November 2002 - Posts
The Future of .NET
Visual C++ and C# Updates In Everette. That release of Visual C# will include four new features: support for "generics," which is a form of a C++ template that can help C# developers build software more quickly; support for "iterators," which help developers create new code; anonymous methods, which ease development of what's known as "event-driven" code; and support for "partial types," which make it easier to use C# for building large projects. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
Woah, I wish, but no these features are not going to be in the Everett release. Everett is more like a bug-fix/performance enhancement release as far as the framework goes. They will be part of a future, major release. Have a look at the whole article right here.
It is awesome to hear that generics are going to be implemented though, a lot of people are gonna be psyched about that (myself included). I'm not sure why the article says:
support for "iterators," which help developers create new code
The definition I'm aware of for an iterator is something more akin to an enumerating pattern... so something tells me the author mixed up a term or definition.
Finally, I'm sure that even though these are mentioned as enhancements to C# they are really enhancements to the runtime and framework classes in general so that every language can use these features. Whether or not they choose to expose them is another question. For example: Will the VB.NET language have support for generics? I guess only time will tell.
Pragmatic ADO.NET
Pragmatic ADO.NET in stock!. Shawn Wildermuth's new book, Pragmatic ADO.NET: Data Access for the Internet World, is awailable now. Shawn's a long-time friend of mine and I wrote the forward to the book, so I'm hardly unbiased, but it rocks! Enjoy. [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
More quality .NET books are rolling out these days. I think I'm going to have to check this one out too.
Essential .NET Is Here
Essential .NET, by Don Box, in stock!. According to the AW web site, Essential .NET, by Don Box, with Chris Sells, is in stock and ships within 24 hours, and Amazon seems to agree. Enjoy! [sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]
Looks like it's time to do some more reading. :)
Adding Custom Functions to XPath
Here's a great article on adding custom functions for use in XPath expressions via the .NET XSLT framework classes. I was aware of passing custom obejects via extension objects, but I had no clue this functionality existed. The author does a good job demonstrating the extensibility of the XsltContext class for all sorts of purposes. Great stuff!
Update: Thanks to Jason Diamond for pointing out that I forgot to actually link to the article itself. Duh! :)
Understanding DIME and WS-Attachments
Yet another useful article from the MSDN Web Services center. The DIME specification is one that I wish was better established about two years ago when we (meaning my company) revamed our upload protocols. Come to think of it, even SOAP wasn't established enough. So we've hand rolled our own XML message format and in between there's a straight HTTP 1.1 chunked upload. The XML messages are custom schema and are used to initiate, resume, finalize and terminate uploads. Next version will be definitely be SOAP+DIME... can't wait!
Using System.DirectoryServices to Search the Active Directory
New article posted under the .NET center of MSDN. If you haven't already guessed from the title, this one's about using the System.DirectoryServices namespace to search Active Directory. I see a lot of requests on how to do this on the mailing lists, so this will be a good article to point to for future requests.
Visual XSLT Comments
Visual XSLT TryOut. I've been hearing about ActiveState's Visual XSLT tool quite a bit, and I was quite intrigued by it, but never found the time to give it a through test. This weekend finally the opportunity presented itself, so I downloaded the trial version and gave it a go.
...
Although I did run into a few gotchas, I did get a feel for the power of the tool (it even works with includes and all). Most definitely, this is a tool I'd love to have on my arsenal, so I guess it's savings time so that I can afford it in a few months... not very soon, though :( [Commonality]
I agree. I tried it out back when it was originally released and was quite impressed with it's capabilities as well. I wasn't doing all that much work with XSLT at the time, so I didn't really have the need to buy it. However, we're migrating our systems over to .NET and XSLT should play a bigger role. If so, I'll definitely recommend purchasing a copy for my company.
Radio Strikes Again
Ok, I don't know why it's working all of a sudden, but it is. For the past few days I haven't been able to post anything because Radio complained about not being able to read one of my data files due to an "incompatible version" or something like that. I have no clue why it started, but Radio hadn't been shutting down cleanly for about a week so I figure that had something to do with it. Its bound to happen again, so I'm starting to backup all my posts to XML in case I need to bail out of Radio and start using other blogging software. It seems like a lot of people are doing that these days...
More Posts