C# 4.0

It's Wednesday … 13 (work) days in a row with a video release. That's got to be some kind of record for me. :) Today we start Day 9 in the Core 1 video series, pushing towards LINQ I talk today about "Object and Collection Initializers" in C#. Yes, I've covered this in the C# 3.0 New Features series, however I plan on deprecating that series and this new video will replace the equivalent in that series. In a nut shell, you should be using this syntax when working with collections and groups of stuff. :)

Ok, now on to the "word of encouragement" ...

Nutshell: Apple's critical acclaim had reduced me to navel gazing, then I discovered the facts.

Long story:

The Windows camp (developers, administrators, enthusiasts, you name it) have been a buzz about this post, which nicely compiles statistics you may have seen represented individually as you've browsed the internet.

http://www.neowin.net/news/crunching-the-digits-the-scale-of-microsoft

Basically, while iPhone and iPad development has been getting all the acclaim from the press there's another story that is not as sexy or exciting, but means everything for those of us who are developers deciding where to invest our energies in learning: Windows 7 sold about 150 million licenses in about a year (give or take). 58 million netbooks were sold in 2009, and only 4% were not running windows. Apple predicts 7 million iPads sold this year. That is an 8:1 ratio of Windows 7 to iPad.

I have a lot of random thoughts on this that are going to come spilling out now. Forgive the bloated post.

Admittedly, as a Microsoft software developer, I've felt a little vulnerable in the past 3 months or so. I mean, at the height of the iPad and iPhone frenzy literally EVERY SINGLE STORY was about Apple. But this Neowin article's statistics emphasized to me a simple fact: Apple really is really about the consumer experience, while Microsoft is about the enterprise. Apple has not expressed or demonstrated a lot of interest in the enterprise. It may NEVER get into that market … who knows. Apple has a great *consumer* product! I use Apple products myself! But from an enterprise (or more relevant to our purposes, a developer perspective) it's not even close. I'll comment on the developer angle in the next paragraph. There are other competitors in the enterprise space, and Microsoft continues to push forward in that market. This is why Microsoft doesn't get a lot of press … the writers don't live in that world. But can any of us who follow Microsoft deny the quality of their latest products on the enterprise side? Products like Windows 2008 Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint, IIS7 or Visual Studio 2010? Or, perhaps to broaden this a bit, the choice available across the entire macro-sphere of Microsoft-dom … third parties, partners, etc.?

Back to Apple … from a developer's perspective. A few years ago I spent a week at Big Nerd Ranch in one of Aaron Hillegas' classes learning XCode, Cocoa, Objective-C, etc. So yeah, I dabbled in it for a week or two to see what all the excitement was about. I came away with this: while Cocoa is an impressive API framework that allows you to plug deep into OSX, XCode is severely lacking features that Visual Studio has had for years, Objective-C is not an elegant language, and the lack of a standardized library for database access was … shocking. I realized at that point that Microsoft had little to fear with regards to Apple as a serious threat to business (sure, small businesses that can make use of consumer grade applications, but not server products.)

The final nail in the coffin for me (with regards to investing more in learning Mac development) was the App Store. Why would I invest all the time and money required to build a software product and chance it that (1) it might be rejected in the only place I can distribute it, i.e., the App Store? and (2) it would be buried underneath 10,000 crappy applications. (Have you ever taken a few minutes and browsed through the 'Release Date' section of your favorite Category in the App Store? Wow, there's a lot of … chaff.

While I haven't used Webkit or HTML5 extensively, it clearly demonstrates a lot of impressive features for a browser-based rich, thin client. If you want to use that, there's nothing preventing you from using it in your UI layer when serving ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC pages. In fact, while I don't know of anyone doing this right now, I can't see why you couldn't use this to build iPhone apps. See what this company has done with HTML5 as an iPhone app:

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/21/wwdc-2010-brian-akaka-of-appular/

Frankly, you have a better chance of someone finding you through "traditional means" than through the App Store.

But wait … this fall we're promised that Microsoft will have a new phone, Windows 7 Mobile Phone or somesuch. And the star of the show (for developers) is Silverlight. Before this announcement, I was rather "bearish" on Silverlight. It seems that the world is moving away from Flash towards jQuery and HTML5, so besides some media projects I didn't see the value. I see the value of Silverlight now, and I've been spending a lot of time personally playing catch up. Forget for a moment that -- at last check -- Silverlight was installed on roughly two-thirds of internet accessible devices (compared to 98% as Adobe claims with regards to Flash).

Focus on the prospect of the phone itself … It would be understandably easy to write off Microsoft's phone as an "also ran", similar to what many have done with the Zune. But, let's suppose that Microsoft is able to sell the phones to enterprises and tie it in with Office and Sharepoint (like they do everything else) and include administration features similar to policies, etc. on Windows Servers. THAT IS IN FACT WHAT WAS SAID by a product manager at TechEd a few weeks ago. THIS IS IN THE WORKS! THAT is a game changer for me … It is conceivable that decision makers would find this to be a compelling offering. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see … but may I offer a small prayer on behalf of the Windows 7 Phone. (Amen.)

I think Silverlight's long term success hinges on the success of the phone. I'm putting a lot of hope into this new phone realizing that (1) they've got to play a little catch up, and (2) it might not be perfect on the first pass. But, what if they were to get it right? What if enterprises do buy the phone? Wow, you and I are going to see another wave of opportunity. (Crosses fingers.)

Even if the Windows 7 phone doesn't win out, the fact of the matter is that it's time to focus on mobile in general. I'm going to be doing that this coming year personally and from an instructional perspective.