Buu Nguyen's Blog

Java 5.0 and .NET 2.0 both support generic types, however, the implementations of generic in these platforms are different. Java makes use of a technique called “code sharing” in which there is just one type to represent all generic versions of that type, for example: ArrayList<Integer> and ArrayList<String> are both compiled down to ArrayList as the compiler perform erasure on generic types. On the other hand, .NET makes use of “JIT code specialization” technique in which there is a separate run-time representation of each version of a generic type (i.e. List<int> and List<string> both have unique representations at run-time). Read more…

An interesting post by Jeff Sutherland in the Scrum development mailing list. Thanks to Marco at http://brainscrum.wordpress.com/2006/08/28/the-importance-of-agile/ that I found this.

Prof. Peter Senge of MIT was asked to update “The Fifth Displine” for republication as one of the leading business books of the 20th century. He sent a note to Edward Deming asking him for a comment for the book. He wasn’t sure Deming would response as he did not know him and Deming was over 90 years old at the time.

The father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival and was regarded by many as the leading quality guru in both Japan and the United States. Scrum roots are in Japanese lean development and that was started by Deming. So really, what we are doing is a U.S. initiative that had to be repackaged by Japan because of dysfunctional management in the U.S.

Deming responded to Senge: “Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, rewarded for the top, punished for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

Senge comments: “I believe that the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. If forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at its best.”

The importance of Agile processes and particularly Scrum is that we are changing the way people work all over the world. While we are often surprised at the resistance to change we see, we can take confidence that we are driving forward Deming’s vision and not just in the world of software. If he were alive today, he would certainly be encouraged by it.

Jeff Sutherland

Now, they even make a C#-2-JavaScript compiler, besides the GWT on the Java space. Guys, the next step is to completely eliminate all JavaScript we have to write, including those embedded in the HTML pages, port as many JavaScript libraries to .NET and Java as possible and vice versa, and make those libraries browser-independent. The point is to make JavaScript and its infamous browser-incompatibility problem completely transparent from application developers. By doing that, developers do not have to care about JavaScript any longer and it will become the machine language of the browsers. I do not care about the machine code since the appearance of Java and C#, neither do I want to care about JavaScript if you guys decide to generate it from Java/C#.

WPF/E CTP released. Now, a subset of the CLR is actually brought down and hosted in the browser. Download and get start with some apps. OK, now I don’t have to regret not having time to learn Action Script. JavaScript means not only a better integration with the page’s DOM but also a lot of people can reuse their skills, and more search-engine-friendly contents. BTW, feeling scared away by JavaScript? Try Google Web Toolkit

It’s coming to an age in which we have so many options in doing highly interactive and functional web applications. I can foresee that in the near future, most business applications will be operated on the web. The browser will be the one single big hosting environment in which I use to run all kinds of my daily works such as spreadsheet, project tracking, and even designing and programming.