Dmitry Shechtman 2.0

Introduction to Hadoop on Windows Azure

shecht — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:05:00 GMT

Check out this video on Channel 9 by our good friend Wenming Ye covering recent developments w.r.t. Hadoop on Azure.

He Will Come

shecht — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:36:00 GMT

As already announced elsewhere, I am attending this year's PDC, a.k.a. BUILD. Despite the numerous leaks regarding Windows 8 APIs and accompanying tools, I believe Microsoft people still has a few tricks up their sleeves, and am pretty excited to be there alongside some of the world's top experts in .NET technologies.

If you happen to be in the Los Angeles area between September 10 and 17, or better yet, are yourself an attendant, drop me a line, and I'll be more than happy to meet you in person.

Silverlight 5 RC is out

shecht — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 12:04:00 GMT

Silverlight 5 RC is available for download (Yes, I know, I'm a little late).

Silverlight 5 introduces some interesting features, including the following:

P/Invoke (woot!)
Custom MarkupExtensions (yay!)
Implicit DataTemplates
Ancestor RelativeSource binding
Binding debugging
Multiple OOB windows
64-bit plugin

This release candidate marks another step towards SL/WPF feature parity. WPF developers are now at greater liberty to utilize their tried toolset within the (relatively) new framework natively, rather than resort to various workarounds (Arik's our own!).

As Tomer and I are actively trying to convince a customer to move their (nonexistent as yet) WPF client to Silverlight, this is great news received just in time!

Update: Pete Brown has a full list of Silverlight 5 RC features.

Rock Solid Me

shecht — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 19:44:00 GMT

Back in the old days of C++ I took a Design Patterns course offered by the Sela Group. The lecturer was both a highly knowledgeable professional and a very skilled presenter, a combination that I learned to appreciate as I gained more experience in the software industry.

Later on, when it was time to transition to .NET (actually, the time had come a little earlier), I had the enormous privilege to learn from the then-CTO of Sela, who infected me (as well as other students) with his great excitement over the platform and the tools (I believe Visual Studio 2005 just came out of beta). Needless to say, the course was a huge success (despite the all-too-well known budget constraints, which stripped it of almost all labs, as usual).

As of today, the Sela Group employs a host of world-class experts in virtually all areas of the .NET technology ecosystem -- internals, WPF, WF7, EF, TFS and mad skillz -- to name just the few I had personally heard or worked with.

I am overwhelmed to have joined the elite club that the Sela Group is.