Dev Blog - Johan Danforth

From the Xtreme Simplicity home page:

"As part of our strategy to be the premiere refactoring solution for Visual Studio .NET, Xtreme Simplicity will soon be releasing a refactoring add-in for Visual Basic. Soon the powerful code-restructuring and metrics which have proved most popular with C# programmers will be available for Visual Basic. If you are interested in participating in our alpha testing program or wish to be notified when VB Refactory is released contact us at VBalpha@xtreme-simplicity.net "

UPDATE: I've been told now that this message has been on their website for ages :( Besides, the function to get an evaluation key seems broken. They've apparently ran out of evaluation keys???

Yeah, sure... 

I wish "MSDN Just Published" had categories. The RSS feed gives us lots of good stuff, but I'm not interesting in everything published. I just saw the title "Stress Testing: Using Modular Stress Test to Test Platforms and Components" and thought it interesting. That was until I saw it was for Windows CE :/

They could perhaps use one of the topmost breadcrumbs as category, in this case "Mobile and Embedded Development". Shouldn't be too hard to add.

Ah great! I've seen the FxCop tool, but I've not had the time to have a look at it yet. Nice of them to make a webcast of it.

"Michael Murray and Jeffrey Van Gogh from the CLR Team describe FxCop, the freely-available code analysis tool from Microsoft."

I've been having fun with the powerful graphics libraries in .NET to generate a map of a small medieval village for a role playing game I'm writing on my (non-existing) spare time. Yeah, a good old pen and paper and dice style RPG. Anyway, that new .ASIX image generator control in Whidbey will be useful for this application. You can have a look at a beta version of my "village generator" by clicking at the image below. It's in Swedish, but just press the button and a new village will be generated.

My good friend Tomas Arfert drew the images for me :)

I've been watching a couple of the Whidbey presentations ScottGu did at the PDC, and I'm really impressed by the powerful controls that's going to be shipped...and concerned. Will Whidbey take away the fun from developing a web application when you can do so many things by just drag-dropping controls and set their properties? Is it just me having this feeling?

It's not that I'm not looking forward to get my hands on some of the new features and controls, like the Cache with database dependency and so on, I really do. I spend a lot of time going through and refactoring other peoples ASP.NET code, and finding bugs in a system made up from a lot of server controls with lots of properties set on them may be a bit trickier. Perhaps I'm just sad because now when these powerful features and functions are part of Whidbey, I can throw some of my old ASP.NET components and solutions out of the window.

Perhaps I should just shut up, be happy that we now can deliver systems even faster to customers, concentrate on the layering and architecture, code providers and say something in a year or so when we've delivered the first Whidbey-based project or two...

What do you say? Is it just me?

As the subject/title says, I'm listening to and looking at ScottGu's ASP.NET 2.0 presentation from the PDC. I was glad to see all those presentations available as streams, really good. I've not counted them all, but there must be hundreds of presentations available with audio, power-point slides and video of code demos etc. Thumbs up from all of us who couldn't attend the PDC this year!

Minor grumbling update: Scott's presentation has died on me a couple of times now, in the middle of the code demos, which is just one long session and can't be fast forwded :/      I had to delete the temporary files, and once I had to delete the cookies to get it running again :(    Pity...

Administrative work must be one of the worst punishments there is for a programmer. I'd rather refactor 10.000 lines of code than fill out another database request form - yes, a non-electronic paper form to get database space... amazing!

'nuf said

Now I've ordered the DVD containing both the Longhorn and Whidbey bits. I'm not sure exactly what builds they are, but at least I'll be able to have a look at what the PDC attendees been posting about for a couple of weeks now :p

If someone reading this knows the exact content of that DVD, please comment on this post!

I just have to figure out which of my computers I gonna install it on. A fast one with lots of memory seems needed, if you look at what people has been reported so far. Guess I'll be needing Virtual PC or something similar...