Visual Studio 2010 beta2 + Framework 4.0 . . . with a few comments on Windows Virtual PC. Installation I don’t “work” on my laptop – mostly used for travel, library, watching Hulu and channel 9, etc. Since I will be out of town for a while, however, I decided to install VS20101b2 in a winVPC for the trip on the laptop. The only complaint about the new VPC offering from Microsoft is that when it is running, it takes forever for my notebook to initiate sleep mode. I don’t recall the old product having...

Static Reflection in .Net Where have I been? I recently took a few minutes to look through the latest MSDN magazine and ran across a nice article by Jeremy Miller on “Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Development”. The section titled “Lambdas as Data” was my first introduction to static reflection in .Net. Where the heck have I been? I don’t write database persistence code, so I am not familiar with NHibernate (or fluent NHibernate) (which is where Jeremy’s sample comes from), but I am still...

Designing Software for Scientists Creating a software design for scientists can be tricky business. Unlike the businessman, who is better off looking at the pretty database report or marveling over the catchy name of the latest Forms over Data application, the scientist can actually contribute to the implementation – provided you use the right architecture. In year’s past (I’m referring to 20+ years ago), the typical Physicist / Chemist / etc. was nearly on par with the typical software engineer...

Three’s a Charm It looks like the third iteration of Team Foundation Server might be a good one. I just finished reading Brian Harry’s post on TFS 2010 and it contains some interesting references. SourceSafe Replacement? I never could understand why TFS was often compared to SourceSafe. All the sessions on migrating from VSS to TFS, TFS for VSS users, etc. Is a team really going to migrate from VSS to TFS? Really? You have got to be kidding me! TFS is change management (to borrow a phrase from Rational),...