April 2005 Entries
So, I got to spend another 90 minutes on the phone with Compaq's customer service. I got to repeat the same crap that I did last time. There was no record of my previous call. How is it possible that a computer company does not have access to the type of information one usually stores on the computer? Heck, I can tell you my phone bill from 3 years ago. Why is it so hard to find a support call from one week ago? It doesn't make sense. So, I am paying $29 to have a motherboard shipped and installed...
Apparantly, a lot of programmers are moving from C# and Java to C++. What was Stroustrup smoking? I have no doubt that it does happen and that there probably are 3 million C++ developers but C++ has been around a while. I am betting there are more Java programmers or VB programmers or maybe even more C# programmers. It just hogwash (as the article says) that there is pilgrimage from the modern languages to C++. It's like selling your Expedition just so you can buy a Pinto. It happens but the people...
I have been having some discussions lately about what the adoption rate of 2.0 will be. Some think it will be as good as the transition from 1.0 to 1.1. Others think it will be as slow as the initial adoption of 1.0. The results probably lie somewhere in the middle. I do not think the adoption rate will be as high as the 1.0 -> 1.1 rate for the simple reason of cost. When upgrading from 1.0 to 1.1, the cost was not an issue. The upgrade for MSDN Universal was $39 I think. However, newly in the mix...
I have been prototyping a FSM over the past two days and their usefulness is amazing. FSM is just a fancy term for workflow engine but I guess it goes well beyond that. I see only one problem. The size of possible actions which in this context would be a transition matrix, gets increasingly large with each possible branch. Add to that possible crossing branches and it could soon become a nightmare. The gold at the end of the rainbow is being able to tell which state an action is in at any possible...
I thought I might post a few of the bloggers involved with NTeam. Sergey M. Jeff Fansler Levi Rosol Scott Reynolds Chris Woodruff Jonas Antonsson Alex Campbell Ryan RinaldiThere are others, of course, but I grabbed these from my head and bookmarks...
This is the first time I have ran across this one: Edgewall
Part ISo, this is a good story. My father-in-law bought a Compaq Presario about two months ago and has all ready had a major issue with it. Saturday evening, he shut down the pc and Saturday night he booted it up again. The 'System Restore' screen came up and he was unable to get past the screen. He was willing to restore the pc since it is fairly new and he just uses it for games. Anywhoo, he brought it over for me to look at. I tried a new hard drive, cables, etc, etc. Finally, I started a live...
I can't believe I did not blog this all ready but Alan and I had an amazing conversation with Philippe Ombredanne (of Eclipse open source fame) Wednesday night about how we may be able to help each other in our respective projects. It was difficult due to the fact that he is three hours behind us but the conversation was well worth not getting sleep for a day. The guy is super smart and knows aheckuvalot about open source projects and the community. I guess they are trying to accomplish the same...
So, as every one predicted, we are going to have to move NTeam to SourceForge. The move should be finished this weekend. We are also in the process of setting up a site for NTeam at www.nteamproject.com/.net/.... Lev Rosol is supplying the hosting for us so that is VERY appreciated.We really did try to keep it at GDN but on Wednesday, the site was up and down all day long. It was almost impossible to get anything done
If you are still interested in joining the NTeam project drop me a line. We have closed the workspace because over half the people who have joined have showed no interest in the project. Please use the contact me link and do not leave your email address in the comments
I was approached by Darryl Taft, a senior editor for eWeek earlier this week for an interview about NTeam. We (Alan Stevens and I) were asked to keep it under wraps until the story went live. Here is the link: link. I tried to work as many names into the story as possible but the only four that are mentioned by name are Ryan Rinaldi, Scott Bellware, Alan, and myself. Sorry guys, we will work you into the next one. Hopefully, the story will be picked up by a few more news outlets. I also hope the...
As we were evaluating the open-source projects to use within NTeam, we noticed that several projects that would provide much need functionality were not in existence. Mainly .NET Refactoring and Code Analysis (such as FxCop). I can't believe no one has taken these on yet. What gives? Are they too difficult to take on or are we overlooking them?There is an active open source project for the Java community called JRefactory but I can't find anything for either tool group in .NET. Anyone willing...
I am shocked by the response from the community on the NTeam project. There are all ready 20 developers signed up for the project and I have received close to 100 emails on the subject. I thought the project would be popular but I felt it would take a release or two to get more than 5 developers interested. With that said, the progress that I was planning to make in the first three releases could probably be made in the first release. What a great development community.So, you can look for the rough...
I started a new open source project on GotDotNet this morning. NTeam will be an open source alternative to Team System, will make use of the open source projects all ready available such as NUnit, NAnt, etc., and will target small- and mid-sized development teams. If you are interested in joining the workspace, join through the project page. I am really excited about this project and hopefully, it will fulfill the needs of those teams feeling shunned by Microsoft.My good friend Alan Stevens has all...
You may want to skip this tip if you do not care about optimization in your server controls. Yeah right. When you are parsing out all the data that will go into your string, you may be tempted to distrust the HtmlTextWriter. 'Beware the groooooovvveeee.' (sorry, sideline from one of my favorite kids movies, The Emperor's New Groove. Speaking of kids movies, have you seen the Incredibles? How awesome is that movie? I love it.) The HtmlTextWriter is sequential meaning if you write a table tag, pass...
A co-worker, Mike McDaniel, circulated this April Fool's Day hoax this morning, http://www.google.com/googl... Hilarious. Carpe diem, ya' know
Well, to celebrate Gmail's 1st birthday, they are giving everyone an additional 1GB of storage space. How cool is that. However, my limit shows as 1276 or something like that. I guess it will keep increasing until the counter on the homepage reaches two gigabytes. And, this comes only days after Yahoo! upped their limit to 1GB. Has that actually taken effect yet? Leave it to Google to render the competition useless. It seems they are also offering Rich Text Formatting so that should make things a...