Archives
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From the Peculiar Ideas Departament: Compilr
Say you're away from home and just have to compile some lines of code to prove a theory, how do you do? Easy: browse to http://www.caller.me.uk/Compilr/, type or paste your lines and the code is compiled in a far and away server. It sounds like a strange proposition to me, but who knows, may be there are reams of programmers with Internet access that don't have a compiler at hand... Where's the money in the site? Advertising of course (Google is now generating some really weird spawn.) For the time being, they offer you C#, VB.NET, C, and Fortran compilers. Come to think of it, if they offer a few exotic languages like Lisp, Prolog, or APL, I may very well give it a try...
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Kerberos, NTLM, PKI, SSL, roles, AzMan, DACL, impersonation, etc. in .NET
You would imagine that topics like authentication (who you are) and authorization (what you are allowed to do), should be by now: a) solved and easily explained; b) standardized. In truth, the latter is a little more truth than the former, but at any rate if you want to understand these subjects you face a real alphabet soup and an entangled concept diversity, with each such concept apparently entitled to a tome by itself. Being 2006, authentication and authorization are still complex and not well understood topics, and, as a consequence, more than a few systems re-invent (poorly and weakly) the wheel.
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ADO.NET provider for Postgresql
This is not really news as the driver has been available since April: Npgsql is an ADO.NET data provider written in C# that enables any .NET application to work with Postgresql 7.x and 8.x. You can download the provider from here.
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.NET in Linux (and something about numerical analysis)
Every few months news emerge about the Mono project: spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza in order to have a Linux .NET implementation that would allow to more easily create Windows like applications in Linux, Mono has managed to implement a good C# compiler, most of the BCL (ADO.NET included) and a pretty reasonable ASP.NET 1.1, but it has failed to have a production-level Windows Forms implementation (they are moving ahead, but Microsoft goes much faster.) A couple of years ago I got enthusiastic about Mono, but now I see (sadly) that it's stalling (even though it was acquired by Novell, or may be exactly because of that [;)]).
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Beta version of Ruby.NET compiler just released
I just got an e-mail announcing the "preliminary Beta release of the Gardens Point Ruby.NET compiler" (what's that? an alpha? an untested beta?) One part of the announcement caught my eye, though:
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Complete Visual Studio Team System shortcut keys listing
Reading this blog entry, I remembered of the times when my younger brother Alex was the capo of PowerBuilder 6: just to impress you, he would put the mouse in his shirt pocket and then banged through the IDE just with the keyboard with amazing speed and dexterity. Well, it so happens that you can do the same with Visual Studio, only that we are so spoiled by the mouse that we never learnt how to drive VS without one. Almost a year ago, Jeff Atwood wrote a VS macro that generates a nice Web page with all the keyboard shortcuts available, I installed the macro, run it, and uploaded the shortcuts page ready for you to download and check here (the link is in Spanish, don't worry, just press the Download button.) So, any unexpected and useful shortcut there?
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What Every Dev Must Know About Multithreaded Apps
Pay attention to this few lines of code:
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TechEd 2006 *live* presentations
TechEd 2006 started yesterday (and I finally didn't make it). Oh well, thanks to the Internet we can be up-to-date and much closer than not-being-there, for example we can watch the keynote delivered on Sunday afternoon and some other "home made" videos recorded in situ. We can also watch a webcasts series to be done live at TechEd from June 12 to June 16. See you at the Virtual TechEd!
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.NET Framework 3.0
Today, as Ecuador was beating Poland in the World Cup (way to go Ecuador!), Somasegar was announcing that what was previously known as WinFX (WCF, WPF, WF) plus other technologies like WCS (formerly Infocard) are an integral part of .NET Framework 3.0. Furthermore, *all* these components will be available for Vista, 2003 Server, and XP. I think it's time we download Beta 2.
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live.com image search
This may be really old news, but I just found out that you can search images in live.com like so:
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Follow the Germany World Cup with Microsoft Scoreboard
Earlier today, Microsoft launched (JIT-style) Microsoft Scoreboard. I have this vague idea that, from tomorrow on, many Ecuadorean software developers screens will look like this:
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Friendly Web sites, design patterns, and metacognition
First of all, you just have to love the guys that created these register policies:
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Datasets are not for everything (and neither XML)
First of all, let me tell you that datasets are wonderful, especially if you have to do CRUD operations on relational records. But that doesn't mean they are always the best choice. Ditto for XML. With the obvious statement out of the way, let me tell you this little tale:
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C# Expression Evaluators
Warning: this is not the usual code sample ready to be cut and pasted in your homework due for tomorrow.
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The Art of Project Management
Today I'm going to make an obvious point: the stars in a software project are the programmers (well, the architects a little bit too [;)]) no doubt about it. But the scenario is not unlike that of a music concert: the stars are the singers and musicians for sure but in order for the concert to be a success you require of far more people in many different fields, some of them totally unrelated to music.
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Programmer fonts, do they matter?
May be I pay attention to silly things, but some fonts are easier to read than others and if you keep writing or reading code during hours and hours, the font that you use may very well affect your productivity (just a theory , besides, far more ridiculous stuff has made it's way in the Internet). Anyways, this is a code section with the standard Visual Studio font (Courier New Size 10):