At PDC this year Microsoft announced that Surface development resources were going to be made publicly available. (Up until now it had been an “invitation only” system).

This is great news and means anyone can build or prototype Surface applications. The Surface SDK comes with a very good simulator. A table is still needed to evaluate performance and usability, but you can go a long way with just the simulator.

Here is a copy & paste from a recent mail-out:

Surface Web site (http://www.surface.com)

• A new Technical Resources section to help you connect to the other available resources and support.

MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com)

• A new Microsoft Surface section of the MSDN Library (under .NET Development), providing the Surface SDK documentation and other topics about developing Surface applications.
• New Surface-specific forums about designing and developing Surface applications.

TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com)

• A new Microsoft Surface section of the TechNet Library (under Products and Technologies), describing the basics of the Surface software and hardware and how to set up, customize, troubleshoot, and maintain Surface units.
• New Surface-specific forums about the Surface software platform, hardware, and applications.

Microsoft Download center (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads)

• A new product category for all Surface downloads, including the Surface SDK Workstation Edition, applications, documentation, and any software fixes.

Microsoft Support (http://support.microsoft.com)

• Public Surface KB articles for fixes, known issues, and workarounds.
• Surface Solution Center to direct customers to the right self-support and assisted-support options.

I’ve been having trouble finding a straight forward comparison of these two technologies. On the surface they appear to be solving similar, if not the same problems.

Make no mistake – the message coming from Microsoft is not clear or consistent – which probably explains the confusion. I suspect the relationship between these two products is still being “discovered” by MS.

Anyway, in this bliki I will try to sum up my findings as to the differences between them as I figure them out.

Common features

• Based on WCF
• Use a RESTful architecture
• Can be used to expose any data source (sql, xml, poco/objects etc.)
• Client side libraries provide ability to query using LINQ

General

• Currently they do not share much (any?) technology / code
• RIA Services is not based on top of Data Services
• RIA Services & Data Services will “align”
• OData eventually pushed down into WCF stack

Your opinions are welcome!

References

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx

http://mschannel9.vo.msecnd.net/o9/mix/09/pptx/t36f.pptx

http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/archive/2009/11/18/the-wcf-services-ecosystem.aspx

http://www.douglaspurdy.com/2009/11/20/on-odata-open-data-protocol/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ee844254.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/saurabh/archive/2009/11/23/understanding-the-wcf-in-wcf-ria-services.aspx

Some tutorials from the Expression Blend 3 help docs (e.g. “Try it: Display data from a sample SQL database”, which is based on these two articles) require a class that is present in the ColorSwatch WPF sample. The problem is that someone appears to have forgotten to bundle the ColorSwatch sample with the Blend 3!

To save you the hassle of trying to track down the DelegateCommand class here it is:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Input; 

namespace ColorSwatch
{
    public sealed class DelegateCommand : ICommand
    {
        public delegate void SimpleEventHandler(); 

        private SimpleEventHandler handler; 

        private bool isEnabled = true; 

        public DelegateCommand(SimpleEventHandler handler)
        {
            this.handler = handler;
        } 

        #region ICommand implementation 

        void ICommand.Execute(object arg)
        {
            this.handler();
        } 

        bool ICommand.CanExecute(object arg)
        {
            return this.IsEnabled;
        } 

        public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; 

        #endregion 

        public bool IsEnabled
        {
            get { return this.isEnabled; }
            set
            {
                this.isEnabled = value;
                this.OnCanExecuteChanged();
            }
        } 

        private void OnCanExecuteChanged()
        {
            if (this.CanExecuteChanged != null)
            {
                this.CanExecuteChanged(this, EventArgs.Empty);
            }
        }
    }
} 

This is what I was greeted with today when I plugged my Patriot Xplorer XT USB stick into my Windows 7 HTPC:

I’ve actually noticed this for a few years, but there is something crazy going on with how Amazon.com categorizes its Computer Science/Software books.

One of my favourite ways to find new books is to use the “wisdom of the crowds” and browse through Amazon’s bestseller lists. If I find a book I like I always check the bestsellers in it’s categories in the hope that I can find some other gems.

The problem is I always end up getting frustrated because there is so much garbage in the lists: I would say at least 40% of the books are miscategorized.

Is this some sort of ruse by publishers to get their books featured in more places? If so its bloody annoying and doesn’t do anyone any favours.

Let me show you the bestsellers for the Software Engineering category:

• The number one bestseller is The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers. I’m sorry but last time I looked, learning Photoshop was NOT software engineering.
• The number two bestseller is even better… Nursing Diagnosis Handbook: An Evidence-Based Guide to Planning Care. I am pretty sure that even a 10 year old child would not categorize nursing as Software Engineering.
• The number three bestseller is slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Come on, somebody is just taking the piss now.

How can we fix it?

Instead of just whining about it I spent 30 minutes going through the top 20 and using the feedback form to contact Amazon about the problem. As you can imagine this got boring quickly.

Then I figured the easier way might be just to go through and tag all the books as miscategorized (spelt with a ‘z’ to make it easier for our American friends) and not software engineering.

One very handy tip is that you can tag Amazon books quickly just by pressing typing ‘TT’ on your keyboard. It bring up this window so you can instantly tag a product:

The end result is something that looks like this:

If enough people (i.e. YOU dear reader) tag these products, it should be pretty straight forward just to email amazon and say:

Oi! Amazon!

Please find all your books tagged as miscategorized and fix them. In particular please remove all the books tagged not software engineering from the Software Engineering category.

Thanks!

So here’s the call to action: Visit the bestsellers for the Software Engineering category and tag at least the top ten books!