Only two years behind

I was going to comment that the "Square object is not a Rectangle object" problem is solved by using immutable objects, an insight I had on this evening's commute home, but others have beaten me to it. And more eloquently than I would be.

There is one here, and another one here.

On the other hand, I'm still happy that I had the insight.

Open Source Bridge 2011

I'm attending the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland OR this week. I've been to this conference in the past. The conference is small and casual, with sessions on technology and also social change. The presenters and attendees are passionate about their work, and conversations are always interesting.

Windows Phone 7 demos

I attended the CMAP meting last night. The presentation was on Windows Phone 7. it was a disappointment.

The WP7 platform seems powerful enough, although programming requires a lot of different concepts (GUI design, web services, .NET, C#, and Microsoft's XAML are all necessary) and a simple program is complex.

Part of my disappointment is with the demo. The presenter built a "typical" application, using the above-mentioned technologies. The process took almost an hour, and in the end the program did not work. The presenter had to display a previously built program, a trick used by cooking shows on television.

Microsoft would benefit from the concept of "Hello, World". Their demonstrations of new tech are complex and pull together multiple technologies. Good in that it shows the total power of the platform, but it misses the immediate gratification and confirmation of the new tool.