Continuing from here.
Ch-7: Digging into the source code
In this chapter, Mike describes the tools that work with, around or towards source code: Idlasm, Reflector and FxCop. The book is written for Visual Studio 2003, so some references are slightly outdated - but there is one utility that stands out and is still more useful than ever: Lutz Roeder's Reflector. It is part of the Visual Studio 2005 (albeit in older version that you can get on the Web site).
On Tuesday evening, the Ottawa Dotnet Users Group organized presentation of Adam Machanic from Boston with title "Designing Highly Concurrent SQL Server Database Applications". I was not sure whether I will make it, because because I did not feel really well, but I am very happy I went.
It was probably one of the best presentations I have seen in Microsoft Glacier Room on 100 Queen Street. I am not sure whether because it was indeed so great or because it touches closely what we are doing.
In software industry there are no annual awards and recognitions of achievements that would resemble the Annual Academy Awards of the movie industry. Various magazines, publishers and companies do present theirs yearly list of Best Products, but they are often biased and seldom representative. The one list that stands apart and that in my opinion comes closest the Oscar is Jolt Awards published by used-to-be one of the best magazines for professional programmers - Dr Dobbs Journal. It is still around and still a pretty good magazine, I guess - but the evolution of the Internet and shift of the money towards on-line advertisement changed the business landscape for most of the magazines, depending on revenue stream from ads. The list has various categories: for books (general and technical), project management, database systems and tools, IDE, design tools, development libraries and so on.
Webbit is like timbit - it comes in 12, 20 or 40 pack, contains many small pieces of different taste and color, is generally unhealthy but good, can be addictive and is nice addition to your morning "extra large, double cream" from Tim Hortons. Unlike from timbits, from webbits you will not get fat, only distracted. Enjoy !
The Quizstop allows you to select how fast are you reflexes with the mouse. Something for those with competitive gene among us (I mean you Igor, of course ;-).
Thanks to Lifehacker I have discovered this extension which add missing piece of GMail functionality: This very simple extension allows you to enter multiple sets of text (such as e-mail signatures) and paste them into forms simply by right-clicking.
Why is this such a big deal ? I am using GMail for both my personal and work stuff. To make sure my work related email appear as coming from company email address, I set the proper From address when composing an email. GMail can be configured to stay with the recipient address when replying. The only problem is signature. In private emails, I want to have link to the blog, in work emails, to company site. And GMail offers only one signature. With this extension, I do not use any signature from GMail, just simply insert correct one from the Clippings buffer.
Today's extension is one that most people do not know about - and still almost everybody has it installed. The explanation for both is that it is distributed with Firefox, and unless you specifically prevent it's installation, you will get it. It is DOM Inspector.
Why would you care about something like this ? Unless you make living by creating Web applications, you probably would not. But if you do, it can help you a lot !
I had a brief MSN chat with friend of mine today, who tried to install and use Vista as development platform. I mean install on the real hardware, in order to use it as core operating system. I have no feedback yet on how Visual Studio works, but as he found out, his Ant build files he uses to compile and deploy Java programs stopped working - because Vista did not allow to copy Javascript files. I can understand why Javascript files are treated with caution - however, it should not be considered the same when a file is copied from a local file to a local file, rather then downloaded from the internet.
According Forrester reseach ".. the Web will fade. It will be replaced by a new software paradigm". Nobody knows what this new paradigm will be, but these guys are saying that it will be their platform. I found this link from this very interesting two part article Changing Climates for Microsoft and Google, Desktops and Webs making interesting analogy between Google and AOL business model, browser as a platform and possible return of thick client ("smart client" in Microsoft terms), why Google might want to buy Adobe and many other interesting observations. Worth reading.
I have switched away from using Outlook once again for variety of reasons - as part of my latest attempts to reduce complexity and increase security (more on that later) and went back to Thunderbird/Web based email systems on all Windows machines. Conversion of address books was piece of cake this time, thanks to Plaxo which I use to synchronize Mac and Windows based systems. Nonetheless, I got curious what format does Thunderbird use for address book and this way I have discovered the awkward Mork file format.
It is now about 1 year since official release of C# 2.0 and .NET framework 2.0. The next version of C# language - the C# 3.0 seems to get more and more attention - in blogs, official channels and MSDN. There is lot of excitement and big expectations - but I have nagging feeling that the general direction of the C# development is not necessary an improvement.
The main new features of the C# 3.0 language are implicitly typed variables and anonymous types, extension methods, lambda expressions, and LINQ - possibility of using SQL-ish dialect inside the C#. With exception of the last, all of them must sound very familiar to every Python programmer. All variables in Python are implicitly typed, we can extend classes to much larger degree than extension methods and lambda expressions were always integral part of Python (inherited from Lisp and Scheme).