Little Hobos Blog

2002-11-11T18:08:00.000Z

Hobo goes Radio

I am just trying out Radio for now, does this mean Blogger shame? :) While I think Blogger is great and I could pay for Blogger Plus I really need the features that Radio provides, so if I am to spend the £££ it looks like radio is in with a chance. Not sure how I will update both Blogs but expect both to carry the same content. Please feel free to visit my Radio BLOG and post some comments :)

2002-11-11T17:34:00.000Z

More news on the future of C# and C++

Bill Gates talking about the future of C#, he also talks about the next version of C++ (and its 98% basis on the ISO C++ standard). He also makes a menion of a interesting defect tracking tool by Microsoft Research, I hope they release it.

2002-11-11T17:32:00.000Z

The future of C#

Rotor already has a beta version of generics so it makes sense that it will make its way into the main stream CLI. The FAQ also shows that Microsoft plan to add these features to VB.NET and J#, this is great, great news.

2002-11-11T17:29:00.000Z

Hello

To Kim, Cath, Cliff and Mike :D

2002-11-07T14:08:00.000Z

Yahoo to go to PHP

The major reason here above languages like ASP/CF is to save $$$ and JSP/Java due to the threading support on FreeBSD. I do wonder what Mono would have added to this.

2002-11-07T13:40:00.000Z

PHP and ASP.NET at PHP DevCon

Kudos to Christian Wenz on this talk

2002-11-07T13:37:00.000Z

Using .NET with PHP via COM

My book was first ;-)

2002-11-07T09:24:00.000Z

The Lizard Book

Or O'Reillys PHP Cookbook :)

2002-11-07T09:19:00.000Z

C# and Parrot

Not sure of the context of this but I came across this news snippet of the folks on the Parrot team talking to the folks on the DotGNU team about Parrot and C#. I can only assume it means that the Parrot team are looking at ways of running C# in the Parrot VM.

2002-11-07T09:16:00.000Z

Rotor 1.0 released

Adds Mac OSX support (Linux is available but not offical) plus a few other bits and bobs, kudos to the Rotor team on getting this out.

2002-11-07T09:13:00.000Z

Code Generation

Interesting project to create a code generator. Several of these exist and come in two parts, a XML system to allow you define a mini language (which allows you to define your language of choice, VB.NET/C# etc) and a parser to convert your mini language to code. I have not had a chance to use this yet but as part of my work I can see its use as a possible way of creating a simplified SQL based query system and to allow large blocks of code to be easily created. I have yet to do the research (and find the time to do the research), John Lam however has a interesting story to tell about his research.

2002-11-05T16:44:00.000Z

Smalltalk

Picked up a Smalltalk book the other day, I do intend to learn Smalltalk so that I can research its use in .NET and see what changes it has in its OOP support. I have heard great things about Smalltalk so this going to be one heck of a journey :)

2002-11-05T16:39:00.000Z

.NET in WSH

Spent the last week writing a WSH file, while looking for info I came across this app. Not tried it yet but it looks interesting.

2002-11-05T16:37:00.000Z

Popfile

Interesting opensource Perl app that uses AI (Baysian rules) to filter POP3 email. If you have a lot of email boxes/spam its worth a look.

2002-11-05T16:35:00.000Z

Rotor mail list website

This is a nice .NET/Rotor web site, of interest to me (other than the Rotor info) was the work that has been done on running Mindstorms with .NET (some of you may remember my research into running Rotor/Mono on Mindstorms. Not looked at this in great depth yet but it will ASAP.

BTW the serversides Java/.NET Petstore benchmark PDF (that is causing so much trouble in the Java/.NET camps right now) is available on the site, you will need to belong to the mailing list to obtain this though.

2002-11-05T16:30:00.000Z

Microsoft BLOG software

Given the recent news on Microsofts stance on employees blogging this article was interesting. Its a rumor that Microsoft is creating BLOG software for SharePoint server. If this is true then this could prove to be very interesting, the article mentions that Microsoft could host and if we get RSS plus all the goodies that Blogger Plus and Radio etc offer it could be killa bit of BLOG software. I would however wait and see how they offer the product though.

