Archives
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Up to speed with 2005: silly me
It's classic: a minute after I post this I check my mail and find out that everybody can and is talking about it. This is what happens when you don't check your mail before posting.
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Up to speed with 2005: NDA
Today, Jim Allchin made announcements that unfortunately I can't talk about (ironically, and as usual, Mary Jo Foley can). All I can say is that it has to do more with 2006, 2007, and beyond than with 2005. So I guess it's OK as I am currently trying to focus on 2005. And talking about that, they just gave us a couple of DVDs: Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 *Team System* (build 40607.85) and SQL Server 2005 Beta2 32-bit Developer Edition latest bits, so I guess I've got plenty of tools until Holiday 2006 arrives. I won't install them until this night so you get the chance to download it first and beat me ;-)
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Up to speed with 2005: Biztalk 2004
Given my previous experience (teaching object orientation and architecture to business developers and custom vertical business applications mostly for internal comsuption) you would understand my lack of knowledge (and interest :-( ) in technologies like Biztalk. But even in my area of expertise, I increasingly see the need for integration and I also see the increasing complexity of the need. Even a few months ago, I would have said "go with web services, that will be enough" but inter-company information exchange (aka B2B) is becoming more and more sophiscated so, in several scenarios, using just web services is viable but it will take too much hand work, thus my growing interest in products like Biztalk. Besides, with Biztalk 2004 abilities' like Visual Studio IDE integration, Biztalk is coming to my turf instead of the other way around. As for fresh information from this event, to the question "what are the plans on Biztalk given the .NET 2005 wave?" the answer was "we will certainly integrate with Sql Server 2005 and do some adjustments but, aside of that, Biztalk 2005 will basically be Biztalk 2004". Now back to the business workflow Erik Leaseburg is showing inside Visual Studio.
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Up to speed with 2005: Windows Forms
It tells you something when you see the Datagrid Girl herself coming to attend a *Windows Forms* presentation (not to mention a few RDs and some Microsoft PMs). For all the publicity (mostly deserved) about the all new ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Forms has also got a number of enhancements in .NET 2005, not as massive as ASP.NET, granted, but may be this is due to the fact that Windows Forms was already pretty mature on .NET 1.1 ;-) So most enhancements come in the form of new controls, if this doesn't sound compelling enough, you should check DatagridView or ToolsStrip. But do it quickly because it seems like Marcie is planning to become the DatagridView Chick. Dang, Clemens Vasters just asked about how the ToolStrip autosave works and, as the instructor was a little lost, the guy that *wrote* it is helping with the answer, I better stop blogging and start paying attention.
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Up to speed with 2005, Day 2
For me today is going to be Sql Server 2005 day, going on with the "intensity thing", Bob Beauchemin is going to give us a 5 day class... today, we are laughing already. Now back to class because I think I already lost day one as I wrote this blog...
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Up to speed with 2005
Glen Gordon comments about a very intense 3 day event in Bellevue on Microsoft 2005 technologies. And it's intense: today's agenda spans for 12 hours! Best of the day so far: VSTO 2005 rocks! (and it does help that the team doing the presentations was really energetic). So, go download it and give it a try. A funny comment fron Glen's blog: "MS corporate has put together an intense 3 day training meeting for field personnel like me as well as key Microsoft advocates around the world." As I am not a Microsoft employee I guess that puts me in the "key Microsoft advocates around the world" bag, you can imagine my grin. Now back to hear Jeff Prosise's talk about Membership in ASP.NET 2.0.
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Open source projects in .NET
It seems that the open source season has arrived to .NET, now they are talking about it everywhere. Of late, I have found individual initiatives as well as companies that mantain several projects, and just yesterday I stumbled on one of the most complete catalogs I've seen of open source projects, exclusively in C#! Me myself, I surrendered to the temptation and got involved in this project, (un)fortunately I've got precious little time that I can dedicate to it but I will try and tell you how the adventure goes.
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For those of you who would like to try .NET on Linux
I just found very detailed and easy to follow instructions to install Mono on Fedora here.
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MIT courseware on line
Probably you already new this but for me it's big news: through the Microsoft Academic Alliance site I found the courseware for a number of courses given at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To be honest, it's frustrating not to have the time for downloading a couple of those and start learning.Edgar Sánchez -
NegativeArraySizeException
The name says it all: this exception occurs when you try to create an array with a negative dimension, e.g.:
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Data structures in C#
Bit by bit, C# is finding its way in the academic environment, I just found out a C# version of Bruno Preiss "Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns". The book is available online (text and code!) here: http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus6/
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Numerical Mono
As soon as I got the SciMark2 benchmark running on C# I started to wonder how well (or whether) SciMark2 would run on Mono. Yesterday, I fired up my Suse Linux partition, copied the CommandLine.exe to a Linux volume and run "mono CommandLine.exe". First of all, the benchmark just run, no translations, no recompilations, I know, I know, "no big deal, what are the news" but, given the number of people who said that Microsoft would never allow .NET in Linux to happen and that Mono would never complete, I like to shout a "So there!" from time to time. Anyway, these are the SciMark2 results on Mono 1.0 (always in my good old Toshiba portable):
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.NET 2.0 and Java 1.5 for numerical computing
Going ahead with my numerical algorithms translation, I started to wonder if I was going to win something in performance. Is .NET 2.0 going to be faster than Java 1.5 for numerical computing? To find out, I downloaded the SciMark2 benchmark from the http://math.nist.gov site and I translated it to C# using Visual C# Express, at this point I didn't try to understand (let alone enhance) the code, only to get it working in C# (except a couple of obvious changes like using Array.CopyTo() to copy arrays). Anyway, these are the results I got with Java 1.5 Beta 2 in my portable (2.8 GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 CPU):
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Arrays in C# and Java
These are some old facts (c. 2002) but as I had to remember them just yesterday I though I would blog about it...