March 2003 - Posts
I went to Borders and (on the company credit card Dad has) bought my copies of Essential ASP.NET with Examples in C#, and Pragmatic ADO.NET. These both look like excellent books. Essential ASP.NET came highly recommended from just about everybody. I can tell from this one sentence that it's going to be a great book:
This book focuses exclusively on ASP.NET and does not spend time reviewing .NET programming, object-oriented programming techniques, database access, or general Web application development.
Yes! Finally a book that assumes that you know these things before you ever pick it up. I hate having to wade through countless chapters of "Intro to .NET", "What is the CLR?", and "The differences between Windows and Web Programming." Thank you, Fritz!
And it's available to MSDN Subscribers. (Thanks to Eric Smith for pointing this out) I'm downloading mine now.
A lot of cool stuff came across the Microsoft Download Center tonight...mostly from the ASP.NET group (which makes it cool automatically). Anyway, this was one that I really look forward to reading:
Caching Architecture Guide (PDF)
Also, I'd like to give credit to Richard Birkby over at ThunderMain Ltd. for putting together the awesome Microsoft Download Center RSS Feed. Often I just pass over the stuff that I see, but then something comes along like this that makes me really appreciate the fact that I can read that RSS feed. Thanks, Richard.
This is just cruel and unusual punishment:
2003-03-28 - Virtual PC, Windows Server 2003, and Whidbey
I've been living with whidbey for the past two months or so. In general, things have been pretty stable and I can even debug using VS.NET.
The new C# language features are indeed good - iterators and closures are my faves so far.
The branch my team builds from (lab21_dev) just got the generic-ized versions of System.Collections. Also nice.
I found out today that the C# compiler in our branch is out of sync with where the language spec is at, so I need to grab a different build. I took this as my opportunity to install some new bits on my secondary machine as a background task.
And then he goes on to list just exactly how he went about installing these things. Come on Don...we know you get access to the cool stuff, but do you have to brag about it? It's cruel knowing that you've already got Whidbey and we're just playing around with Everett. Stop tormenting us! (On the other hand, if you can sneak me a build of VS.NET Whidbey...that'd be cool) ;)
I want one! :)
Okay, I've been playing with NUnit for the past couple days. I have one thing to say:
I LOVE NUnit!
It's just so dang easy to use. And I absolutely worship NUnitAddin. That thing is so easy to use it's not even funny. (Well, it is...but you know what I mean) I mean, the whole concept of Attributes and what you can do with them just blows my mind. I am fascinated at how good this tool is. I'm going to use it forever, until the end of time.
But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
[They Write the Right Stuff]
This is an awesome article on the folks who make the software that controls the space shuttle. I highly recommend reading it. Not only does it show how complex the code that runs the shuttle is and what it has to do, it also talks about "grown up" coding.
But, back to Econ homework. :|
Last week was horrible. I barely had any time for coding at all. I had a French test on Monday, a Calculus 2 test on Tuesday, and a Modern American History test on Thursday. The good thing is I think I got an A on each one. The bad thing is I had to neglect my weblog and CodeProject in order to pull it off. Mais, c'est la vie, non?
But I'm enjoying my rediscovered freedom. Last night I went over to a friend's house for his XBOX/Bday party. We had 6 people on two XBOXs playing Halo over System Link. At 6PM, we started a game of Capture the Flag, 15 points, on Blood Gulch with all vehicles and normal weapon set. We had to leave at 11PM, and we still hadn't finished. The other team had 13 at the end and we had 11, so they won. But the coolest part was that I got the most kills with 246! My team mate was runner up with 184 kills (of which half were probably sniper shots to the head). Man that was fun....246!
I'm getting a new Web Server to sit next to me at work and be my dev server. Even though the box hasn't gotten here yet, I'm in love with it. Here are the specs:
Intel Xeon 2GHz CPU x2
SuperMicro Dual Xeon motherboard
Kingston 1024MB RAM
Sony 24x DVD Drive
Seagate 80GB 7200rpm ATA100 hard drive x2
ATi AGP 64MB Video card
Now, why they included a 64MB video card is beyond me...but I'm really happy about the processors, RAM, and HDDs. The best part though is that those Xeons and that MB support HyperThreading. w00t!
At the end of an introductory course on distributed application with .NET, a programmer made this question: "How can I use a VB 6 COM component from a remote .NET app?" Lucky me, just yesterday we were reviewing .NET Remoting (following Ingo Rammer's excellent Advanced .NET Remoting), so I proposed this solution:
- Create an RCW for the COM component by adding a reference to the COM object in the VS.NET project
- Create a .NET Remoting service that simple invokes the RCW and returns the result (3 lines)
- Expose the service with a small .NET Remoting server (cut & paste a few lines)
- Consume the service from the remote .NET client app (4 lines of code or so)
Probably obvious stuff for many of you, but what amazes me is that the full exercise was done and understood by people that last week knew nothing about .NET distributed applications. From here on, the whole class started to play with all kinds of distributed scenarios and possibilities, meanwhile I just sat enjoying the whole thing. At times like this I totally agree with fellow RD Carl Franklin when he says that .NET Rocks!
[Edgar Sanchez]
I gotta agree here. .NET Rocks! It's even cooler that something like that can be done so easily now. Just imagine the headaches you'd have to go through to get that done before Remoting. Can anyone say DCOM? *Yuck*
More Posts
« Previous page -
Next page »