2002-11-05T16:21:00.000Z

Happy Bonfire Night

Stay safe

2002-11-04T09:16:00.000Z

Borland for Mono

This is a article from the Register on a rumor that Borland is looking at using Mono to add .NET support to Kylix its Linux RAD IDE tool. Borland have not supported this claim (nor denied it) but if its true then I hope that the work they do they share with the Mono project. Borland should take a leaf out of Macromedias book, they use the Apache AXIS project in their Jrun product however its a common fact that Jrun engineers are active members of the AXIS project.

2002-11-04T09:10:00.000Z

ondotnet.com

The new O'Reilly .NET info portal, I am looking foward to seeing to what they put up, content wise.

2002-11-04T09:07:00.000Z

Congrats to Peter Drayton

On joining the Microsoft CLR team, I don't doubt that Microsoft would benefit the services of the other usual suspects, Sam, Ingo and Jason :)

2002-11-04T09:02:00.000Z

Mad Week

Just had a mad week, hopefully this week will be a little easier (fingers crossed) and I'll get some time to BLOG.

2002-10-28T09:16:00.000Z

Sun vs .NET

Another Register article, this one on comments made by Sun on the Java/.NET war (silly though it is). Should Sun dismiss IBM like this? I think not. I have always seen IBM as a strong supporter of Java, look at the research work they done with alphaWorks etc. I would love to see them do the same thing with .NET, if Sun is going to behave like this then maybe IBM should plonk them selves in the middle :)

2002-10-28T09:08:00.000Z

Microsoft Bloggers

This article on the Register seems a little strange. I don't understand why Microsoft is being like this, what harm can a BLOG possibly do? Look at Macromedia, so far one of the big companies to embrace BLOGs and use them in a very postive way. Maybe Microsoft should take note.

2002-10-28T09:06:00.000Z

DIY

What a weekend, spent saturday looking after my 10 month yr old god daughter and Sunday fitting a dish washer/drier. Saturday night was great, my elder sister got engaged :D

2002-10-25T07:36:00.000Z

North Code

North Code are a company based out of Ottawa, Canada and are the creators of SWF Studio, a great tool for producing projectors and screen savers from Flash files. Tim Goss the guy who leads the development of SWF Studio and is the founder of Northcode, is a great guy. I know Northcode is going places, so if you use Flash then give them a visit.

2002-10-24T08:35:00.000Z

.NET Languages

Jason Bock is running a .NET Languages page, I have sent him some info on the Ruby/.NET effort. He mentions that he is looking to research Ruby. I cannot recommend more strongly enough that you do, if you have ever seen what the LISP CLOS system brought to OOP then you will like Ruby.

2002-10-24T08:31:00.000Z

Update

Apologies for the lack of updates. I have had a bad cold, moved house and have a deadline for a major project to finish. Its just work, work, work :)

2002-10-14T16:31:00.000Z

Blog for fun

Brian Gaf asks why is blogging and where he is going wrong. My advice is not to take it to heart too much, do what you enjoy and report what you find, be it fluff or not. Most important of all, enjoy it.

2002-10-14T16:28:00.000Z

Moving House

Me and Em should (fingers crossed) be moving into our new home on Friday. I been packing the last couple of weeks and I never knew I had so much stuff. Worst offender is my book collection, 200+ computer books plus another 50 or so books on other subjects. I have no idea where I will put them all :)

2002-10-14T16:25:00.000Z

Blog Wear

Might get a Mug and Bag to match my T, hmmmm.

2002-10-14T13:12:00.000Z

.NET Opensource

From a mail on the CLR mailing list is a list of .NET Frameworks.

Following are some of the Frameworks (OpenSource), mostly ports of their JAVA implementations.

1) http://mavnet.sourceforge.net/
Maverick.NET is a .NET port of Maverick, a Model-View-Controller (aka "Model framework for web publishing. It is a minimalist framework which focuses solely on MVC logic, allowing you to generate presentation using a variety of templating and transformation technologies

2)Logging Framework for .NET (http://sourceforge.net/projects/log4net)
The .NET implementation of the popular log4j Java API providing flexible and arbitrarily granular control over log management and configuration.

3)Object Persistance Framework for .NET
(http://sisyphuspf.sourceforge.net/home.htm)

4)Nvelocity (http://nvelocity.sourceforge.net)

NVelocity is a .Net-based template engine. It permits anyone to use the simple yet powerful template language to reference objects defined in .Net code

5)NLucene (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nlucene)
NLucene is the .NET implementation of the Lucene high-performance, full-featured text search engine.

