Great Raven/Nancy Video

Justin Soliz - Intro to RavenDB and NancyFX from NashDotNet on Vimeo.

First Causes in Software Development: How do I decide what is good?

I couldn't find the original post to share via Google Reader, so this serves as a way to share it. In reading it, the part about reversibility reminded me of a programmer I used to work with & I think is one of the drivers in terms of how he designs things. Jeremy describes it quite well, I think.

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2008/02/05/first-causes-in-software-development-how-do-i-decide-what-is-good.aspx

Mouse Lag with VPC 2007

I've been using VPC a lot lately, most due to:
1) wanting to run Vista, but needing XP
2) wanting to have a decidicated SharePoint environment to work on without installing all of the tools on my laptop
3) wanting a server OS for dev use

I've run into some issues with SEVERE mouse lag... which made XP almost unusable. I did stumble across the Mouse Integration option, which was set on with my 2003 environment, but not XP.

In order to turn on Mouse Integration for XP, I first had to install teh Virtual Machine Additions (found under Action in the VPC window for the XP windows). Prior to installing it, Mouse Integration wasn't enable.

I installed the Additions, enabled Mouse Integration, and voila! No lag. It does mean that my cursor can easily go from one monitor to the other (currently using two monitors) but a small price to pay for not having the lag.

Dynamic Languages vs Static Languages... or C# vs. Ruby

Great debate below:
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=350187

I like Ruby a lot from a development point of view - easy to prototype and get apps up and running quickly. My issues:
- speed (its slow, as everything is interpreted)
- lack of good development/debugging tools (maybe they're out there, but i haven't seen them)
- hard to get Sql Server up and running with it (I guess people are using MySql instead, but its pretty painful to get Ruby to talk to SqlServer the first time out).
- I haven't seen a lot of info about how to architect them properly.

My worry with languages like PHP & Ruby is that you can get some really bad apps (ASP is the same). One of the points brought up was that because Ruby doesn't have intellisense, or refactoring capabilities, you need to code "better" methods. You SO don't. You can write spaghetti code to your hearts' content and let someone else maintain it.

Overall - I'm not sure that if you were on one side of the fence or the other you would be swayed. I'd still like to try a "real" project in Ruby, but I still don't like not having a compiler :-)

The last 7 minutes are pretty good - not sure if C# is a thing of the past, though. Fortran97 vs. C# is kind of funny, though.

UPDATE: Another great interview below - a little more esoteric, but opens up some higher level ideas and thoughts. Functional programming has been something I've been meaning to get into for a little while since seeing a lot of the LINQ/Lambda work.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=348717

Removing HTML errors in VS2003

We have a lot of custom tags in our applications that are pre-built, and we use them every time. Unfortunately, VS 2003 doesn't like them and we get oddles of HTML validation errors. Not a huge deal but definitely annoying when compiling.

Turns out this can be turned off, obviously not always a good thing but in my case I never look at them anyways so I may as well get them out of there.

The below dialog can be found under "Tools", "Options".

More details (and more elegantly put) below. Also nice to see that the errors have been changed to warnings in VS2008 (post Beta 2 release).

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/09/18/vs-2008-support-to-treat-html-css-and-jscript-validation-issues-as-warnings-instead-of-errors.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/23/431350.aspx

Practical Functional Programming

I don't want my blog to become a "list of links", but the below 4 articles are well worth reading. Definitely a different way to program/code.

http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/12/Practical+Functional+C+Part+I.aspx
http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/13/Practical+Functional+C+Part+II.aspx
http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/16/Practical+Functional+C+Part+III+Loops+Are+Evil.aspx
http://www.atrevido.net/blog/2007/08/29/Practical+Functional+C+Part+IV+Think+In+ResultSets.aspx

My only concern is that C#/VB.Net is going to become a very hard language for newbie's to easily pick up. Sure, they don't have to learn lambda expressions or LINQ, but the difference between a "for" loop and LINQ is pretty significant from a learning point of view. That being said, less code = less bugs so they probably should jump in and learn the useful stuff first.

Debugging AJAX with Fiddler

By default, IE & Fiddler won't track HTTP traffic through localhost - a pain when developing locally.

A few work arounds - if using localhost, the easest is to acces it as below:
http://localhost.:3233/Default.aspx
with a "." after localhost. You can also use your machine name.

Taking a look at the differences between web service calls & update panels prompted this - interesting to see the differences in data being passed back. Nothing comes for free, and although UpdatePanels are really easy to implement they do have performance concerns (above and beyond the page going through its entire life cycle).

I then watched the below video, where they point out the Fiddler issue which would have been nice to have known before I hunted for it myself.

http://asp.net/learn/ajax-videos/video-160.aspx

If you haven't checked out the videos above, you owe it to yourself to do so. Excellent stuff.