Tales from the Evil Empire

There’s been some debate recently on the new “dynamic” keyword in C# 4.0. As has been the case with many features before it, some love it, some hate it, some say it bloats the language, yadda yadda yadda. People said that about lambdas. Me, I’ll just use it where I see a use case, thank you very much.

I bought the new Guitar Hero 5 because I needed a new fake plastic guitar and Activision’s guitars are the best that are not outrageously expensive. The Rock Band guitars I just can’t stand. So as I was going to buy a guitar from them, I thought I might as well get a (couple of) cheap game(s) with it.

The Microsoft Ajax Library 4.0 Preview 5 is the first release of Microsoft Ajax that I didn’t participate in: I left the team a few months ago. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love what’s in there, and I really do. And by the way I’ve also seen what’s in Preview 6 too and man that will seriously rock.

In today’s post, I’m going to show an interesting technique to solve a problem and then I will tear it to pieces and explain why it is actually useless. I believe that negative results should also be published so that we can save other people from wasting time trying the same thing. So here goes…

One of the challenging aspects of working with TFS as your source control system is very unfortunately the installation of the client software.

I think today is an appropriate time to write this post, as Rob Conery is leaving Microsoft tomorrow. “Who?”, you might ask. Rob is the author of the excellent MVC Storefront and Kona series where he explored the challenges in building an MVC-bound storefront application. I’ve been working with Rob for a few months on the continuation of that, which will be the subject of this post.

One of the great things about NHibernate is its vibrant community and ecosystem. So many people are using it or building other libraries on top of it that you can be pretty sure that there is always a reasonable solution to any problem you might face. Or several.

(Screencast can be found at the end of the post)