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April 2005 - Posts

• .NET Undocumented: The Art of Thread Synchronization

  .NET Undocumented: The Art of Thread Synchronization Jeffrey invented a super-fast thread synchronization lock, SoaReaderWriterLock, that never puts any thread in a wait state. He applied for a patent and sold the idea to Microsoft. Richter urged Microsoft to relax restrictions to the use of the lock. Microsoft agreed to allow the technique to developers of Windows application but not other platforms like Linux. Whoa. Posted Apr 26 2005, 08:53 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Windows Forms and Win32

  Good post by Joseph Cooney about windows forms and how they interact with Win32 -ben Posted Apr 21 2005, 10:34 PM by breichelt with no comments

• Rory's Haggi Metric...

  From Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com Metric: Haggi Explanation: How many servings of haggis I would eat before reading this book again (the graphic is supposed to look like a stomach, ‘cause that’s, like, what haggis is). Rating: 4/5 Haggi I would have given this book more haggi, but the problem is that my stomach has its own limits, and I don’t think I could possibly eat more than four haggi in one sitting. Fortunately, after eating so much haggis, I think I’d probably pass out, rendering myself unable to read the book, so four is probably safe. Pure comic genius, IMO. Posted Apr 21 2005, 09:40 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• OT: This is just too incredible...

  [From Christian Weyer] OT: This is just too incredible... "Some students at MIT wrote a program called SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator. From their website: SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. What's amazing is that one of their randomly generated paper was accepted to WMSCI 2005. Now they are accepting donation to fund their trip to the conference and give a randomly generated talk." Posted Apr 21 2005, 09:22 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Brain.Save() - Is Indigo compelling?

  Brain.Save() - Is Indigo compelling? You’ve got ASMX to do SOAPy stuff, WSE to do interoperable stuff, COM+/Enterprise Services to do “enterprise” stuff and MSMQ to do asynchronous message-oriented stuff. And somewhere in there is .NET Remoting, too Posted Apr 21 2005, 09:10 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion - U.S. Business News - MSNBC.com

  Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion - U.S. Business News - MSNBC.com SAN JOSE, Calif. - Adobe Systems Inc., one of the world’s largest providers of document-design software, will acquire Macromedia Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion, the companies announced Monday. Posted Apr 18 2005, 01:19 PM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• MSDN TV: Introduction to Indigo

  MSDN TV: Introduction to Indigo  Indigo is the managed communication stack that will ship with WinFX. It is the "V.Next" for ASP.NET Web Methods, .NET Remoting, Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, and WSE. Steve Swartz provides a brief conceptual overview of Indigo, walks through some code, and introduces you to his jackalope. Posted Apr 15 2005, 01:16 PM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - TechEd Video #4 - It's all about Community. And Ice Cream. And Baby Carrots.

  ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - TechEd Video #4 - It's all about Community. And Ice Cream. And Baby Carrots. In the fourth and final installment of our "Those are some really weird TechEd Videos Collection (coming soon in DVD, not)" Rory and I learn the meaning of community as we sleep through the TechEd Keynote Address. Okay, now that’s funny. Posted Apr 15 2005, 09:05 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Strong Typing vs. Loose Typing

  Rick Strahl, someone I've followed for close to ten years now because of my affiliations with Visual FoxPro, talks about strong versus loose typing. Posted Apr 14 2005, 05:37 AM by Raymond Lewallen with no comments

• Breaking Changes in a Managed World for download

  Brad Abrams has a great download on Breaking Changes in a Managed World: One of the more valuable resources we use internally is a formal definition of what a “breaking change” is.  That is what are the rules team “A” should follow such that new builds of their library don’t break all their clients.  Some things are obvious “don’t remove any public methods” but some are subtle such as “don’t change return types of public methods”.  Breaking Changes in a Managed World Posted Apr 13 2005, 02:20 PM by darrell with no comments

• Michael Swanson's Blog : ZAM 3D: A 3D XAML Modeling Tool

  Michael Swanson's Blog : ZAM 3D: A 3D XAML Modeling Tool Electric Rain has released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) build of their new 3D XAML designer called ZAM 3D. Although you can always create and edit XAML files by hand (NOTEPAD anyone?), for more complex scenarios, a tool like ZAM 3D is a godsend. In addition to creating 3D models and interface widgets, elements can be animated and integrated directly into Avalon applications. The XAML that is output by this build is compatible with our March 2005 CTP. Posted Apr 13 2005, 09:21 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Service Station: Contract-First Service Development -- MSDN Magazine, May 2005

  Service Station: Contract-First Service Development -- MSDN Magazine, May 2005 In one of my previous columns on Service Orientation (SO), I introduced the concept of "contract-first" service development (see Service Station: SOA: More Integration, Less Renovation). Over the next two installments of this column, I'm going to cover the topic in depth. In this first part, I'll build the case for contract-first development and discuss the ASMX programming model. As a follow-up, I'll walk you through a practical contract-first development process using today's tools and illustrate a hybrid technique that can give you a good balance between interoperability and productivity. Posted Apr 13 2005, 08:46 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Lazycoder weblog » Arraylist.ToArray

  Lazycoder weblog » Arraylist.ToArray The ArrayList class in the System.Collections namespace is a handy class to have around when you have to put objects into an array but you don’t have any idea how many objects you have. There is a hitch when you want to convert the ArrayList to an Array using the ToArray method. I use this techique all the time, it’s a life-saver, especially when I want strong-typing, but don’t feel like creating a Collection class. Posted Apr 12 2005, 11:08 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - Psuedo Internationalization and your ASP.NET Application

  ComputerZen.com - Scott Hanselman's Weblog - Psuedo Internationalization and your ASP.NET Application John Robbins has a great MSDN BugSlayer Article from April of 2004 on Psuedo Internationalization. When you're creating localization-ready applications, but you don't want to go to all the hassle of localizing your ever-changing resources to a specific language, you can create psuedo-internaFile Attachment: Psuedoizer.zip (11 KB)tionalized resources. Posted Apr 11 2005, 09:26 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments

• Getting Props for .NET Refactor

  Getting Props for .NET Refactor My friends and former co-workers/boss and I created .NET Refactor to help us refactor some of our code and it turned into a pretty cool product pretty fast. Les is the man when it comes to writing Visual Studio .NET Add-Ins and Brian is the man that never met something that couldn't be parsed. Well, looks like we got some kind words said about .NET Refactor which is always nice to hear. If you are into Refactoring code and don't want to wait until VS 2005 -it's a pretty darned helpful little utility (granted I'm a bit biased). Posted Apr 11 2005, 09:15 AM by Brendan Tompkins with no comments