Two or three months ago Krzysztof Cwalina made one of his Microsoft Research presentations available. It’s a presentation of around four hours about how to design framework APIs.
He talks about quite a lot of subjects that I think the community of people working on future GNOME related frameworks and infrastructure should carefully listen to.
I’m one of those software developers who have very much respect for those people that Microsoft employs who are passionate and knowledgeable. I truly believe a lot of the technical people at Microsoft do want to make things better. This makes it interesting to listen to their thoughts and ideas, to be open minded about their research.
If you have Windows Media Player you can watch the presentation here. You can download this presentation for offline view here. It contains a .asf file in one of the folders. You can probably view it using one of those media players that we have. If not, in stead of ignoring the content I advise you to use your mother’s Windows computer to nevertheless watch the presentation. You’ll suffer from having to use Windows and you’ll suffer from having to watch four hours of presentation material, but I promise you that it wont kill you and that the presentation itself is quite interesting.
I know that this blog item misses real argumentation on why you should view it and waste four hours on this. Well, just do. There you have it.
I can recommend the book he co-authored: http://tinyurl.com/2lmq3s
I usually program in Java, but it was interesting nonetheless. A while ago I also found the presentation but it has lots of overlap, so I didn’t sit through the full four hours.