As the email states a lot of the projects are Java ports of tools from the Apache Jakarta group, it would be nice to see a hosted project like this for .NET (where we can group .NET projects togther).

2002-10-11T11:05:00.000Z

Hosting Cassini within Apache

An interesting french article (translation was done with astavista) on hosting Microsoft's free little ASP.NET web server in Apache 2. Take a look at the comments on the asp.nets forums as well.

2002-10-10T12:15:00.000Z

New Servers from Microsoft

2002-10-09T07:52:00.000Z

PHP programmer interview

On John Lims BLOG I spotted a article on a developer who has created a OOP lib for PHP, in the QA session I spotted the following when asked what he thought of .NET

Vince: From what I know about .NET, it's much better (technology-wise) than PHP. What's stopping me from using it is the company that's behind it. It's not that I *hate* Microsoft, but I don't like their tactics... Also, I can't understand why anybody would want to work with a technology that has that awful a EULA (End User Licence Agreement).

I am beginning to feel like I am saying this over and over again (maybe I am) but may I suggest Vince you take a look at Mono. Your reply only serves to reinforce my view that certain folk ignore .NET because its Microsoft and don't bother to do the research first.

Vince goes on to say that ASP.NET is just like JSP, in some reguards it is but many reguards its not, again a case for better research.

2002-10-08T08:24:00.000Z

AXIS 1.0 is released (from Sam Ruby)

This should make its way into Jrun quite soon, congrats to the AXIS team.

2002-10-08T08:15:00.000Z

Shake your Faith (from Chris Sells)

I understand this completely. I think Justin is right that if he has grown tired of the corp bullsh1te that so often effects our industry that he looks for the next challenge. You have to earn your crust to pay your mortage and feed your family but do you really need to be fed up to the back teeth doing it.

2002-10-08T08:07:00.000Z

VB.NET Doc tools (from Chris Sells)

This works really well, its free, integrates into VS.NET and has got loads of features on the way!

2002-10-08T08:04:00.000Z

.NET compiler tools

If you have used compiler tools such as Yacc and Bison before then this will be of interest, not tried them out yet but they look interesting.

2002-10-08T08:02:00.000Z

Macromedia DesDev center for CFMX and J2EE

Some interesting resources, hope we will soon see articles on using web services (such as JRuns AXIS based system).

2002-10-08T08:00:00.000Z

Robin Williams

Is da man, I heard in a recent TV interview that he has over 50 bikes, some mountain bikes, mostly road bikes. Would love to see a collection like that, must have some classics.

2002-10-02T12:25:00.000Z

.NET for other platforms

Interesting article on using the .NET Framework on other platforms. The comments are full of Microsoft bashers, even if you hate Microsoft that does not mean you have to hate efforts made by folks like Mono to give us a cross platform, powewrful development framework. It makes me wonder if people will just go to any excuse to bash Microsoft.

2002-10-01T12:27:00.000Z

Zeev Suraski interview

About the compilation issue - PHP does not translate very well (read: at all) to machine code, or byte-code similar to that of the CLR. That is one of the reasons that PHP doesn't have a CLR implementation. For the same reason, the .NET implementation of Perl is very limited. Scripting languages simply don't translate well to the CLR bytecode, or to machine code.

My question to you Zeev is that when Perl/Python move to the Parrot VM where will PHP stand on this issue then. These languages are moving to this model at the very least (other scripting languages like Ruby and TCL will be able to make use of the changes to the CLR, dynamnic types etc), is the optimizer enough when other languages in the PHP sphere are moving to a compiled model?

2002-09-30T08:08:00.000Z

Microsoft looks at commerical license for shared source

Starting with the SSCLI (Rotor) and CE.NET first they looking at a way of allowing developers to both modify shared source code and sell those modifications. In terms of Rotor this will really open up platform ports, tools and languages (I once mentioned to Jeremy Alliare that the JScript.NET code could form the basis for a .NET version of SSAS but he stated that the license prevented him from doing so, not anymore hey Jeremy).

The article goes on to say that a lot of the product groups are looking at shared source, I hope that ASP.NET and ADO.NET join the party ;-)

2002-09-26T21:45:00.000Z

Flash Remoting BLOG

Set up by the Boston Macromedia User Group (BMUG) this is a BLOG on all issues realting to Flash Remoting, will be interesting to see it develop.

2002-09-25T22:47:00.000Z

Blogger T

Got my Blogger.com T today, I will wear it with pride :)

2002-09-25T22:46:00.000Z

Peter Joel

Fellow Team Macromedia member and blogger, thanks for linking to me and welcome to blogger land ;-)

2002-09-25T22:43:00.000Z

Team Macromedia

As of today I will be prowling the Flash Remoting forums as a Team Macromedia member, after 4 years and 1000+ posts on the Generator forums it will be nice to return. Expect to see lots of FlashRemoting news in here as a result :)

2002-09-25T22:42:00.000Z

Flash Remoting price worries

Seeing a few concerns over price worries for Flash Remoting (and the fact it costs more than CFMX and Jrun), I understand these but its commerical product aimed at the enterprise market. I stand by Macromedia but what I don't want to see is a "Generator" style price issue and the product to loose developers and die a death, its a great product and I hope lots of folks are making of use it. I hope that some point for a future release they can introduce a pricing plan to cover as bigger an audience as possible. It deserves it.

2002-09-24T07:56:00.000Z

Mesh reports FlashRemoting MX

Mike Chambers reports that FlashRemoting is available, note that his comment.

and the .NET version works of course, with Microsoft .NET servers.

Means that the .NET version will work with any OS that has the .NET Framework 1.0 installed.

The comments mention a wish for a PHP version, would love to see a Perl/Python/Ruby version too.

2002-09-23T15:11:00.000Z

FlashRemoting MX is available

The best way of getting data from to .NET/J2EE and Flash. Bring out the books !! :)

2002-09-23T08:01:00.000Z

ASP.NET for Dreamweaver Forum

Kudos to Microsoft for setting this up.

2002-09-23T08:00:00.000Z

Earthquake

The UK was hit by a earthquake today, 4.8 on the richter scale. Nothing serious when compared to the quakes that hit places like the US and Africa but it scared me :)

2002-09-19T08:10:00.000Z

Rise of the Mono

I am little amazed by the opensource world, some folks are embracing .NET and some think its Microsoft devil spawn, the latter forget projects like Mono and the fact that it will form a big part of Linux (Mono will be included in most distros and will form the future in KDE and GNOME) but also the fact it has nothing to do with Microsoft. My hope is that Mono is going to find its way into other opensource projects like Mozzila, I wonder if Netscape would oppose it? ;-)

2002-09-17T16:31:00.000Z

J2EE to .NET

A look at if its worth porting a J2EE app to .NET, lets consider their points.

CLR does not support Java

Mentions Java to C# and Java bridges but no mention of the Java CLR port (yes there is one).

IIS does not support JSP

Granted its not native but a lot of the EJB servers will host in IIS, Macromedia Jrun is one example.

Server controls require redesigns

J2EE does not offer a stright forward .NET migration path for this (or vice versa), so given your app will be in ASP.NET then this will be the case. If all you want to do is run your J2EE app unchanged on the CLR then see the first point.

2002-09-17T12:25:00.000Z

.NET Compiler tool

Handy tool from the Component Pascal folks for creating compilers, rather than create CIL directly from your compiler you can use this instead.

2002-09-17T12:16:00.000Z

.NET Workspaces

The free sourcecontrol system for .NET has gone into beta testing.

2002-09-16T16:21:00.000Z

Rise of the Rich Client

A great post but sadly the comments are full of Microsoft bashers, any excuse to go on about who knows what, yawn.

2002-09-13T12:04:00.000Z

RSS Feed

I have added a RSS feed for my BLOG, feel free to subscribe.

2002-09-13T12:03:00.000Z

More Macromedia Bloggers

Macromedia's CTO Jeremy Alliare has joined Macromedias Bloggers. I hope that Jeremy is frank and open on his Blog and shares his thoughts, from what I have read, so far so good :) Added ya to my daily Blog roll Jeremy ;-)

2002-09-13T08:01:00.000Z

What a week

Been a heck of a week, some reasons are obvious reasons but also having a critical time at work while I bid to project lead a .NET migration. Apologies for the quiet but its been a busy one :) Got lots to report so stick with me while I sort it and report it :)

2002-09-09T12:21:00.000Z

In Remberance

9/11 is almost here, I won't be blogging on that day so let me make a few words now. I remember the day very well, like thousands others around the world turned on the TV in horror to watch the second plane hit the tower. I watched for hours afterwards and how afraid I felt. With the day almost upon us let us all remember those that lost there lives and hope and pray that it never happens again.

2002-09-06T12:01:00.000Z

Delphi and .NET

Borland have released Delphi 7 which includes .NET support in Delpi, see the .NET compiler and ASP.NET support in action. Much more is coming from Borland including a complete development enviroment to rival VS.NET, I hope its for any .NET language and not just Delphi (if not it won't face up to VS.NET).

2002-09-06T08:25:00.000Z

PHP vs .NET

An interesting article that attempts to defend PHP when faced with ".NET arguements". Some of the points are valid but some are not.

First of all you can't compare the .NET Framework to PHP, its like comparing water to wine. You can compare certain parts though....

PHP is not compiled.

The point is that all .NET languages compile to MSIL and that PHP is not a compiled language but with accelerators it is. What happens is that PHP is compiled to machine codes and the accelerators just cache the code and compiles what it needs to. This is a similar behaviour to ASP.NET in that it compiles a page to MSIL and the caches the MSIL. Note that this is an add on behaviour and should be a native part of the Zend engine.

NET supports multiple languages. PHP doesn't.

Weak arguements here. I do agree that PHP can interface with Java and Python etc but can you write a PHP page in anything other than PHP's language and can you run PHP on anything other than the Zend engine. No.

Its not to say we can't, PHP could easily compile to IL (Just as Perl and Python will in Parrot) and thus support language independence. Anyone that is worried about Linux etc should take a look at Mono.

Language.NET has superior object orientation.

OOP is not a bad thing, peroid. Zend 2 will offer a lot of powerful OOP features so PHP will have powerful OOP features too. PHP is not intended to become like C++ but with .NET you can vary what OOP features you want. Lends its self quite well to Zend 2.

My final point is lets not look at this as being PHP vrs .NET and more like the Perl, Python appoach, PHP and .NET.

2002-09-05T12:32:00.000Z

Generics and Rotor

Its great to see that Microsoft have added Generics to Rotor (and called it Gyro), at the moment its for C# only. I hope that ILX is not far away :)

2002-09-04T07:57:00.000Z

A Roadmap to the Recently Released Windows APIs

Think Microsoft has something to hide ? Think again.

2002-09-03T12:36:00.000Z

MSIL in Apache

Embed MSIL in Apache, thats the goal of this Apache Module from Sterling Huges. The project is opensource and based on Mono. Sterling is a member of the PHP core development team and I am sure that his work here will find its way into PHP. We need a .NET & PHP dev team and we need one now ;-)

2002-09-03T11:21:00.000Z

Rotor Talks

Given at the First Rotor Project Workshop (Queens' College, Cambridge), some interesting talks given here. Nice to see talks on threading and generics as well as language developers talking about how they are using Rotor.

2002-09-01T16:40:00.000Z

Laszlo Raising

Interesting startup thats going to use Javascript and XML to render rich client side interfaces in Flash. To start with they will base this on J2EE servers and later move it to .NET Servers (I take it that means the JVM and later on the CLR). Some guess work here but I guess that they will write a compiler for JavaScript that can take XML to render out Flash bytecodes. This is hugely interesting work, my guess is that their compiler will be written for J2EE or .NET but all the VM's will do is create the Flash bytecodes (that is the compiler will be written in Java Bytecodes or IL) and on request run through the VM to create the machine code to create the Flash btyecodes. With .NET we can use Reflection to create and run virtual assemblies and maybe this will be their approach.

I hope the work they do with getting .NET to generate Flash bytecodes is shared as if Macromedia want to push this kind of work they should get the next version of the Flash spec available in J2EE and .NET versions as well as the C++ version that they currently have.

If you want any .NET help please give me a shout ;-)

2002-09-01T16:23:00.000Z

Flash MX for ASP book

I am no longer involved in the FoED book but the concept won't be going away, check out this BLOG to track its progress.

2002-08-30T07:51:00.000Z

Book Link

Thanks to John Lim for linking to my book and his kind words :)

2002-08-28T07:42:00.000Z

Mono wallpaper

Cool, now my wall paper :)

2002-08-26T22:05:00.000Z

A change of subject

I bought book at the weekend, Human Cognitive Neuropsychology (editors Andrew W. Ellis and Andrew W Young). Its been a while since I have read through a text book like this but I find the field (Cognitive Pyschology) hugely interesting. At the moment I am feeling very fed up of computers and the whole IT thing, its nice to look at something else for a change.

