ASP .NET 4.0

They are bringing MVC support to ASP .NET in the next release. They seem to be trying to catch up things like rails and django which were even mentioned as their competitors in the slides. It's not likely that I would be selecting their MVC stuff over rails any time soon but whatever rocks your boat and many times you are not the one making the decisions.

Evangelists

On Thursday the last session was kept by a MS Evangelist. A nice contrast to some other talks done by developers or product managers. He was very energetic and the talk was less technical and he kept using the term asynchronous quite weirdly in my opinion. I would hope that not many people were exited about using Silverlight for web development. Of course if you are doing intranet stuff for a MS using company it does provide you nice eye candy. The next version even has 3D support. The session was titled Silverlight for Business Applications any way (of course in Finnish but any way). Likely that these guys are quite effective in selling their slides to the managerial level.

Codeplex

Many talks referred to codeplex. It was fun that they never mentioned the words open source. They kept mentioning that source for this and that is freely available and you can modify it. One talker said that GNOME is a window manager but I did correct him after the talk. Of course it's not that easy to use the right terms if you never touch Linux but then you should probably not try.

F#

Quoting their web page F# is: "A succinct, type-inferred, expressive, efficient functional and object-oriented language for the .NET platform." There's potential there for making better use of the multiple cores that we have. I wonder how long it will take for a mono implementation to show up. If you want to try it out, the binaries should work with Mono but I haven't tried yet.

Pex

Pex is a really nice tool for .NET that can automatically generate unit tests. It works on MSIL and can generate you tests based on analyzing the execution with very good coverage. They shoved for example a demo exercising a poor regexp email address validator for which Pex was able to generate test cases that matched the regexp but were not really valid email addresses. I haven't tried to find out if there are things like this available in the open source world but we really should have and use them. The license here requires a Visual Studio so trying this is in practice might not be something that most of you will be doing any time soon.

CHESS

Another cool tool for testing. CHESS is able to work with the thread scheduler so that your code gets tested with different scenarios. Again something very useful. CHESS also needs a Visual Studio. Of course if you are a student you can get licenses for free via DreamSpark.

Google Summer of Code

Summer of Code is approaching so maybe there is some potential for projects for students here. Probably not enough time to fully implement things listed here but shouldn't be a problem to define a project around these that fits the allocated time.

This is what it looks like currently:

betelgeuse@pena /mnt/test/dev-java/java-config $ getfattr -d java-config-2.1.7.ebuild  | head
# file: java-config-2.1.7.ebuild
user.CDEPEND="1:"
user.DEFINED_PHASES="1:compile install postinst postrm unpack"
user.DEPEND="1:dev-lang/python >=sys-apps/sed-4 virtual/python"
user.DESCRIPTION="1:Java environment configuration tool"
user.EAPI="1:0"
user.HOMEPAGE="1:http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/java/"
user.INHERITED="1:"
user.IUSE="1:"
user.KEYWORDS="1:~alpha ~amd64 ~arm ~ia64 ~ppc ~ppc64 ~x86 ~x86-fbsd"

As for performance the current implementation seems to perform about the same for emerge -uDpv world as the default cache.
These results are with a warm file system cache.

Results on btrfs/xattrs:
real 0m13.194s
user 0m10.906s
sys 0m1.811s
btrfs/default:
real 0m12.101s
user 0m10.847s
sys 0m0.980s

xfs does a little better because it has a longer limit for attribute values. I guess that most of the time is spend in doing something else than cache lookups but will try to profile later. The code isn't committed anywhere outside my portage trunk git svn checkout yet but will try to see if this is something zmedico accepts to Portage trunk. Probably not going to be a documented option any time soon though.

http://fosdem.org/2009/schedule/events/java_recruiting_foss
http://www.klomp.org/mark/classpath/fosdem09/poster_09.pdf

I will be around tomorrow so, if our new developers want to meet the guy who caused them grief during the long quiz reviews, try to find me. I will be posting my phone number to -core if you need help navigating in Brussels or just want to know my whereabouts.

layman -a java-overlay
emerge icedtea6-bin

The binary package should also make it easier to bootstrap the from source build. The binaries are built in stable chroots so they should run for our stable users too. Please report any problems to https://bugs.gentoo.org with [java-overlay] in the subject. For amd64 users this should be the easiest way to get a 64 bit browser plugin.

I updated the Stable Candidates bug feed to have open bug numbers for ${CATEGORY}/${PN} and ${PN}. It will of course be a little behind actual bugzilla data as the feed is updated daily but that's good enough in my opinion. I think the next item for the feed is to add a link you can use to file the actual bug. That should make it dead simple for you to file stable bugs on stuff you use.

You can find the feed here:
http://gentoo.petteriraty.eu/stable.rss