Just kidding.
Monthly Archives: February 2004
Kathleen Dollard’s Code Generation book gets rave review from Mr. Code Generation, himself
Jack Herrington, who, if you google his name comes up over and over as “the force behind code generation” (and author of this well received book on Code Generation) gave Kathleen’s new book Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (MSPress) a 5 star review! Way to go Kathleen. Another review by someone who seems to know what they are talking about is also 5 stars. Too bad some meany who for some reason missed the fact that all code is in VB AND C# and didn’t like the binding of the book posted his one star nasty review TWICE making Kathleens’ current average of two 5’s and two 1’s not good. Whether you are interested in codeGen or interested in getting a better understanding of how .NET works, definitely check out this book!
Generics benchmarking
Found this little C# app on iDesign’s download page to demonstrate perf gains with generics. (scroll down on page and look for Generics Performance.) These are demos from iDesign’s classes. I believe it’s the same demo that is in Juval Lowy’s C# Generics MSDN article.
From the iDesign downloads page:
When using value types in a generic type there is typically a 200 percent performance gain, and with reference types you can expect up to a 100 percent performance gain. This demo is a micro-benchmark application, which executes a stack in a tight loop. The application lets you experiment with value and reference types on an Object-based stack and a generic stack, as well as changing the number of loop iterations to see the effect generics have on performance.
I am finding it painful to try to help people understand generics in such a small amount of time. I have to keep reminding myself – it’s an introduction, an overview, a look, a hit list, a reference. But it is SO satisfying to help someone get to that “oh!” of real understanding and uncomfortable to knowingly leave them hanging.
msdn architecture dev center overhauled
(thanks Leon, I fixed the spelling in my title – glad someone’s actually reading it!)
Just this morning I was visiting the MSDN Architecture Dev Center with the idea that if Duncan Mackenzie’s info is on the VB area, etc. then I could find out who the person in charge of the Architecture area was. But that site was very different and completely impersonal.
This afternoon, into my aggregator pops this from Keith Pleas announcing the revamped Architecture and voila! it is TOTALLY different than what I saw this morning and now exactly what I had expected to see!
So with all of the great architecture posts and discussion out there, here is a fine place to follow up!
first real longhorn application???
A few days ago, I posted a completely bullshit post (with caveats) about working with Longhorn. The post was nothing more than a commentary. I sometimes wonder if some of the people who write broad statements about Longhorn have even touched it, and are merely writing something, anything, for appearances’ sake. I have not even installed Longhorn. I’ve seen pieces of it at PDC, read a bit about it, looked at the sample stuff people are developing (videos or screenshots). But I’m not doing anything bleeding edge there.
The one person who commented, who missed my (a bit too unobvious I realize) irony, was Jason Nadel, who I quite like, and truly *is* working with Longhorn. So I was tickled to see this post by Chris Sells, saying that it seems Jason has built the “first real custom app for Longhorn I’ve seen that doesn’t have to do with demonstrating or building for the platform”.
Go Jason!
hmmmm…
I am a little saddened by this “conversation” between two people who have wonderful and intriguing, voices, similar in some ways, different in others … Liz Lawley and Shelley Powers.
IBM hiring again in Burlington area – software jobs posted today
There was something in the local news the other day that IBM was doing a small amount of hiring (small in comparison to the thousands that have been laid off in the last few years). The newscast showed people in full lab gear, so I assumed it was jobs right in the manufacturing area.
However, I just noticed that Dice.com posted a bunch of software jobs today at IBM in Essex Jct (just outside of Burlington, VT). In fact I think they are doing it as I type because it was 8 when I started this post and now there are more.
If you’re curious, go here, type “IBM” in the Full Text Search box and select “Vermont” from the state dropdown, then go. There’s some WebSphere, C+, etc. Some are pretty focused on particular industries.
Whidbey Beta comes in “June time-frame”
okay from Kent Sharkey, via Chris Garty from the proverbial horse’s mouth (sorry Scott! you’re not a horse…)
Chris asked Scott some straightforward questions and got some straightforward answers.
The summary:
- The first public beta will be released in June
- There will be releases before the first public beta with limited availability
- Second beta release will be after issues from first public beta are resolved
- There will be a “go-live license” available for the second beta
(copy paste sure helps prevent “telephone operator” here…)
If you can’t wait till June and you live in the u.s. , get thee to a DevDays show! (where alphas will be distributed)
PowerPoint Deck for DevDays
Because of my user group meeting, Steve Smith and I were both unable to make the live meeting training for my DevDays session. I’m doing “Defenses and Countermeasures”. Oddly enough, the day before I was asked to do this, I had written a very long email to one of my clients explaining all of the things that I had implemented in his web apps and winforms to web service applications to protect their data. (It was a long list)
So, I just took a peek at the deck for my session. It has SIXTY THREE slides – and they are each chock full of stuff. Holy smokes!
I think that works out to 50 seconds a slide…
Generics Help and Type Placeholders
I’m working on the generics part of my little BCL Whidbey talk. I’m going to have about 5 minutes to do generics – whadya think? LOL.
I just wanted to point out that in addition to some of the more (now) classic resources, like Jason Clark’s MSDN Mag articles (1, 2) and Anders Hejlsberg’s PDC demo, Juval Lowy’s C# MSDN article, the generics chapter from the upcoming VB Whidbey book by Scott Swigart, Sean Campbell and a few others, that I found Rob Chartier’s article on 15 Seconds very helpful. Since I spend 97% of my coding time in VB, I have to work a wee bit harder when dealing with the C# stuff and also C# before and after generics is very different than VB before and after Generics. It was not such a big leap from VB into generics. Anyway, thanks Rob.
I also had a funny idea. Since I am always adding grins in the form of (hmmm, will this mess up my html?)