I was reading over on DevTopic today about how 100 Million Lines of Code is pretty common in cars today.  We have come a really long way since 1977 when the first micro-chip was introduced in to the Oldsmobile Toronado, but what I really want to share with you guys is what I found at the end of the post.  I laughed out loud, when I read this because believe it or not this is starting to happen in cars and it has nothing to do with Microsoft.  Just the ever growing source code base that runs modern cars, and the ever growing chance for one of those lines to have a bug it in.

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive — but would run on only five percent of the roads.
6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

Believe it or not #1 from above is happening to a friend of mine on his 5 Series BMW.  And well we are all accepting #10 as a great feature on new cars.  In fact my new 2009 Acura TL, that I just bought, has a button like the one pictured below.

Isn’t it ironic how we laughed at these 10 statments a number of years ago?

I will be presenting September 17, 2008 at Philly .NET User Group Meeting.  My talk will be on:

Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation.

The group will be meeting at the Microsoft Malvern Campus, located at 45 Liberty Blvd, Malvern, PA 19355.

If you think you might attended the meeting please make sure to register, so that Bill has an accurate count for the food order.

User Group News * Please distribute this notice throughout your development community! We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site. September 17 ASP.NET Dynamic Data, MVC & Web 2.0 Wednesday Malvern, PA Our monthly meeting will be held at the Microsoft Greater PA Office in Malvern, PA on Wednesday, September 17 from 5:30-8:30. Refreshments are provided courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. Please register on our web site. Detailed directions are on the Microsoft Greater PA web site. 5:30 Rachel Appel, Appel Consulting An Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data If you are tired of the same old ASP.NET webforms, GridViews, and ADO.NET data access code that make up your current applications, then you’ll want to take a closer look at ASP.NET Dynamic Data.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data is Microsoft’s new technology that provides a template infrastructure for your application, page and fields based on your application’s data model. In this session you will learn concepts and use of application templates to create ASP.NET dynamic data web application. We’ll then create customizations at the application and page levels showing how easy website maintenance is when using ASP.NET Dynamic Data. We’ll also cover field level customizations by supplying data display formats, custom field types, and data validation based on the application’s data model. Rachel Appel lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania and is the senior technology consultant at Appel Consulting. Rachel is an MVP and a member of ASPInsiders, and holds the MCT MCAD & MCSD certifications.  She has been working as an instructor, software developer, architect and DBA for a wide variety of organizations. She is the Vice President and a regular speaker of the dotNetValley user’s group, as well as an active member in other local user groups of Northeastern Pennsylvania and the tri-state area.  Rachel’s expertise lies within developing solutions that align business and technology using the Microsoft .NET family of products. 6:45 Q&A Rob Keiser & Dani Diaz, philly.net co-leaders, ask questions, get answers from your peers! 7:00 Break Meet your peers. Refreshments and drinks courtesy of Vovéo Marketing Group. 7:15 Nicholas Berardi, Vovéo Marketing Group MVC & Web 2.0 Creating a modern, web 2.0, application with MVC and jQuery with a focus on doing this in a RESTful manor.  My goal is for the developers in attendance to learn how to create a RESTful website design using MVC and implement that RESTful design on the front end with some simple jQuery. These principals will be demonstrated by creating a simple Twitter like application for sharing messages. All the source code will be available via my website at http://www.coderjournal.com after the presentation. Nicholas Berardi works for Vovéo Marketing Group in Malvern, PA as a Software Architect.  He is the co-author of ASP.NET MVC Website Programming, Problem, Design, Solution published by Wrox and will be released early 2009.  He received his BS in Information Science and Technology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2003.  Nick has been using C# and the .NET framework since its beta and has over 10 years of experience in web development and related technologies. He helped to develope one the first websites on the internet to use the ASP.NET MVC framework, in a production environment, at http://www.ideapipe.com.  He blogs at http://www.coderjournal.com. 8:30 Closing & Raffle! Books, software, and other goodies!

I have been a huge fan of MySQL for a long time.  It is the perfect database for when the budget is tight or you are not working in a Microsoft Environment.  It performs well, and has a huge following of dedicated professional programmers that use it day in and day out on some of the largest websites on the planet.  Most noteable Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Digg.  Even with all these proven capabilities to scale and perform, Microsoft has choosen to ignore it and focus on some of the monolytic providers of databases such as IBM and Oracle when comparing SQL Server.

However that has all changed with the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008.  Microsoft has set its focus on MySQL.  This is a huge turning point for both companies, because it means Microsoft is starting to take the needs of the Web 2.0 crowd, which MySQL has dominated, just as seriously as the big iron installs they have always catered to.

I am not sure if this comparison has been spured by the purchase of MySQL by Sun Microsystems, or if Microsoft has started to feel the preasure from Web 2.0 MySQL installs, or a little of both.  But none-the-less this is very encouraging, because it means that Microsoft is finally taking the needs of the “cloud developers” seriously.