Anywhere in an Hour

During Yesterday presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide Australia, Elon Musk shared an inspirational speech on "Anywhere in earth in an hour"

Details are available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anywhere-hour-ganesan-senthilvel

Personally, I admire Elon's vision, commitment, building disruptive technology, enabling tech to the society usage and so on.

TigerGraph

Industry Graph share is led by Neo4j and Titan, the latter recently acquired by DataStax (DataStax Enterprise Graph).

Social graphs are a prime example of utilizing the graph model, Dr. Xu (PhD from UCSD) was working at Twitter till 2011, and the graph databases that were around at the time could not cope.

He has 26 patents in distributed systems & databases, led Teradata's big data initiatives, and worked on Twitter's distributed data infrastructure. So when faced with that problem, Xu saw an opportunity and went off to create a solution.

Xu founded GraphSQL in 2012 and has been working with a team of 30 engineers since.  Today GraphSQL is officially entering a new stage in its development, including a new name: TigerGraph.

The product is now generally available, a series A founding round of US$33 million is announced and a hosted version of TigerGraph based on Amazon EC2 is launching.

TigerGraph also supports different graph partitioning algorithms enabling it to split very large graphs over a distributed architecture. This can be done either automatically, or as specified by users using application-specific partitioning strategies.

There probably is a hefty price tag that goes with TigerGraph, but for the ones that can afford it, it looks like it can deliver some substantial benefits.

C# 8.0

C# 8.0 has been previewed in Channel 9 by Mads Togersen.  Ref: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/A-Preview-of-C-8-with-Mads-Torgersen

Top 5 tech highlights are:

1. Nullable Reference Types
Consider a scenario where you know that the nullable variable x isn’t actually null, but you can’t prove that to the compiler. In this case you can use x!.Method() to suppress the compiler warning about potential null reference exceptions.

2. Extension Everything
As with interfaces, you cannot define instance fields in extensions but you can simulate them using ConditionalWeakTable. You can also define static fields.

3. Default Interface Implementations
The primary benefit of default interface implementations is that you may be able to add new methods to an existing interface without breaking backwards compatibility.

4. Async Streams (a.k.a. foreach async)
This is referred to as a “pull model”. By contrast, IObservable is a “push model”, which means the producer can flood the consumer with a higher flow rate than it can handle.

5. Extension Interfaces
Extension interfaces, the ability to add new interfaces to existing classes, is also being considered.

My closing note is C# is ahead of tech capabilities and roadmap, on comparison with Java.

.NET Core 2.0

Happy 70th Independence Day of India to my brothers and sisters.

Coincidently, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, the release of .NET Core 2.0, and a release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1.

VS 2017 ver 15.3 has over 1,700 improvements and still have some work to do, but if you are using Visual Studio 2017 in a low-vision or no-vision mode, a lot has improved. For the full list of improvements check out at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes

.NET Core 2.0 is also released today. This is the second major version of .NET Core and this release focuses on performance improvements and expanding the set of APIs available via .NET Standard 2.0. It includes the runtime and libraries for .NET Core as well as the tools for building, debugging and running .NET Core applications.

Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1 is also available today. It adds support for .NET Core 2.0 targeting in console apps, web apps, and web services. It also enables creating .NET Standard 2.0 in library projects, to share more code across projects. Like Visual Studio 2017, a lot of the improvements in this update center on reliability.

FICCI 90

On attending FICCI-90th annual conference, key take away is "Continuous learning to sustain the career; Continuous sharing to collaborate the industry trend". Itz applicable not only for individual but also enterprise.

More details are available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ficci-90-ganesan-senthilvel

Yahoo Bullet

Yahoo Bullet is a highly distributed framework designed for cloud multi-tenant data centers that let you run forward-looking queries. Bullet queries act on data flowing through the system after you submit the query.

In other words, you query data that will arrive, rather than data that has already arrived. Unusual for an open source project, Bullet also includes a visual user interface, so you're not necessarily restricted to command line or third party tools. And it also has a REST API for programmatic access.

As a query engine, Bullet was designed to be light weight, adding minimal overhead as you process streams. But there is some heavy lift involved in that the raw data, formatted as Avro files, must be parsed into columns that can then be hit with SQL queries that are placed over sliding time windows.

For now, Bullet is early stage technology, available as open source through GitHub. There's no vendor support and it's not part of any tool, so you're on your own with regard to managing and integrating it. Bullet competes in a very crowded landscape of log monitoring engines such as Splunk, Logstash/Elasticsearch, and others that provide near real-time capabilities.

The challenge for getting mindshare is proving the case that forward-looking queries provide the edge in knowing your customers through the digital log file footprints they leave.

Ref: https://yahoo.github.io/bullet-docs/

No Support Windows Phone 8.1

By July 11 2017, Microsoft is officially ending support for its aged mobile OS, Windows Phone 8.1, which means that users will no longer receive updates.

It is reflected in Microsoft's End of Support page at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4001737/products-reaching-end-of-support-for-2017

It also marks the end of the road for Redmond’s initial foray into phones, and essentially paves the way for Android and iOS to rule the roost.

Itz interesting to know why they made this strategic move?

Microsoft has been moving away from WP towards Windows 10 Mobile, which is essentially an extension of its desktop platform that’s geared towards letting users take their files and apps with them – but it’s no real rival to Android or iOS. The company has been working on numerous cloud-based and cross-platform apps and services lately, so Windows 10 Mobile doesn’t seem like much of a priority anymore.

In my view, Microsoft is focusing more on mobile cross platform development Xamarin to boost the business benefits of time to market, development cost benefits, easy maintenance, etc.