complicated, but it is powerful too, especially if you need to support multiple bindings (e.g. REST and SOAP endpoints for the same service). Also, if you need to support the SOAP WS-* standards, it's a life-saver.

Database isn't relevant, there are .Net drivers for pretty much every popular database. Loads of .Net devs use MySql and Postgres, and using document databases like MongoDB is also an option now

You're really not considering the potential employee here. When interviewing for a job, unless the company is very well known, a Google or a Microsoft, a candidate will probably know relatively little of your company, and probably have no understanding of your mission. How can you expect them to be driven by your mission if they don't know what it is?

You could say the best way for them to find this out is by doing this 3 week contract for hire idea, but that's still a risk to the candidate.

anti-trust, how so?

Ah sorry I see your distinction, I misread model 2), thought you were referring to gmail/facebook in model 1).

Yeah if a company is tracking me which results in me gaining nothing and them gaining income, that is quite annoying, I'm not disagreeing that in that case it's wrong. But I still don't think you are harmed in a way that requires such a sweeping piece of legislation. These sorts of rules may land up harming the free services you refer to in model 2).

If there was a way to target just the companies in model 1) without interferring too much in the user experience of all web-users, I'd be for it.

> You track me to sell my data and to profit from the ads. I gain nothing

Sure you do; you get to use Gmail and Facebook for free because they generate enough money from ads not to have to charge.

I can understand that there people like yourself that don't want to be tracked, that's cool, but if the majority of people don't care, should the system at least be opt-out? Or left up to the user to use the do-not-track features of browsers?

I'm not saying tracking must be forced on everyone, but this piece of legislation seems like a massive hammer to hit a very tiny nail.

One thing I don't get is how a site-owner is meant to know what cookies a 3rd party may send. If I add a Facebook "like" button to my site, does FB send a cookie? What if they don't now but decide to later. And if FB does decide to use cookies down the line, how do they ask your opt-in?

You can send cookies with any HTTP reply, so how do you know if that image you are hot-linking from a 3rd party site doesn't send back a cookie?

There seem to be so many technical vagaries that make this so tricky to implement properly.

> It's reminiscent of secret police behaviour with their networks of informants

That's a bit of a stretch.

Also I don't believe the vast majority of people care about an organisation generating a profile of your interests, otherwise services like GMail and Facebook would have failed.

This seems like such a hugely expensive policy to enforce for what problem exactly?

Tin-foil hats at the ready!

I'm with you on this one. Fading scroll bars make sense on mobile devices because there is very limited screen real estate; we don't have the same issue on a desktop/laptop.

I also like using the size of the scrollbar to figure out how much content a document has at a glance.

As a bit of a finger in the air estimate from looking at job ads here, I would probably estimate that a London finance company will pay about 50% more than a "normal" company.

Not sure what a starting salary would be, but I would bet it would be > 30k. After 5 years you would probably be on > 60k, but if you're quite specialist (in terms of finance based skills) you could be earning much more.

What I find really iritating with Twitter and Facebook logins is that the rights an app asks for (e.g. post tweets, read DMs) is an all-or-nothing proposition.

It should be more configurable at the point of login so that you can refuse to grant something that a 3rd part app is asking (e.g. often I don't want 3rd party apps sending tweets as me), and let the app figure out if thats ok.

Yup I actually agree with you. This whole native argument for me means speed when compared to multi-platform browsers, so if that doesn't turn out to be true, then there isn't much value in saying it (and a bit embarressing for MS).

My main point though was that all this talk has very nothing to MS introdcuing non-standard html5 in IE10, which loads of people seem to be implying.

I don't really understand why everyone is getting so worked up about this. I take it as meaning that MS is going to implement IE10 with as much low level integration to the OS as possible, i.e. it can make efficiencies by not having to support multiple platforms.

This is not the same thing as adding proprietary extensions to HTML5 that people seem to be inferring. Although IE9 doesn't support all of the HTML5 spec, so far as I've seen it hasn't added anything proprietary or invalid according to the spec, I don't see why they would change this for IE10

LINQ is innovative because it brings a generic query language as a first-class citizen in the language. I.e. LINQ is more than just a library as they added syntax constructs for it.

I reckon the article title isn't really accurate, there isn't anything wrong or broken with asp.net deployment, it's just that there isn't a single, complete sanctioned product from Microsoft. I don't see this as a problem, I think using a bunch of techniques (NAnt, MSBuild, xcopy, PowerShell etc) is ok, gives you lots of flexibility. Not that MS creating such an integrated tool would be a bad thing.

Interesting that this article is from 2006. Whats happened since then?

Ah yeah forgot about that. Maybe they should buy Apple Records :) Clear up all sorts of confusion in the process

I think Amazon and Apple should just start their own record label, save a fortune by cutting out the sleazy middle-men and give artists a much bigger % cut from albums to attract hoards of artists. Why wouldn't it work?

Interestingly, in the poll at the bottom of the article, 40% of 3800 people said they don't think tablets are here to stay. A lot higher than you would expect.

Personally I think they are here to stay, although I think their value is a bit exagerated. I used an iPad for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I didn't do anything I don't usually do on my smartphone. Doesn't mean I wouldn't buy one though...

Sure, if you have authenticated users, I'm talking about anonymous users

Sometimes I think we have it wrong. Instead of trying to determine if someone IS a spammer, why not try figure out if they're definitely NOT a spammer.

So start with a pessistic view they they are, and that they need to be shown a CAPTCHA. Then do some analysis to try figure out if they're legit, e.g. time spent on page, mouse/keyboard interaction, geo-location, referrer etc.

If they're all good, don't show them the CAPTCHA (perhaps just rely on honeypot inputs), otherwise show them a CAPCTHA as a next step after posting content (and apologise in case it's a false positive).

So serious around here, was referring to the picture...

Dude, WTF!

I normally defend Microsoft, but then they pull crap like this. This lawsuit dance is ridiculous.