Archives
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Top Reasons Why I like Subversion Better than SourceSafe
*Offline access is the model Subversion is designed around. You don't have to worry about going offline, because this idea is at the root of Subversion. Subversion was designed to replace CVS, which is typically used for projects with huge geographical dispersion. Think ADO vs ADO.NET.
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Laszlo 2.0
Laszlo 2.0 is coming. Sounds pretty cool, especially this part about the new UI components:
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Subversion 1.0 + VS.NET
So, Scoble linked to a post about subversion going 1.0 today. What you may not realize is not only does subversion run completely on its own on any Windows machine (yes, no Apache is needed unless you want WebDAV support), but it is fairly easy to get up and running, comes with great documentation, and there is a VS.NET add-in if you just can't wait to ditch SourceSafe, but want to do it from the safety of VS.NET. -
.NET Weblogs Archive RSS
You can once again get all the .NET Weblogs Archive goodness in your RSS aggregator here:
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.NET Rocks
My .NET Rocks Episode is up. I'm on with Chris Kinsman talking about “.NET success stories.” Great show, IMO, but I might be a little biased ;-).
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JetBrains IDEA Refactorer EAP Information
“The early access build of IDEA's ReSharper comes out today. It aims to support advanced code editing and refactoring features for C# developers using VS.NET. I am a big fan of the IDEA Java IDE and have high hopes for this VS.NET plugin. Get yours from
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Confirmation: Windows Source Code Was Stolen
Thanks to Ali for this link:
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ASAP: The "Breeze Killer"?
Jeremy Allaire thinks he's found a “Breeze Killer.” The app, ASAP by Convoq (which Jeremy just happens to be an investor in and board member of), is actually pretty cool. Integrated video, voice, IM, presentation sharing, etc. He says that it makes “first generation products” like Placeware and WebEx feel awkward, but I have to disagree. Although this is a very cool application, it suffers from the same design flaw that Lazslo does, it is built on top of Flash. This means that, although the UI is very slick, it is extremely unresponsive compared to a standard desktop app, and it sucks up your CPU cycles like mad. Just try doing some screen sharing and you will notice that not only does your CPU utilization go through the roof, but the video is like 8 seconds off, even on DSL.
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IDEA# Early Access Program Has Started
That's right, people are now testing the C# add-in from the guys at JetBrains. That means we are getting pretty close to the launch. This should be exciting.
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Rory on XAML
Rory has some great commentary on the “Why Doesn't Microsoft Use SVG or XUL? debate“
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Mars Rovers Run Java
“I had to laugh when I ran across this article on USA Today that talked about how the Mars rovers ran Java. Let me add to the jokes thatare already spreading:
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Whitehorse Preview
Aaron Skonnard points out this super cool preview video of Whitehorse (the visual designer stuff for web based systems coming soon from MS).
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From MS: Build Your Own Darn Blocks!
Ron Jacobs is of the oppinion that the community should build their own application blocks. His proposal is quite interesting, because Microsoft would furnish test cases and do some design work and then let the community build the blocks themselves. The reason he gives is that the PAG could never really build all the blocks the want to build, so the community (who apparently has lots of extra time on its hands) could build them themselves.
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Dave Winer Goes To Microsoft
If you haven't heard already, Dave made the trek to Redmond. You can find a pretty extensive overview of what he had to say here:
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.NET Bloggers Are Approximately 2x as Likely To Link Chris Sells Than Scoble...
...which is quite suprising at first, considering that Scoble is about 9x more likely to post at any given moment. But then again, if you follow Scoble, you should realize that he posts so much nonsense that 90% of what he writes doesn't deserve any google juice anyway ;-).
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SOA, what happens when your service provider goes out of business?
As we move toward SOA based approaches, we face an interesting dilema. What happens when your service provider goes out of business (or when they kill a product line, or say, like MS tends to say after a few years “upgrade now or die“)? Unlike a software company whose components you have purchased going out of business, this could be potentially devastating to your application's infrastructure. How will you deal with this situation? Does your SLA cover you? Is this outside the scope of a SLA? I have a feeling this may become a hot topic as we move toward service oriented architectures. One major side-effect of this dilema may be the creation of serious barriers to entry for smaller software companies (which have a hard enough time with large licensing deals when they are shipping binaries).
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Pat Hellend on TheServerSide.NET
Pat Hellend is over on The Server Side talking about distributed computing. Highly recommended.
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.NET Weblogs Archive (Most Linked Blogs)
Another preview, search for the most linked blogs in a time period and narrow by term, such as “Avalon“ or “WinFS“:
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Top Blogs For Term (.NET Weblogs Archive)
I'm working on extending the archives to do some useful stuff with all that data, now that we have a good amount of data to mine. You can preview the first of these features here:
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.NET Weblogs Archive Updated (Search Support)
Search and filter are now implemented and runing on the .NET Weblogs Archive. Also new is “Rate this Post” which allows you to assign a rating to posts as you are browsing. Rate this post will be integrated with the RSS feeds (still coming), so that you will be able to rate posts straight from your RSS browser if you are not using the web interface. Also noteworthy, the 25,000 posts that have been archived over the last 10 months or so since the archive first began have all been imported to the new SQL database.
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New DotNetWeblogs Archive Up
There is a new version of the .NET Weblogs Archive up and running. We are transitioning from flat xml files to SQL server storage, which will allow nice things like full text search. The XML flat files where becoming too resource intensive and causing all sorts of problems with the large amount of traffic we were getting. This should provide more stability as well as a good foundation for adding more robust features.
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Brady (Flex IDE) Screenshots
Christophe has a preview of the Flex IDE work being done by MM and others.
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eHelp Acquisition Blues
So, right before Macromedia bought eHelp, eHelp acquired some technology from Articulate, which they turned into a product called “RoboPresenter.” Since I wrote the backend for Articulate's technology, I've been watching this quite closely. In any case, RoboPresenter is used to convert PowerPoint presentations into Flash animations. You can do all sorts of things like add naration, set slide timings, etc. However, Macromedia also has a product that does this now (Breeze), which they acquired from their acquisition of Presedia. So, the two overlap. The official word from Macromedia is that they will be killing the RoboPresenter line, which is pretty sucky for all of eHelp's customers. You see, Breeze is not only an inferior product, but it doesn't allow you to publish locally, you have to send your presentations out to a) Macromedia's hosted servers or b) a Breeze server at your site. Publishing locally, is of course a major reason why all these people chose a product like RoboPresenter in the first place instead of Breeze. Macromedia's solution is apparently to give out hosted Breeze licenses to ticked off customers, which hardly solves the problem. RoboPresenter is like $500, compared to Breeze, which is something like $50,000. So, as soon as your Breeze hosted contract runs out, you wind up with having to choose between coming up with tens of thousands of dollars to renew your license, or going to some other product line. Understandably, there are lots of ticked off people out there, because eHelp just released RoboPresenter a few months ago and the assumption is that they are already abandoning it after promising continued support to all their customers. Interestingly, this whole deal works out good for Articulate, because they will probably wind up getting all of eHelp's (or should I say, Macromedia's) ticked off customers.
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ShadowFax Pre-Alpha Build Available
After a month or so of downtime, you can once again download shadowfax from gotdotnet.