Jesse Ezell Blog

“ALBUQUERQUE - Reaching back to revive an idea promoted by the man he beat for the White House, President Bush urged Friday that affordable high-speed Internet access be available to all Americans by 2007, saying it was essential to the nation’s economic growth.” [1]

”The European Commission's order for Microsoft Corp. to ship a version of Windows without the Windows Media Player could stifle innovation and help Microsoft's rivals instead of promoting fair competition, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust chief said Wednesday..."The U.S. experience tells us that the best antitrust remedies eliminate impediments to the healthy functioning of competitive markets without hindering successful competitors or imposing burdens on third parties, which may result from the EC's remedy," [1]

Fawcette is covering VSLive SF. There should be a video of the keynote later today up on the site at:

In Windows, it is very common to see an icon that has an image overlayed on top of it to designate something special. For example, when you create a shortcut to another location, you get that nice white box with the curvy arrow that says to you “this is just a shortcut, not an actual document.” On the web, this type of thing can also be very useful in your UI, but achiving the effect with Javascript or layers can be a pain. In our CMS UI, we needed a way to designate which documents in lists were merely shortcuts or overlay different status info on top of icons. If you run into a case like this, here is some code to get you started (note, you probably want to add caching, etc. to this):

Laszlo has announced their low end version pricing. The low end version is limitted to deployment on single processor machines and costs $1,999. Personally, I think they would make a lot more money if that was the price for the Enterprise version. How do they expect to compete against Flash when their lowest end version is five times as expensive and their product doesn't even include any real tool support? [1]

“IBM plans to bring a software development technique that has been the subject of theoretical work for years to commercial products this year and next.

Daniel Sabbah, IBM's vice president of software group strategy and development, on Wednesday plans to detail the company's use of the technique, called aspect orientation, at the Aspect-Oriented Software Development conference in Lancaster, England. Sabbah also will declare that the technology is reliable enough for commercial use, according to IBM.“ [1]

One of the very cool tools we are working on here at the office is an ASP.NET based defect tracking system (we actually use it in house already and it is really helping us manage defects effectively as we push to get our CMS out the door). We have some very cool things going on with the system (like integration with NUnit to automatically keep bugs in sync if you use TDD). From the start, I've always thought it would be nice to have bugs show up in the IDE just like compiler errors. After all, runtime errors (like unhandled exceptions) are just as bad to have strewn around your code as compile time errors and a little visual notification would be nice. So, when I heard the VSIP extras were finally here, I rushed out and downloaded a copy. I quickly filled out the sign-up form and 30 seconds later I was downloading the install.

Bruce Eckles continues his great rant on “weak typing.” What seems to be missed by this discussion is that you can actually write generic code in C# without too much difficulty. Delegates provide us a very nice interface independant way to make method calls. For example: