Mind Rot

Charles Petzold on Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. For some reason I hadn't seen this before (Thanks Kevin for pointing it out). It raises some very important questions about code automation, programming productivity, maintainability, data driven software and the importance of naming things right. It's very interesting as an opinion piece circa-2005 for comparison against where we now are at 3 years later.

| 27 Oct 2008 | #

Moonlight: Silverlight on Linux

Miguel and his team have been busy - 21 days after Microsoft revealed their cross-platform browser-hosted CLR efforts, the free software world have reimplemented a good junk of it.

• Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days (aka Moonlight)
• Another report of the 21-day hackathon at Novell
• Moonlight-based Desklets
• A Mono Developers Guide to writing XAML by hand. (ie. the language of Silverlight)
• Silverlight Surface demo

Besides the cool tech and the flashy demos, what is very impressive by itself is what can be achieved by a small focused team in a small amount of time. Slow viscosity/inertia/velocity (or whatever you want to call it) is the enemy of innovation. Slow development progress begats further slow progress, whereas quick results sky-rockets the motivation of the team. Seriously, the more projects I see, the more I'm convinced that if you can get the obstacles and interruptions out of the way then you have a great chance to get a coherent, innovative, quality software product developed quickly. It's less about process, it's less about documentation, and it's more about focus.

The hackfest/sprint is certainly under-utilised as a software development lifecycle today.

| 29 Jun 2007 | #

Trusted Code 2.0

So back in .NET 1.1 days we had a problem running C# code off a remote fileserver - Windows trusts, by default, code on the local machine only. Fortunately there is a work around, which we dubbed The Dilbert Zone.

Moving our product across to .NET 3.0 means changing the security trust on the local machine for this new environment in a similar fashion.

Start the appropriate configurator found at Start|Settings|Control Panel|Administrative Tools|.NET Framework 2.0 Configuration

Navigate to Console Root|.NET Framework 2.0 Configuration|My Computer|Runtime security Policy|Machine|Code groups|All_Code|LocalIntranet_Zone and select Add a Child Code Group.

Create The Dogbert Zone, with condition type = Zone, Zone = Local Intranet, and Permission set = FullTrust. Select Ok a few times and exit out of this user-unfriendly administrative console.

Restart Visual Studio 2005, and voilà - it just works as expected.

| 16 Feb 2007 | #

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 released

.NET 3.0 has finally been released. What's is it?

Basically it's .NET 2.0 with extra APIs such as Windows Presentation Foundation WPF (was "Avalon"), Windows Communication Foundation (was "Indigo"), workflow stuff etc. What will it let me do? Hopefully do high-level programming for rich clients. Hopefully not having to avoid bugs in the 2.0 release.

The most interesting question is how this relates to Mono. Will these new APIs be supported?

| 08 Nov 2006 | #

WebClient class omission

In the .Net framework there is a nice helper class WebClient which makes it easy to [up|down]load files off a network. Unfortunately it ignores the GlobalProxySelection setting - meaning that there is no way to use WebClient through an http proxy.

A small note is found on this page which suggests that WebClient has a proxy property in .Net 2.0. This is another indication of the immaturity of the .Net Framework library - so many simple things have been overlooked. sigh.

Note: Haven't checked the implementation at Mono yet.

Update: Ok, so it is possible. WebClient will honour the global proxy settings, just not with the default credentials of the user invoking it. For reference...

     System.Net.WebProxy proxyObject = new System.Net.WebProxy(proxy);
     proxyObject.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential(username, pass);
     GlobalProxySelection.Select = proxyObject;

     WebClient client = new WebClient();
     client.DownloadFile(this.uri, localFilename);

Thanks James...

| 19 Jan 2006 | #