April 2005 Entries
This is some of the worst technology news I've seen in a long time. Smalltalk is the most productive language I've ever used and seeing one of the major vendors signing off is not good news. Okay so Instantiations are going to be taking it over - but let's face it they're not IBM. It wouldn't be so bad if IBM weren't touting Java as a replacement technology. Java?! I mean, everything that's cool about Java was ripped off from Smalltalk and everything they did themselves sucks - 'nuff said there I think. Thank God for Cincom, that's all I can say.
More than half of air passengers are risking their health flying by being starved of oxygen, a study finds.
[Via BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]
I recently became aware of a bunch of Shared Source licensed projects that are available through Microsoft Research. There are over 50 projects listed and many have been available for a few years. Games, tools, graphics...good stuff.
http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/default.aspx
Enjoy
[Via Matusow's Blog]
Don't have the time to read a 10 - page how-to article or watch a full length webcast? Try an MSDN Nugget, a webcast that takes you step-by-step to discovering new functionality or exploring a hot developer topic, all in 10-15 minutes. View them online now or download for later reference. To view MSDN Nuggets you need Windows Media Player 9 Screen codec support on WMP 7 and above.
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx
There are all kinds of webcasts on developer topics ranging from working with ClickOnce and Generics to SQL and the new XML datatype... 
[Via David Crawford's WebLog]
The Senate agrees to a White House request for an extra $81.3bn (£42.6bn) for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[Via BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]
So that means if Bush has a stack of dollar bills and he spends one every second, day and night, it would take him 2,624 years to spend all the cash - and that's just for Iraq and Afghanistan. I wonder how much of that cash is going to end up in Halliburton's coffers? :)
Over on his blog Edward Ferron asks " Does anyone still build MDIForms?" Well yeah, I do. The current project I'm working on has the concept of a searcher window. This window has fields for defining a search criteria at the top and a grid to show the results underneath. You fill in your criteria and hit the search button, the grid is then populated with the search results. From the results grid you can double click or right click and select edit to edit the item. This sort of metaphor cries out for an MDI form as many forms can be opened from the search results form.
Over on his blog, my friend Michael Clark comes up with a function for turning Excel column letters into their ordinal numbers, (i.e. A = 1, B=2...ZZ=702). I've simplified the function here:
private int ColumnLetter2Number(string aLetterString)
{
const int ASCII_OFFSET = 64;
const int NUM_OF_LETTERS = 26;
char[] sourceArray =
aLetterString.ToUpper().ToCharArray();
return (sourceArray.Length < 2) ?
(int)sourceArray[0] - ASCII_OFFSET :
NUM_OF_LETTERS * (sourceArray[0] - ASCII_OFFSET) +
(sourceArray[1] - ASCII_OFFSET);
}
Self-Updating applications are a must for widely deployed smart client apps, so don't miss the opportunity of watching this introductory web cast on Updater Application Block V2.0 presented by patterns & practices Smart Client Team next Thrursday 14th. at 11:00 am (PST).
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032271288&Culture=en-US 
[Via eugeniop's WebLog]
Another Dundee company has gone into administration. Not that I work in the games industry, but it's not good to see local software houses, (of whatever type), going under.
I'm a language orientated guy, the exams I passed in school, (English, history, biology), were ones where I could describe problems and solutions using language and not those horrible formulae type thingies, (yeuk!). In particular I was really bad at maths at school. The breakthrough for me came long after I'd left school, when I finally realised that maths was not some sort of alien technology designed to torture poor people like me, but was instead just another way to describe things. In short, it was just another language. A language that can be used to describe things that can be quite stunningly beautiful. Check out this site to see what I mean.
I've just come across this great product, it lets you aggregate videoblogs and podcasts as well as producing them.
The C# team is hosting a chat about the C# language design on April 21st. This is a great opportunity to find out more abouthow and why the C# language works the way it does.
Find more info here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/
[Via Peter Hallam's WebLog]
Check this out for some cool performance data.
Ever wanted a simpler way to create SoapClient and SoapService classes without having to go look in the online WSE 2.0 documentation or WSE 2.0 Messaging Hands On Labs to find the exact syntax? Then check out the link below for a very cool VS.Net addin.
[Via Kirk Allen Evans' Blog]
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