DevTopics

UPDATE:  Problem solved!  The VMWare add-in VMDebugger was the culprit.

I recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 and had a rude awakening: VS2010 starts up very sloooooow.  I have a 2-year-old dual core laptop.  Visual Studio 2008 starts in about 3 seconds.  The first time I start VS2010, it takes about 55 seconds.  Subsequent startups take 25-30 seconds.  The hard drive doesn’t thrash; instead, the splash screen just sits there for a half minute before the IDE finally opens.

Continue reading »

Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.  Mono enables developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications with improved productivity.

Sponsored by Novell, Mono has released version 2.8, which includes full support for C# v4.0, improvements to the optional LLVM-based Mono backend, and more efficient garbage collection.

Download Mono 2.8

Get More .NET News

Are you interested in .NET development news like this without having to wade through pages of code and ads?  Then check out Dot-Net-News.com for the latest news and information about the Microsoft .NET Framework and development ecosystem, including C#, Visual Basic and Visual Studio.  No fluff, no spam, just the facts, man.

Ron Burk wrote a terrific, funny article “A Brief History of Windows Programming Revolutions” that describes the internal back-and-forth struggle between programming groups at Microsoft in their endless pursuit to eliminate DLL Hell.  First there was DDE, then OLE, COM, ActiveX, MFC, ATL, and eventually .NET:

“And that brings us up to date with .NET (pronounced like ‘doughnut’, only different), which is like the Internet, only with more press releases.  Let’s be very, very clear about one thing: .NET will eliminate DLL Hell.  .NET includes a new programming language called C# (turns out there was a fatal flaw in Active++ Jspresso, so just as well it died).  .NET includes a virtual runtime machine that all languages will use (turns out there’s a fatal flaw in relying on Intel CPUs).”

The serious point behind this funny article is how each of these Microsoft “revolutions” were supposed to be the panacea of Windows development, only to be replaced in a few short years by the next-best-thing. 

At least Microsoft has stuck with .NET Framework for 8 years, but the churn continues within the .NET development ecosystem.  Remember how WindowsForms was supposed to provide a rich client GUI that ran across all hardware platforms?  Turns out it didn’t work so well in a web browser, so Microsoft invented WebForms.  And MVC.  WinForms also didn’t render well on Linux, so open-source geeks use Gtk# instead.  And WinForms is too heavy to run on mobile devices, so Microsoft ejected it from the .NET Compact Framework.  But .NET CF is too “old school” for smartphones, so now there’s Silverlight.  Are you following me?

In the tech industry, the only constant is change.

First it was musicians, now it’s software developers, and next it will be movie stars.  The gravy train is over, folks!

If you write code for a living, your career is in the crosshairs of the Web’s demand that everything digital be cheap or free.  A whole generation is growing up believing that if you cannot touch it, then it has no monetary value and is free for the taking.

The terrific webcomic The Oatmeal demonstrates this brave new world:

Is this necessarily a bad thing?  If we remove the economic incentive for the time-and-resource-intensive business of software development, consumers are likely to see fewer ambitious software products like Photoshop and Microsoft Office.  However, I’m confident in the future that we’ll all enjoy an endless supply of Fart apps.

This is part 18 in a series of articles on obscure programming languages.

What is REBOL?

REBOL (Relative Expression Based Object Language) is a cross-platform data exchange language and dynamic programming language originally designed for network communications and distributed computing.  More recently, REBOL has been used to program client and server-side Internet applications, database applications, and multimedia applications.

Continue reading »

This is what I tweeted after being blown away by the movie Inception:

Inception is AMAZING! That rare combination of high-concept brain teaser with summer popcorn blockbuster.

And this tweet by Stas Miasnikou is one of the best explanations I’ve seen for the movie.  However, you must truly be a geek if this comment makes you LOL:

The main idea of "Inception": if you run a VM inside a VM inside a VM inside a VM, everything will be very slow

Here’s a clever way to pre-screen candidates: post the job description in C# code.  That’s what a company in Port Chester, New York did for a $80K-$100K .NET Developer position posted on CraigsList.  The job description starts as:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace CandidateSearchApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main( string[] args )
        {
            var candidateSearch = new CandidateSearch();

            foreach (Candidate candidate in candidateSearch.GetCandidates())
            {
                if (candidate.IsViable() && candidate.IsQualified())
                    candidate.SubmitResume();
            }
        }
    }

And the necessary qualifications are summarized as follows:

return
    canWriteCSharp
    && canWriteCPlusPlus
    && knowsOO
    && knowsInterop
    && knowsThreading
    && knowsEntity
    && knowsClientWCF
    && knowsLinq
    && knowsWinForms;

I bought a laptop in June 2008 with 64-bit Windows Vista installed.  At that time, Windows x64 was relatively new, so I encountered a few problems with incompatible hardware and software that required an upgrade to 64-bit drivers.

Now in August 2010, most of the incompatibilities have been solved as x64 has gone mainstream.  At the local Best Buy today, perhaps 90% of the full-featured laptops run 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium.  This makes sense because most new laptops come with 4-8 GB RAM, and you must run 64-bit Windows to access more than 3GB RAM.

64-bit Benefits

Here are the key benefits of running 64-bit Windows instead of 32-bit:

Continue reading »

DeveloperFusion offers a free .NET code converter.  Simply paste your C# or VB.NET code into this web-based tool, then select your target language: C#, VB.NET, Python or Ruby.  Supports syntax up to .NET 3.5.

Code Converter

“I’m tellin ya, mo fos… I’ll bet my last clean diaper that C# is the best programming language there is.”
 

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: a programming poem.  A BABY programming poem, no less!  Apparently Google App Inventor is so easy that even an infant can build Android apps.

But back to the poem by Andra McCoy.  Here is the first stanza:

Why does PHP and HTML sleep in the same crib,
Whenever I look, they’re sharing a bib.
They seem to support some code they call OOP,
I find it irrelevant, more concerned with my Poop!

Any poem that contains both OOP and poop is true geek art in my book!

Read the rest of the “Baby On Rails” poem