March 2005 Entries
As we move towards Beta2 and are preparing for the headlong rush towards RTM (release to manufacturing), I’ve been lucky enough to be able to carve out some time to start doing some research for ideas that might show up past Whidbey. We’re not talking anything formal here, no feature lists or anything like that. Just the opportunity to spend some time noodling with some ideas on the whiteboard and fiddling with some prototype ideas. It’s one of the perks of having been around a long time – especially since most people on the team are still totally heads-down on shipping.
One of...
Yes, it’s going to suck. So will this one. It’s just a law of nature: Alan Moore doesn’t translate. This one was OK but didn’t get close to the original material. This one sounded so bad that I couldn’t even bring myself to watch it.
Am I missing any? Instead, go buy the books:
No, really, do it. Now. Probably Watchmen is most accessible, but my personal all-time favorite is V for Vendetta. (I’ll tell you a story about that one in a moment.) From Hell is pretty dense reading and is probably left to the end. The...
As an example of how VB .NET threw its lot in with the MSDN camp instead of the Raymond Chen camp, Joel points to the example of the disappearance of Set and parameterless default properties. (I should add that Joel slightly misspoke again – VB still has default properties; now, though, they can’t be parameterless.) This is an interesting design point to pick because it was one of those that unambiguously showed the dilemma that we faced when moving to .NET. Namely, how do you do two mutually exclusive things at the same time?
You see, when we started out on the grand...
In my previous entry on the VB6 petition, I explicitly avoided the question of support as something that I knew little about. So, for those of you who missed it, you can check out what Rob or Jay have to say about it. They know far more than I about it.
Another “just links” entry… I thought that Raymond’s entry on the performance shell game was particularly good, and Michael’s additional take was very relevant. Much of performance work involves shifting work around from scenario to scenario, and when doing so it is vitally important that you keep track of the bigger picture. The fact that it’s not possible to test every scenario can easily lead to tunnel vision, where you get so motivated to improve one important scenario (application startup) that you lose sight of perhaps an even more important scenario (OS startup) that’s “not your department,” but which impacts...
In my continuing quest to block out comment spam, I made a tweak last week to my SQL scripts. Instead of doing a full-text match to a list of banned comment titles (among other filters), I started doing a keyword match. So if, say, you use the name of a certain drug that can help Bob Dole, then the comment would be automatically filtered out. Because this was a hack, I didn’t do anything fancy like put filtered comments into a table so that I can know if I’m filtering out legit comments.
Which, it appears, came back to bite me...
A few days ago Scoble emailed me with the heads up on his post talking about the MVP revolt spurred on, in part, by the fact that VB 6.0 mainstream support is ending this month. Then life intervened and I’m just now getting some time to get back to the whole brouhaha. In the meantime, this has roiled through at least a few corners of the blogsphere. I’d throw in a couple of gratuituous links, but if you read any number of .NET or VB blogs, you’re going to have seen them. Well, OK, two entries that stand out in my mind were those of...
One of the things that would be amusing if it wasn’t so annoying is the way that a step forward can be perceived by people as a step backwards. Case-in-point: the commonly heard refrain that C# is the “official” language of .NET (and Microsoft) because so much of the frameworks are written in C#. Scott has a pretty good set of arguments against this canard framed in the context of the present day, but the thing that I find really ironic is how all this hand wringing is so woefully ignorant of history and how it is backhanded evidence of the...