Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Mono release dates

Items of interest pt11

Quite worn out from todays fun :)

• The first UK RIA meet went well, great to see, its pleasing that a good mixture of Java and .NET folks were there talking about RIA and how they can be used (sadly no pics). Some talk of the group going south of the border, it would be great to see the RIA word getting spread all over the UK. MM's Mike Chambers is flying into the UK for the next meet to talk more about MMs vision for RIAs, hopefully many more MM staffers will pop in to talk.
• Phil asks if anyone is interested in a .NET developer group for the the North of England (Manchester) UK, its my kneck of the woods so I would be. Who knows maybe I could talk some pro speakers into giving a talk ;-)
• Tech Ed Europe 2004, Tim blogs about BOF at this years TechEd Europe event. Would be great to see a CLR/Rotor and Mono BOF, not sure if I will be able to attend so can't nominate yet, lets hope someone does.
• Joel has been busy, some great posts on debugging Rotor in Mac OSX and Free BSD (would be great to see this extended to effects on debugging on a platform port) and late-bound invocation scenario notes.
• Jesse has some great posts on his up and coming SWFSource for .NET and a basic compiler to translate C# to ActionScript. The compiler sounds interesting, Jesse has based his work on Robin Duebrils compiler (who intends to add C# -> ActionScript support). Would be great to see this work be open sourced and all efforts shared.
• Sam makes 50 in his 'New and Notables', congrats :) He has an interesting link to a VS powertoy to add syntax colouring to VS for IL, prehaps we will see more here, Intellisense for IL maybe :)
• MSBuild articles on MSDN, funky to see.
• Miguel wades in with his assessment of the potential of XAML and Avalon. John thinks it may be hype and that Internet enabled apps are going on now. Sure they are, Flex and Laszlo are just two ways it can be done.

MSDN Road show Day 1

Thats day 1 of the MSDN road show over with. The early sessions in the dev track were for folks new to ASP.NET so my self and Mark (one the folks I work with) had a blast sitting in on the security tracks. The later sessions were Yukon and Whidby, it was great to see both these being demoed. Yukon just blows me away, I can't wait for the beta :)

Was hoping Tim Sneath might make it, would have been good to say Hi to a fellow blogger :) 

The next big leap, GAs?

Chris Sells is one of the folks that has a great ability to get other folks thinking about a subject, in his blog he poses the question "Whats the next big leap in Programming" and ponders "is it self modifying, self adapting code". To achieve this he wonders if GA's may hold the answer (some confusion on Generics and Genetics in the comments). GA's are a subject that is close to my heart, so its good to see folks thinking about the subject.

Some great links from the comments.

• http://www.thinkingin.net/stories/2003/01/02/cGeneticAlgorithmsForProblemsolving.html
• http://www.lazycoder.com/article.php?story=20040116161936450
• http://blogs.geekdojo.net/richard/category/9.aspx
• GA lib for C#

My personal take is that GA's could be used, certainly a managed system could adapt the programs it hosts should the requirements on that programs change. Providing a set of services that the program can use and hook into it can report to its host that its requirements have changed, needs more memory, needs less memory, needs networking access, needs to change its interface, needs locale aware data etc. The runtime then refactors the code on the fly. I suppose one the ways this could be done is to provide certain blocks of code to the compiler than it then marks as adaptive in the IL, the code can then be marked for change. The runtime could also adapt its self, modifying its own code as system requiements change, more memory available, less memory available, less CPU allocation available etc. Just some thoughts :)

.NET and Lego Mind Storms

CI with CruiseControl.NET and Draco .NET

MSDN Roadshow UK

Items of interest pt10

Short and sweet before the week starts

• One of .NETs big guns Randy Holloway has taken the red pill, Randys post on his reasons for joining (the point about not having to relocate is yet another example of Microsofts view, its about being able to do your job not where you do your job)
• Dan's work load has just gone up, Apocalypse 12 which states the features of Perl 6 OOP has been released.
• Kent has been spending his Saturdays learning PHP, hats off to you Kent nothing like learning some thing new. He has been looking at PEAR and asking what there is in .NET. The control gallery on ASP.NET does do some of what PEAR does but PEAR is free, some of the controls on the control gallery are not (but if you don't mind spending then its a mute point). The other point is that PEAR is also a framework, while we can get freely available frameworks, PEAR is an all in one, community driven project.

Flex, Flash Remoting and .NET revisited

I recently wrote an article on using Flex with Flash Remoting and .NET. Macromedia's Brandon Purcell has some great posts on using the endpoint attribute to spec a AMF gateway rather than change the Flex config (both methods work) and recommended I try it out. To do this we do what is stated in the article but we leave the flex config alone, we then modify the Flex code as follows.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml" width="600" height="450">
   
    <mx:Script>
        var MyResult;
    </mx:Script>
 
 <mx:RemoteObject id="test" encoding="AMF" endpoint="http://localhost/flashremoting/gateway.aspx" source="FlashRemotingCode.RemotingTests"
        fault="alert(event.fault.faultstring, 'Error')" result="MyResult=event.result">
        <mx:method name="EchoString"/>
    </mx:RemoteObject> 
 <mx:Label text="{MyResult}">
    </mx:Label>
    <mx:Button click="test.EchoString('Flex and Flash Remoting rocks')">
    </mx:Button>
</mx:Application>

Note that the endpoint specs what AMF gateway to look at so you add what ever URL points to your AMF gateway. Please note that if any of you are still using a beta release of Flex that endpoints may not work correctly, please upgrade to the current full release.

Items of interest pt9

Its offical, I hate cars, day of work just to get my raditor replaced.....

• Anatomy of a Flex MXML request, interesting post from Steven Erat. Listed as a CF engineer on the MM blogs, Steve has worked on Jrun, CF and now Flex.
• More Flex posters, more posters for the Flex API, great to see.
• .NET lib for SWF update, Jesse has an update on the progress of his SWF lib for .NET, adding in MP3 support.
• Gudge 2 years inside the big house, one of Don Box's team, Martin is celebrating 2 years at Microsoft. Gudge is one of the folks I admire the most, he lives in the UK but travels to redmond every month (and spend weekend's at Don's), living proof you have your home in the UK but still live the dream. Something and someone I aspire to.
• Write a compiler for Parrot, Dan has an interesting article up on OnLamp on writing a compiler that targets Parrot. Dan is using Perl to create the compiler but there is no reason at all that you could not use other languages, as with all compilers syntax grammer and result output (in this case PIR code) are important. I am wondering how hard it would be to target PIR code as well as MSIL code.