May 2003 - Posts
As the DotNetWeblogs have now moved to ASP.NET weblogs and are hosted by Microsoft, I felt necessary to add a disclaimer to my weblog to remind that my posts are independent from Microsoft.
Also, please update your links for this weblog to http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/ and the RSS feed accordingly.
Simon Mourier says that he is "missing good tracing support from the CLR".
In my opinion, this is one area where AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) can bring value into. Although the tools are not ready yet for prime time for .NET, it should be possible with AOP to dynamically activate trace for an application or specific methods of an application with a config file or a GUI.
I know that LOOM.NET has an exemple of this. Dunno for the others.
Although not quite AOP, but a post-compiler instead, we can do that with eXtensible C# (including getting the values of parameters). If someone is interested in having an example of this, just let me know.
I guess AspectJ covers this for Java as it is very advanced compared to what we have for .NET.
If you need to do some clean-up on your disk, you should definitly download SequoiaView to get an idea where the big files are hiding. If offers a nice and efficient treemap view of your disks.
Update: As viewed on Larkware, you can also try SpaceMonger and Scanner.
Update: FolderSizes
Update: WinDirStat
Just wanted to let people now that CodeSmith is a powerful yet simple tool that can help you with code generation tasks. You should definitly give it a look.
Bravo Eric!
Note: Codify seems like a valid competitor too, except that unlike CodeSmith it's not free and won't probably become open source while CodeSmith may.
There is still a lot of activity around the Java Pet Store and .NET Pet Shop sample applications. Here are the latest news from the front:
Here is a nice quote by Jon Udell from his interview with Ward Cunningham:
There is a vast gulf between the process mappers who model business systems pictorially, and the programmers who grind out the C++ or Java or .Net services that support those business systems. Between the two camps lies a fertile land of opportunity. It's time to jointly explore it.
Famous for his contribution to XP, Ward Cunningham is - among a lot of other interesting things - working on the Fit Framework which he summarizes as being "about tests that people can read" ("people" here means all kind of people, not only developers).
The Fit Framework is worth a look as it proposes a way to easily associate the testers and the developers around unit testing. This is definitly a good approach reminding us that unit testing is not solely for developers, but should also be used to validate business rules expressed by people that have no development talents.
I think that this approach is a step forward in the land of opportunity that Cunningham is speaking about. The relationships between business and our technological world need a lot of smoothing. My guess is we will soon see many opportunities following the same path.
Update: Ward Cunningham has a weblog.
As a follow-up to my article on generic data access, I'd like to clear something up.
I think that everybody would agree that there are so many peculiarities for each DBMS that it is not possible to write code (don't even think about SQL) that would work with every SGBD.
What the article shows is that it's possible to write a good portion of the code generically, without having to rewrite the utility classes (such as DBHelper) each time. So, the main goal isn't necessarily to be able to switch to another DBMS without having to change an application’s code (we don’t change an application’s DBMS that often…). The goal is instead to have at hand utilities that will continue to work tomorrow, even if that next application we have to write requires a different DBMS.
I've published an article on a french site named DotNetGuru. This site is dedicated to technical articles mainly about architecture in .NET (often with comparisons with J2EE).
The subject of my article is Generic data access with ADO.NET and the Data Access Application Block. In this article I show:
- how to compensate the lack of genericity in ADO.NET by going beyond the interfaces provided by ADO.NET and introducing the Provider and DataSource classes.
- the generic DBHelper class I created from the DAAB's SqlHelper class.
Warning: this article is in french. Si quelqu'un souhaite le traduire...
Source code which shouldn't need translation (C#) is included.
I'm probably not going to win any friends, but...
I've uninstalled RSS Bandit Beta 5. I did this for a couple of reasons.
...
[News from the Forest]
Same here. Everything is so slow! What's going on?
I'll stick to SharpReader.
So, Luke, my wishes for SharpReader are:
- a lower memory consumption (currently everything is kept in memory right?)
- multi-selection for feed items and for feeds
- properties for feeds to be able to change the refresh rate for example
- being able to stop applying a filter right next to the Apply Filter button
What are the plans Luke?
The long due Mozilla Firebird 0.6 release is out
Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (formerly Phoenix) is available for download. This release features a fresh new look, a redesigned preferences window, preliminary support for Mac OS X and much more. Read why you should be using Mozilla Firebird and get the latest release.
[Slashdot]
You should definitely give it a try. The tabbed browsing and the extensions are just wonderful.
Still lacking the "Send a Link" and "Send Page" commands though :-(
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