The Father of C# Improves His Brainchild
Hurrah for the generics and iterators inclusions in C# by Anders Hejlsberg [Vol. 1, issue 1]. We propose similar features for the Eiffel language. See "Collections and Iterators in Eiffel," Journal of Object Oriented Programming, Vol. 6, issue 7, Nov/Dec 1993, USA.

Miguel Katrib & Ismael Mart
mkm@matcom.uh.cu

Bravo! OO Is the only way to go
The only "non-OO" feature [of C#] is anonymous functions. The inventor of the term object-oriented, Alan Kay, included anonymous code blocks in Smalltalk, the OO language he developed.

Generics and partial types allow you to create a class. Classes are an OO feature. Iterators seem to fix an inconvenience in the design of containers.

Brendan Johnston
irisebrendan@yahoo.com

Bravo! OO is NOT the only way...
For too long, OO has been held up as an absolute good. This attitude might have been understandable in the late 1980s, but the popularity of Java has extended OO's time in the limelight. These new features of C#, while very useful, have nothing to do with OO, and in fact, mostly cannot be achieved using straight OO! Many newcomers to computer science and engineering (Java zealots) will point this out in a negative light. But the fact is that OO is only one useful view of reality.

Congratulations to [Anders] Hejlsberg and MS for recognizing this.

M. Whitener

Asked and Answered: ADO.NET Query
I enjoyed Dan Fox's article "Advanced Data Retrieval with ADO.NET" [Vol. 1, issue 1], but I can't find info on using ASP.NET with Access databases. Does anyone have info on how to connect and get data from an Access database using ASP.NET?

J.  R.  Michael
jrmpat654@aol.com

Ron Hostetter of Quilogy.com replies: You can use Access databases. When creating your ADO.NET connection you need to use the OleDb data provider. This means that to connect, you'll use the OleDbConnection object and specify the Jet provider. Then you'll use the OleDbCommand, OleDbAdapter, etc., objects to work with the data.

Ron Hostetter
rhostetter@quilogy.com

Stay Optimistic
In my view, .NET is just getting under way. I still think it's something to get excited about as a developer. We worked on a development tool with Microsoft www.ecriteria.net/press_webservice.asp for our Web service initiatives at the www.ecriteria.net database service. So I would stay optimistic; real progress is often slow but steady.

Camille Jacks
camille@ecriteria.net

.NET Not Yet!
I am a consultant in the Salt Lake City area. I have contacts throughout the industry in this region...

I like .NET. I think that it is a vast improvement over Microsoft's past offerings in most ways. It makes it easy for a Java developer to do work on the Microsoft side of the fence. One downside, however, is that Microsoft has given up the entry level stuff. The old Visual Basic and ASP were very popular with programmers who were doing simple projects and who did not want the complexity of Java. They were not very elegant or object oriented but they were great for quick and dirty projects. Now Microsoft has given that up in favor of a Java-clone solution that has all the complexity of Java and more.

Mark
[via SYS-CON.com]

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