2002-08-26T21:51:00.000Z

.NET decompiler

Decompiling .NET assembiles to IL is very easy to do (the SDK has all the tools you need), decompiling IL back to source is another matter. One tool I have come across is Anakrino by Jay Freeman, this nifty free tool (with C++ source) can decompile an assembly into C# (I hope Jay adds VB.NET some time soon). Why do this ? Well if you loose the source to any assemblies that you have created this is a great way out. Let me add that decompiling some else's source is at best unfair and at worse illegal, so unless you have permission, don't.

2002-08-26T09:40:00.000Z

PHP and ASP.NET

This session will be about outputting .MSIL from PHP which can in turn be executed using the Microsoft .NET runtime engine. With the release of PHP alpha version 4.3.0 with Zend Engine 2.0 it is possible to generate Java bytecode as well as .NET bytecode. The .NET bytecode can be serialized to disk or can be generated in-memory. We will discuss the architecture of PHP.NET as the proposed extension is called, the C/C++ code used to build the extension and the internals of the PHP module engine that outputs the .NET MSIL. We will also present a sample application which will use PHP.NET to generate presentation and processing layer logic and interface with any ASP.NET application. We will also present an example of a C# application that interfaces with the PHP.NET module.

This is a talk been given by Ramesh Mani at the International PHP 2002 show and it looks really good, would have loved to have attended this talk :(

BTY Not sure about his statement of Zend 2 outputting MSIL, its OOP model does in theory allow you to export Java Bytecodes and MSIL but of the box it won't. I can only guess as to what Ramesh has in mind, maybe it will be a hacked Zend 2 engine to allow this? My hope is that such work will make its way into mainstream CVS.

2002-08-26T09:35:00.000Z

Macromedia sponser International PHP 2002 show

This is nice to see, kudos to Macromedia for getting involved in such a great event.

2002-08-26T09:27:00.000Z

My book in a book store

I had another magic moment at the weekend and spotted my book in a borders store. Em wanted to reshelf it (so its cover pointed out and took up the shelf) and was shouting its presence around the store :)

2002-08-22T11:45:00.000Z

Wolfy 2

As somone who loves and plays Return to Castle Wolfenstein this article on Planet Wolfenstien has me very excited indeed. I want it now !!! :D

2002-08-21T08:09:00.000Z

Source Control for .NET

As someone who has used SourceForge in the past this will be a great, great thing. I can't wait for this to go live and yes I will be getting some projects up on it :)

2002-08-20T22:45:00.000Z

Learn a language a year

Speaking of Dave Thomas, he says in his book that programmers should learn a new language every year. For 2001 it was Ruby, for 2002 its Haskell, both languages rock. Whats next year Dave? My vote is we go logic from functional, Prolog !!.

The book Dave is using to learn Haskell is The Haskell School of Expression by Paul Hudak

2002-08-20T22:36:00.000Z

Ruby

I started looking at Ruby some two years ago when Dave Thomas started talking about it, I liked its powerful OOP features (as powerful as LISPs CLOS system) and the fact you had that power in a scripting language. Ruby has like Perl and Python found its natural home on IX systems but its Windows support is growing and already you can download a windows installer for it. Check this thread for a sign of things to come for Ruby and the interest ActiveState have shown in it. The futue is bright for this little gem :)

2002-08-20T09:54:00.000Z

My book on Safari

This is a subscription based service but for your money you get three books, see my book in all its glory :)

2002-08-19T14:12:00.000Z

ECMA 4 features

Interesting list on MSDN of ECMA 4 features in JScript.NET, can we have these in ActionScript please Macromedia :)

2002-08-19T13:02:00.000Z

Creating assemblies using Reflection.Emit

Interesting article on Win Developer (you will need to register) on using System.Reflection.Emit to create assemblies. I found this interesting as it looks at doing this using MSIL, in effect MSIL code creating MSIL code. The prospect of self generating/modfying code I find very interesting.

2002-08-19T12:58:00.000Z

Easier eval

Found an even easier way of doing Eval statements, JScript has it built in and so to make it useable across languages just encapsulate the statement into a JScript assembly. Its easier and quicker (no compiling and loading to memory) than using Refection and Compiler namespaces however it depends on JScript operators where the other method allows more flexability (we can use a whole range of statements) and we can develop operators for C# and VB etc.

2002-08-18T23:47:00.000Z

Done it !!

