There’s been plenty of hype over the last couple of years that the trusty rotating hard drive is going to be replaced by solid state drives. So far they have been expensive, slow and and low capacity, making it more of a future tech than a now tech. But has the future finally arrived?

It seems that everyone is getting into a lather about the newly introduced Intel X25-M SSD. Although still expensive at $400 for 80GB ($800 for 160GB) it does at least solve the slow speed and low capacity complaints. But just how fast is this new bad boy?

Check out this video showing 24 x SSD in Raid 0 to see some pretty awesome desktop performance. On the down side 24 drives would set you back around $9,600. For a more realistic use of these drives Joel Spolsky has a blog entry about his attempt to use them for speeding up compile times on developer machines.

Give it another couple of years and my next development machine is definitely going to have a couple of SSD drives in Raid 0 for holding the OS and applications. Reserve those large terabyte spindles for storing pictures and videos of the family cat.

Microsoft has never been able to achieve the same level of UX consistency as Apple (or any other major software vender for that matter). The usual excuse is that Microsoft cannot control the way other developers write applications and although they produce style guidelines they cannot enforce them. This is certainly a valid point but I think Microsoft make problems for themselves.

Take as an example the Ribbon control, a recent innovation that started out in Office 2007. This is a recent control and so there is really no excuse for getting it wrong. So how many implementations of the ribbon would you expect there to be? Let us count them…

1, Office 2007 has the original.
2, Windows 7 has a different implementation.
3, Visual C++ now has a ribbon MFC classes.
4, WPF has a version written in managed code.

No wonder they need 100,000 developers at Microsoft when they duplicate so much work. Although they did cheat with the Visual C++ version as they bought it from a component vendor. Versions 1, 2 and 3 all have different code bases even though they all use C++ for the core implementation. I will cut them some slack on the WPF version as it needs to be written in a managed language and not C++.

Now add into the mix all the different ribbon controls from venders, including myself, for Window Forms, WPF, Silverlight and C++ and you’re talking about a massive level of coding duplication. Still, keeps us all in work I suppose.

I’ve finally decided to check out twitter.

Seems like every developer I come across uses it and thinks its wonderful. I have doubts but you don’t know till you try. At this point in time I have a mere 6 people following me so I’m not sure that my tweets are providing much value to the world!

Follow Phil

Krypton 3.5 Released

This version includes date, time and calendar controls so that you can create line of business applications with a professional look and feel. The number of free controls/components in the Toolkit is now an impressive 41.

New features in 3.5 include…

KryptonDateTimePicker
KryptonMonthCalendar
DateTimePicker for KryptonRibbon
MonthCalendar for KryptonContextMenu
Per-KryptonPage ButtonSpecs
Many bug fixes (consult change lists)

Download 3.5

Third time’s a charm?
A common belief is it takes three versions before Microsoft really gets a new technology right. Now that Silverlight 3 has been announced at MIX09 it would seem a good time to take a look at this platform.

WPF, the big brother of Silverlight, has been around since Vista was released and although a critical success has only slowly gained traction in desktop development. I think this is because WinForms, despite many shortcomings, is good enough for most business focused applications. With few ‘must have’ reasons to immediately make the jump, adoption is rising but only slowing.

Silverlight adoption has the potential to happen much faster for two reasons. First is the continuing trend towards richer internet applications. Although you can create nice websites using Ajax, jQuery and HTML it takes great developers pushing the limits to achieve it. Silverlight makes it possible for average developers to do the same but in less time.

The second force is just shear weight of numbers. With about a million .NET developers in the world you are instantly opening up rich internet development for them all. Asking a C#/WinForms developer to learn all about Ajax, jQuery, CSS and so forth is a steep learning curve with no leverage of existing skills. But ask the same developer to keep using C# and much of the same base class library and it becomes much more appealing. Plus once you have mastered Silverlight you can transition that knowledge over to your desktop apps with WPF.

This entire preamble merely explains why I find Silverlight interesting as an area I should start thinking about. I would like to hear bad about others opinions and get a discussion going about this topic.

1, Should Component Factory get involved in Silverlight?

2, What type of controls/components etc would be useful?

I have started a forum thread for this discussion. This will make it easier to track the full set of responses on an ongoing basis. Thanks.

Silverlight 3 Beta Site
Silverlight Development Links