"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Why so late to the "table" (so to speak)?

The discussion was about how difficult was to map the db to an object model, how 'transparent' can persistence be, and the fact that noone wants to write ADO.NET code manually anymore.
I think it is a fair question to ask why Microsoft is so late to the table with O/R mapping? Many problems and solutions have been addressed in academia and industry for well over five years.

Waiting for the one, true, API (which will certainly have faults... this is software) is stretching out another couple of years, apparently, at best.

Do you think I like picking on Microsoft? It's just the company has never seemed to grasp that software has to evolve, or maybe it's just that I've never grasped the business sense of their "rewrite the entire API just once" approach to Longhorn. I can only assume there is great business sense in this. Technically it can't hold up, and so will cost "us" money for years to come.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"It's just the company has never seemed to grasp that software has to evolve"

I think that Microsoft has perfected the notion that software has to evolve. They release early and often. The joke is that their software is never ready until version 3, and I've heard people from Microsoft tell that joke. I don't know the issues behind what you are saying about ADO.NET and Longhorn, but whatever the problem, it is not because Microsoft in general thinks that software will not evolve. When I talk with people from Microsoft, they seem much more aware than most that everything they do is transitory.

-Ralph Johnson

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.