Hacked into the night to get the Eval statement to work and it works a treat :) I need collect the compiler messages into a string and raise it as an execption so any problems are clearer to see and easier to trap, also rather strangely all code going into the VB compiler needs line breaking but the C# compiler does require this. weird. At least I can go to bed now :)

2002-08-18T22:22:00.000Z

Creating a Eval statement for .NET

A rather interesting little .NET project I am involved in at the moment is building a class set for adding functions to create a eval like statement (e.g. take this statement and run it). The brunt is that you must take the statement and compile it into a assembly, the run the assembly and obtain its result. I have worked out out the code for doing this but I am running into problems. The code to load the created assembly into memory for running is not able to find the assembly, I am not sure the assembly is being created ok. The next step is to check the net to see what I can find and to see if I can trap any execptions from the creation process. It will really cool if I can get this running though :)

2002-08-18T22:14:00.000Z

Ouch !!

Hot and sunny weather in the UK at the moment so I grabbed a chance to get out on the bike. However, I have had my first major stack (bike term for fall off at high speed) and the net result is a lot of cuts and gashes and I am limping like mad after twisting my thigh. When I heal I will be back, doing the same hill to see what I did wrong :)

2002-08-15T16:36:00.000Z

Macromedia in trouble

Not a rumor from f**kedcompany but business week. The returns by Macromedia have been great and the future does not look very bright.

Personally I think that they can do well in todays markets but they have got to keep inventing and catch each developer wave as it comes along. An example of a wave.......they are doing great things with .NET but they can do more, said this a millon times but lets see SSAS become a language in its own right (and one that runs on the CLR and JVM) and lets see CFMX run on the CLR and JVM.

2002-08-13T23:02:00.000Z

ActionScript, The Definite Guide, 2nd Edition

Considered to be THE actionscript book, I won't be upgrading to this edition stright away, as Colin says 90% of the 1st edition applies to MX. Its looking good and I am sure will be as much a classic as the first.

2002-08-13T16:06:00.000Z

Rotor source docs

A great idea and a great resource, what we need now is CVS resources :)

2002-08-13T16:00:00.000Z

Delphi compiler for .NET

Some interesting details of Borlands Delphi compiler for .NET

2002-08-13T11:44:00.000Z

GOO

Language of the day....GOO

2002-08-13T08:02:00.000Z

10 Reasons we need Java 3.0

Not talked about Java all that much yet but here is an interesting article on what could be done to change Java, I don't think dropping the AWT is a good idea though.

2002-08-13T07:45:00.000Z

.NET Remoting book for VB.NET !!

Ingo Rammers Advanced .NET Remoting is now available in a VB edition, consider it bought ;-)

2002-08-13T07:39:00.000Z

Book round up

Amazon had delivered several books when I got home last night, one of which was Jason Bocks CLI Programming book, I have not had a chance to take a look in great detail but from what I have seen so far it looks like a classic.

2002-08-12T12:10:00.000Z

Wanna write ?

Jason Bock provides some good advice to any budding authors, I learnt all this the hard way so avoid the pitfalls and read this.

2002-08-11T23:19:00.000Z

Woke up too early, and wrote a Perl 6 regular expression engine. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

A true hacker....mind you when you work full time this only happens at the weekends....I do miss it though ;-)

2002-08-11T23:05:00.000Z

When it all gets a bit silly

Interesting story from a Perl hacker who wants a break from the Perl community because he was getting too involved. This guy has said bad things of Perl community and in return is getting a lot of flack. I don't know first hand how the Perl community works and some of what this guy says may or may not be true but you will find it in any virtually everywhere, in every project, every company and every organistion. Its a sad state of affairs I know but if you want to do things your way then the moral of this story is do just that, don't go on about it, don't moan about it, just do it....I'll see you there.

2002-08-10T23:21:00.000Z

Dreamweaver MX Book

If you use and know Dreamweaver then you should buy this book, written by one of the top experts (and a top geezer) in the Dreamweaver community, this book is a must. Glad to see my advice helped Drew ;-)

2002-08-08T12:16:00.000Z

Supporting Perl and Python in the CLR

One of the problems facing Perl and Python when running on the CLR (and as outlined in Zeev Suraski comments, see yesterdays blog post on that) is that the CLR has no support for dynamic variables. Microsoft are working on this issue so it won't be long before this issue is resolved.