I had a quick write up of WCF services in a restful state.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B1AwLfyKxW00MzNjODE2ZjEtMGNhMy00M2Y5LWEzMWEtODMyOTBhNmZlY2Iz&hl=en
Friday, April 15, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
Microsoft - A Story of an early Compiler Company
Long ago, back in the early nineteen eighties, there once was a new technology company that built compilers, this company managed to build a compiler that had one trait that was better then all the others, it had a superior implementation of a floating point operator that allowed it do better precision math then the other off the shelf compilers. Since this was good, lots of people used it.
A big company with deep pockets asked the company that was good at making compilers to build a simple text operating system for it, and so the compiler company built DOS for deep pockets. This arrangement worked out so well for both of them, they formed a short lived partnership to make a graphical operating system together.
At about the time that the first graphical operating systems from this partnership (someplace in the very early nineteen nineties) came to market, the compiler company wanted graphical applications to run on its new operating system, and so started to port some standard office productivity tools from the text based world to the new graphical operating system world. Office productivity tools had become fairly standard already, so they began making a word processor (the text based standard was word perfect) to work in their new glossy graphical computer interface. So they made Microsoft Word and in doing so created a Macro Language (based on their “Embedded Basic Language” that they created for reuse in various Applications) called WordBASIC to allow the Users of the word processor to automate tasks (after all this was a compiler company).
The compiler company then used the WordBASIC macro language foundation it had built, and ported this to a “full” compiler called VisualBasic. This new compiler had a new idea in it, to support drop and drag “Visual” development, and so the compiler company partnered with a small start-up company that made a “form generator” and incorporated the visual form generator into the final compiler. This new compiler had menus that were trivially easy to make, differentiating it with the thousands of lines of code required to handle menuing usually, so this compiler was used to make millions of applications, because it’s menu system was so easy.
So around 1993, a set of technologies was beginning to form around Microsoft. Their DOS and IBM partnership had born fruit in the form of a new graphical operating system called windows and was shipping as Windows 3.1 which had network support. They had partnered with an innovative database company and ported the UNIX Sybase database engine to their 16 bit environment, and in the process were learning all sorts of interesting things about Client-Server development which led to the development of protocols that eased task of connecting to a remote database resource called respectively ODBC and DAO (which eventually became ADO and ADO.Net, after passing through a transitional period known as RDO).
The compiler company now had a network capable operating system, a full set of Office Productivity Tools (with embedded macro languages), a couple of decent database engines for storing data, a new “open” protocol for accessing data in databases, and a compiler that made it fairly easy to build forms that connected from from the client computer to databases, and other external resources. This setup, even though no individual tool was better or more innovative then other applications on the markup, taken together made the lives of business people easier.
The total was so much greater then the sum of the parts in fact that millions of custom applications were made for that platform by a widely divergent groups of individuals with widely varying skill sets.
This is one of the great plateaus of Information Systems, as this configuration has remained largely intact to the present, and looks capable of continue to stay in roughly this same configuration in the business world for decades.
A big company with deep pockets asked the company that was good at making compilers to build a simple text operating system for it, and so the compiler company built DOS for deep pockets. This arrangement worked out so well for both of them, they formed a short lived partnership to make a graphical operating system together.
At about the time that the first graphical operating systems from this partnership (someplace in the very early nineteen nineties) came to market, the compiler company wanted graphical applications to run on its new operating system, and so started to port some standard office productivity tools from the text based world to the new graphical operating system world. Office productivity tools had become fairly standard already, so they began making a word processor (the text based standard was word perfect) to work in their new glossy graphical computer interface. So they made Microsoft Word and in doing so created a Macro Language (based on their “Embedded Basic Language” that they created for reuse in various Applications) called WordBASIC to allow the Users of the word processor to automate tasks (after all this was a compiler company).
The compiler company then used the WordBASIC macro language foundation it had built, and ported this to a “full” compiler called VisualBasic. This new compiler had a new idea in it, to support drop and drag “Visual” development, and so the compiler company partnered with a small start-up company that made a “form generator” and incorporated the visual form generator into the final compiler. This new compiler had menus that were trivially easy to make, differentiating it with the thousands of lines of code required to handle menuing usually, so this compiler was used to make millions of applications, because it’s menu system was so easy.
It seems to me, that the softies that invented VisualBasic, had little intention of its use becoming so predominate, but that the predominants of the VisualBasic language came from its menuing system being so easy to use.
So around 1993, a set of technologies was beginning to form around Microsoft. Their DOS and IBM partnership had born fruit in the form of a new graphical operating system called windows and was shipping as Windows 3.1 which had network support. They had partnered with an innovative database company and ported the UNIX Sybase database engine to their 16 bit environment, and in the process were learning all sorts of interesting things about Client-Server development which led to the development of protocols that eased task of connecting to a remote database resource called respectively ODBC and DAO (which eventually became ADO and ADO.Net, after passing through a transitional period known as RDO).
The compiler company now had a network capable operating system, a full set of Office Productivity Tools (with embedded macro languages), a couple of decent database engines for storing data, a new “open” protocol for accessing data in databases, and a compiler that made it fairly easy to build forms that connected from from the client computer to databases, and other external resources. This setup, even though no individual tool was better or more innovative then other applications on the markup, taken together made the lives of business people easier.
The total was so much greater then the sum of the parts in fact that millions of custom applications were made for that platform by a widely divergent groups of individuals with widely varying skill sets.
This is one of the great plateaus of Information Systems, as this configuration has remained largely intact to the present, and looks capable of continue to stay in roughly this same configuration in the business world for decades.
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