I wanted to try out VMWare workstation today so I went over to the VMWare site and filled in all my details and created my new password, all the time happy in the knowlege that I had a nice secure (if you forget about possible man in the middle attacks) SLL connection. So what does VWWare then proceed to do? Why lets confirm that password by emailing it back to you over a nice insecure connection.
Nice!
At the recent PDC in LA I had the opportunity to speak to some of the C# team. I tried to make the most of this by voicing one of my biggest bugbears with the C# language: Why make numbers so overly difficult to use?
We have sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, unit, long, ulong, float, double, decimal to represent the simple real world concept of a number. If we take the concept of a number into the software development paradigm what do we really want from it:
- Fidelity (How many decimal places to we need to be accurate to)
- Possible values (What is the range of numbers to be stored: Minimum & Maximum)
Pretty simple huh!
I do understand the reasons behind .NET’s numeric types:
- Give the C, C++ and Java developers something familiar
- Performance
- Hmmm, maybe they didn’t think about it so long.
Personally I think that performance is a non-issue. The .NET runtime is responsible for handling garbage collection as we’re too irresponsible to do this effectively ourselves, so why not handle numbers for us too. Maybe we might have to introduce some attributes to indicate what is most important to us:
- [Optimisation=Speed]
- [Optimisation=Space]
I certainly wouldn’t miss having to debug runtime errors where a DataReader returns an insignificantly different type from the attempted cast.
Create a windows users using Wix
Sharing some thoughts and experiences of using the pre-beta version of Windows 7.