Ben S. Stahlhood II's Blog

Well, I should be on news.com either today or monday for helping reverse engineer the new XM Direct and Commander protocol and making an SDK for .NET written in C#.  The team and company I work for is selling a kit for 45.00 for home users and car users that use computers in there car.  It basically helps replace the XM PCR that was discontinued a few weeks back after the Timetraxx and RIAA drama.  We will be working with TimeTraxx to make a new version supporting the XM Direct and Commander.

Fun stuff!

 I tried out MSN Music today.  The first thing I noticed was that I was getting a lot of error pages with the "Unknown Error" page being displayed.  I know this thing is Beta, but you would think that it would be just a little better being a public beta and all.

The UI experience is much better on iTunes Music Store compared to MSN Music.  Two things I like on the iTunes Music Store that MSN Music is missing is Celebrity play lists and the iMix's.  I know MSN Music is new and will eventually get better closer to a full release.  I love some things Microsoft does and sometimes I just wonder what there were thinking when they release something.  I think C# and the .NET Framework are among the greatest innovations I have seen in my programming career.  It just seems that the overall quality of software from Apple in there initial releases are at a much better quality level then some of the first version releases I have seen come from Microsoft.  Microsoft then picks up steam and by version 2 or 3 of a product, most of the time it is just awesome.

I guess every company has there own methods in the way they develop software.  I just wish Microsoft would spend a little more time on some of there projects and get more involved in the community with there development, like they have with Longhorn, .NET, Whidbey, and Yukon.  I hope they start going this route with all there future versions of software they release.  If they get a lot of feedback from the development community on products, they can up there level of quality from the initial release.  Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 will be 2 of the best products I have seen come out of Microsoft in quite some time.  It would also be nice to see more involvement with the open source community.  I hope Josh Ledgard makes progress with the open source efforts at Microsoft.  They have already release two great projects to the open source community, which Josh has been the oversear.

With the new release of Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 1 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta Microsoft has included a lot of nice enhancements to ADO.NET 2.0.  By either using the DAAB or writing it your self, you could get generic provider factories.  Microsoft has now included this in ADO.NET 2.0 along with a lot of other nice enhancements.  For those using SQL Server and wanting to provide a list of servers to your users, we would have to PInvoke SQL DMO.  Now there is a new base class called DbEnumerator.  The SqlClient support for this class will return a list of SQL servers.  There is a ton of features that you can read more about at the following link...

I must say that I am impressed with the performance of .NET Framework 2.0.  I wrote a Media Library that if given a folder will iterate through all the directories and add all the files to a DataSet with various tables.  I have a table called “Audio” for all audio files (i.e. MP3, OGG, etc) and a table called Video for the various video files.  On the audio side I read in the MP3 tags, all version from 1.0 to 2.4.

I have read where Microsoft most likely will not be adding functionality or updating VSA.  The demand for dynamic scripting support for windows form apps is definitely out there.  I have got away with supporting something like this using Interop with the Microsoft Script Control.

I have seen post and discussions around the net regarding using C# vs VB.NET.  Here are my .02 on the subject.

This is roughly about a week old, but none the less it is a great post from Brad Adams about the Dictionary issue where it throws an exception when a key does not exists...

Adam Nathan (http://blogs.msdn.com/adam_nathan/) has put up a new Interop Wiki (http://pinvoke.net/)