Software Geek

There was a time not so long ago when we built “home pages”.  Glorviously extravagant, naievely simple web sites that said who we were, and what we were about.   On those home pages, we put news & announcements, and often, links to static pages of content.   If we wanted to interact with visitors, we included guest books, maybe a simple message board, or just displayed our email address prominantly so others could drop us a note.    All of this was created by hand with the expectation that changes would be few and far between.

Eventually this became such a common approach for building a web site, that we tried to standardize these things.  At the same time, we discovered that a frequently updated web site received more visitors than one that was static or rarely updated.  As a result, content-management features were added to speed updates, forums were improved to include user avatars, threading, and email subscriptions.  Finally, the news & announcements became data-driven, annotated with metadata, and archived for historical review.

Also see: Manual CRUD operations with the Telerik RadGrid control

The current incarnation of this evoulution is what we call the Weblog.   A weblog is still nothing more than an “about” page, news, articles, and forums, it just has evolved a few new facets and appendages to impower users to interact in new (and hopefully better) ways.   Today, we can hardly imagine a web site without at least 1 RSS Feed.  In fact, most web sites today (nearly) completely revolve around their News & Announcements and the related RSS feed.  Yet, we must remind ourselves that the RSS feed is useless by itself.  It is an evolution FROM a web site, not an evolution OF a web site.  It is nothing more than an alternative delivery vehicle for information, not neccessarily a replacement for the weblog (read web site).

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Wow… a lot of traffic about macworld… Keynote , Safari , and a 17″ Powerbook. oh my!

The most interesting news (to me, at least) - Safari being an open source web browser based on KHTML… awesome to see Apple take on something like this.

 

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I just noticed that the good folks at Pixel8 posted a podcast I did with them a while back.  It was a fun conversation about a bit of.NET history as well as where we are going. 

Landing Page   Download show

I’d love the hear what you think!

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/15/brad-abrams-pixel8-interview-podcast-posted.aspx

First, let me offer a great big thank you to Youtube from me and everyone on the internet, including many small businesses. Im just guessing here, but based on reports coming from Compete and others, I don’t think its a stretch to say that Youtube subsidizes the cost of more than half the user generated internet bandwidth consumed in the United States.

Yep, you read that right. If you thought that the internet only used free as an incentive back during the Bubble Years, think again. I’m sure I speak for 10s of millions of us who have hosted videos on Youtube when I offer much gratitude to Google for their generosity. Never could even I have imagined that when they bought Youtube it would be such a costly mistake. If buying a company in order to subsidize the video bandwidth of the internet isn’t crazy.., I dont know what is.

Fortunately for Google, they have unquestionably the world’s best network and most likely the world’s lowest bandwidth costs. So if anyone is going to be able to afford that cost, it would be Google.

As long as their stock price doesn’t fall another 50pct that is. At that point even the most forgiving shareholder may ask about the wisdom of subsidizing all things video on the internet. Particularly when they realize that they have forgotten to price in the overhanging risk of the legal copyright challenges still in play against Youtube. Those lawsuits have not gone away, and the risk certainly has not been reduced. They simply are not front of mind to shareholders these (more…)

By “Frameworks assemblies,” I mean the assemblies that ship with the CLR. But, I’m not counting mscorlib.dll , since it’s special in a different way.

With v1.0 SP3 or later, Frameworks assemblies are unified. That means that the version of those assemblies that you request is ignored - you get the version that matches the loaded CLR. This only applies when the assembly is loaded by version - that is, by assembly display name or static reference (AssemblyRef in the CLR metadata).

For example, if the v1.1 CLR is loaded and you request v1.0’s system.dll, then you’ll get the v1.1 system.dll back. If you load it by path from c:\foo\system.dll, however, then you’ll get c:\foo\system.dll back, not the v1.1 system.dll.

Those assemblies are unified because the owners of the code feel that they are so closely tied to the CLR/mscorlib.dll that they should not be loaded with a different version than they were built against. Additionally, there are some cases where they expect that only one copy of the Frameworks assemblies be loaded in a given process.

If the v1.0 (pre-SP3) CLR is loaded, though, you will get the assembly that you ask for. Unification isn’t done for Frameworks assemblies in that version.

Do not rely on this behavior. You should still fully-specify assembly references with the correct version. That’s just good practice, in general. Besides, if your assembly is loaded in a CLR later than v2.0, those references may not be unified, so you may get unexpected behavior.

http://blogs.msdn.com/suzcook/archive/2003/07/30/binding-to-net-frameworks-assemblies.aspx

Jon’s fascination with libraries has given him a deep understanding of the ISBN format. This reminds me of all the people that “whip” together a XML parser and forget to support all the complex corners of it. Everything is much more complicated than it first seems once you have understood it completely.

Favorite bug of the day: Someone was parsing version numbers and thought the format was always 4 sets of 1-4 digits separated by periods. (1.23.456.5678)… of course, the actual format for version numbers is 4 DWORDs, which, when printed can be many more characters long… boy I wish people would read specs before writing code!

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I have always wanted to move to Japan. More specifically I have always wanted to live in a foreign country for long enough that I’m not just a tourist. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount. I have been able to see Japan, Spain, USSR (while it still existed), etc. I find travel to be one of the most exciting and invigorating things you can do.

So the other day when an old friend called from Japan and said he had some open positions… To cut to the chase, I’m not moving to Japan.  What is worth writing about?

[Note to other ‘Softies - don’t expect me to be moving anytime in the near future, i’ve got product to ship! <G>]

Good managers.

Before I had decided, I walked into my manager’s office and started the conversation with “So, I’ve always wanted to move to Japan”. He responded by asking about my motivations for considering this. I told him about how I had been thinking about this idea for a long time, it has been kind of a life goal. I told him that I was really happy where I was and that the only reason that I was considering this was that the opportunity had presented itself, and it was something I had always told myself that I would do at some point.

He told me that (of course) now would be a tough time for me to leave - however that if this was something that I really wanted to do that it was something we could talk about in the future. He described some other employees that had spent time in other countries.

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Question from my brother Brent:

Is there a way to determine what file and method called my function?  I have a logging object that I would like to be able to automatically add the function, file, and line number of the caller.

Also, I’d like to automatically generate debug output when a function begins and exits

• You can use context bound objects and produce a somewhat heavy, but really cool framework for auto-logging , which can give you the begin/exit outputs
• You can use the StackTrace class to get file, line, and function name information at any point during execution

The caution I would give about either of these is performance. ContextBoundObject has some significant performance implication, as does using the StackTrace class. In addition, the StackTrace class will only give file and line information if the PDB is available.

Since C# doesn’t support macros (a good thing, btw), you are faced with either hand coding a lot of Debug.Write*(…) method calls, or living without this feature.

Maybe this is something we should think about adding to.NET? you could imagine something that plugs into the JIT and lets you compile in pre/post code for any method… ouch, and API into the JIT - that sounds scary. Maybe we shouldn’t consider this

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Jerry (no blog) has been telling us all about a process they use for consensus  [link from Michael ] building in some standards meetings… apparently the Quaker vote is done by everyone voting on each item as one of:

a) Prefer
b) Can live with
c) Can’t live with

The idea being that reasonable people will more quickly come to a decision with they understand what people are willing to tolerate and not. Seems interesting.

Several of us in my group are going off to do some architecture planning and I think we will have lots of challenges around consensus - we may have to put this to the test.

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Chris : that is one of the coolest things that I’ve seen in a long time! I love the idea behind Eclipse (open source pluggable IDE), it’s just too bad it doesn’t have support for C# <G>
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