.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

Up to speed with 2005: silly me

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 ;-)

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.

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.

Up to speed with 2005, Day 2

Up to speed with 2005

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.

For those of you who would like to try .NET on Linux

MIT courseware on line

 

 

NegativeArraySizeException

The name says it all: this exception occurs when you try to create an array with a negative dimension, e.g.:

    double[] b = new double[m];

And m happens to be less than zero. This is the exception that is fired in *Java* but in C# there is no such exception and instead a much less obvious OverflowException is fired. Note to the BCL owners: could you emulate Java in this little detail?