Velocity project – memcached by Microsoft?
Reading over the last week shows that there is some strong interest in Microsoft's new "Velocity" project. What is Velocity? It's a distributed caching framework to aid in scaling out applications over many servers – for example, an ASP.Net website.
But, wait a minute, doesn't this sound exactly the same as what memcached does? Almost the defacto standard for distributed caching and developed many moons ago, memchached powers sites like YouTube, Slashdot, Facebook, NYTimes.com to name a few.
I'm a big fan of what Microsoft creates, in fact I'm building a business that sits on top of what Microsoft builds. I appreciated that the initial blog post even referred to memcached and hints at some of what Microsoft might want to add to their caching system to create some differentiation.
What concerns me here is seeing posts popping up about how cool this framework is from various Microsoft geeks from the "ooo – distributed caching!" perspective. Do they not ever look outside the Microsoft world? Do they not realise this is not new? I think it's an important discipline for developers to keep looking outside their comfort zone to learn new things. This is by no means something I'm perfect at – it's a struggle when you're comfortable with what's already in front of you but, as the saying goes, you don't know what you don't know.
I look forward to the future of the Velocity project and I really hope it's not just a me too project from Microsoft. You can keep an eye on it by subscribing to their blog.
It's made even more comical by the implication that you would need a GUI to actually get an IP address. I'd also recommend reading the comment on the YouTube post itself for more laughs.
A big thanks to everyone who came along to the dot net user group meeting this evening for my presentation on the new ASP.Net MVC Framework. I've attached the files below to have your own play with the sample and to check out the presentation file as well.
You will need to install the ASP.Net MVC Framework but everything else (like the MVC Toolkit) is included in the download. If you would like more help with LightSpeed then I'd suggest you download the Express edition which includes a huge number of samples and one of the best developer guides you'll find.
Download the slides and sample application here.
I hope those of you that attended enjoyed the presentation and, as always, I appreciate any feedback.
Andrew Peters (co-founder of Mindscape) has released the NHaml View Engine for ASP.NET MVC. He had been working with Haml on a project and fell in love with how easy it was to use and the quality of the output and decided it was high time something like this was available to .NET Developers.
Andrew has created a rather lengthy blog post about the engine as well as how to write in Haml, Check out the NHaml View Engine here.
If you are using ASP.NET MVC and are a lover of fine XHTML output then you should check this out.
I've been looking to find more information about IE8 lately however it looks like JB got the scoop (damn Regional Directors and their underground connections! and has posted specifically about standards compliance in IE8 – certainly the most important area of enhancement in my opinion.
Click here to read Jeremy's post about IE8.
I also question the inclusion of a new header tag to force compliance mode. Even if this is just a meta tag addition I can already hear the outcry's about splintering standards. Admittedly Microsoft often find themselves in "damned if they do, damned if they don't" type situation and overall it's fantastic to hear that there will be ACID2 support – lets just hope that they manage the whole tag required challenge well.