Why West Coast Grid? PowerShell and LINQ are two great reasons
My very first post explained why I call this blog "West Coast Grid:" simply put, we think there's an advantage to specializing on one platform (in our case, the Microsoft platform, which happens to be developed here on the West Coast).
There are many advantages to working on one platform (deep integration with .NET, integration with the development environment, easy integration with Office and other tools, etc.).
Two cutting-edge examples of why stack integration is so useful have sprung up in just the last couple of days.
First, Digipede CTO Robert Anderson posted a PowerShell SnapIn for the Digipede Framework. I'm really excited about the SnapIn for a couple of reasons.
- First of all, it allows for command-line management of the Digipede Network (of course, PowerShell's .NET interface would allow this anyway, but Robert's cmdlets make it easier and more script-friendly).
- Secondly, we decided to open-source this SnapIn. That means that this is, in effect, an in-depth code sample for the Digipede Framework Management namespace. Most of our code samples have focused on the different distributed application patterns, so this is quite valuable. And, by releasing the source, we hope that our users may feel inspired to offer their own improvements!
The other great example came from outside our organization.
Matt Davey, the Lab49 WPF guru who has been doing a bunch of writing about the use of cutting-edge Microsoft technologies in finance, posted a very simple "GridLINQ" this morning, using Digipede and LINQ together. It's very simple, but very powerful. And, according to him, it took him about an hour to put together!One side note: In a recent post (where, by the way, he said that "probably have the best customer support in the world"), Matt mentioned that he had some trouble using Digipede and Vista together. While we do support Vista for the Digipede Agent and the Digipede Framework SDK, we haven't yet released a version of the Digipede Server that runs on Vista (which is where he ran into some installation problems). Not to worry, we'll be releasing a version of the server that supports Vista (and Server 2008) in the near future!
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