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Historical design flaw.

Actually, IE 8 passes the Acid 2 test (yes, they are last, but its an improvement). Not to mention that Microsoft contributed 2524 test cases to the CSS 2.1 test suite. I'm a web developer, and I know the horrors of developing for multiple browsers (especially IE), but I have to give Microsoft some credit for their interest in standards in this coming IE version.

Also, the acid tests are just one indicator of how well a browser does standards. To make it the defining standards test would not be completely fair. More info on that here.

It's also important in user interface design. One of my pet peeves is seeing something like:

[X] Disable the foo button

Why the hell not just invert the sense of the checkbox?

[ ] Enable the foo button

Ok, you win. How about we add another checkbox to disable negative sense checkboxes

[ ] Don't use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.

When you clicked it it would look like this

[ ] Use negative sense checkboxes in Advanced Options.

All the other ones would toggle their checkedness and lose the Don't's and Disables in their captions.

For .net languages, FxCop does some of this checking, even understanding camel casing and underscores in tokens. And a bunch more, since it is a static code analysis tool.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Team/FxCop/

Actually, I don't know if I could say that it is the best ever but it is a damn good virtual machine! It can run as well or even better of its equivalent JVM http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/compare/Benchmark_re sponse.pdf [gotdotnet.com].

Bar none, VS is the best development tool that I have used.

I'll concede on the third allegation which I interpreted as the denial of access to the source code. This is one of the reasons that I have Linux running on my home box since I like to know how things tick on the inside. But I develop with M$ at work and I wanted to point a few things:

"Microsoft has the best virtual machine with .NET,"
Nope.

"the best development tool with Visual Studio"
Nope.

Just b/c it's made by M$ doesn't mean that it is a horrible product. The company itself makes some really shady ethical decisions but there are a lot of developers working for M$ just like us who want to release a great product.

Apparently you've heard of the CLR (and MSIL)?

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/clr/about_clr.aspx
http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_general/il /article.php/c4635/

there are already multiple projects who have brought there bugs down to zero.

You mean "who have brought down the count of their bugs that this tool can detect down to zero." I'm sure they will have other bugs in code and design.

How does this tool compare to tools that do analysis by introspection on bytecode from languages like C# and Java. I use FxCop on C# code, and while it is very cool, using it is not newsworthy at all. Does this tool do more? Is is the news that it's used in a high-profile C++ program?

Integrating tools like this into your build process may be cutting-edge best-practice at present, but give it a while.

I find that when spending too much time looking at the same code, it starts becoming 'vague' and I feel as if I'm in a fugue. It's akin to the same thing as writing a story or some e-mail and thinking that you've misspelled the words 'it' or 'and'. It may very well be correct, but it looks foreign and you try to fix something that isn't broken. At that point, it's time for a mental break.

I actually tend to take at least three breaks a day for about five to ten minutes each. The first two, I read Slashdot; usually around 10:00am and the other right before lunchtime. I don't eat out often, but I do pick up lunch and then around 4:00pm, I check out the latest 'IT' curiosity posted on The Daily WTF http://www.thedailywtf.com/. I also check Slashdot again right before I leave so I don't miss some of the few gems posted here.

A lot of IT shops have their eye on Web browsing, but they usually won't pay mind to it unless you're not producing or you have a tendency to frequent sites that raise an eyebrow or two (hint: pr0n sites tend to fall in that category). I do like to visit sites geared towards developers, such as GotDotNet http://www.gotdotnet.com/, CodeProject http://www.codeproject.com/, CodeGuru http://www.codeguru.com/ and the latest "up and coming" Krugle http://www.krugle.com/ code search engine. Sometimes visiting those sites will give a tidbit or two that is useful; you may run across some code or solution to a problem that interests you. Also, you may end up learning something that you'll run into in the future. (Coders tend to re-invent the wheel if they don't have the code handy; however, if the code is there, they tend to add spinning rims to it.)

Adding a bit of diversity to the routine helps keep you on the edge and refreshed to approach a problem in a new light.

The end is coming. If we complete our project - http://gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id= cc3191af-1b3c-425c-a21d-4729196ec37e The idea is to produce mutable OS core with MSIL to x86 compiler build in it. Join.

I guess the only difference between any two languages is syntax--that's what a language is. The rest is just API.

However, if you're going to program for .NET and you're not an old VB programmer, don't learn VB.NET, learn C# instead. VB is a syntactically ambiguous language, which is why C# to VB.NET translators are easy to come by, but VB.NET to C# translators are a bit more problematic. For example X=A(5) could refer to a function call, an array index, or a number of other possibilities, depending on what "A" is, which you may not know based on just that one .vb file.

Add to that the classic "bad habits" problems associated with BASIC, and you've got yourself a crappy starting point. For example, BASIC uses a single equal sign for both assignment and testing equality. BASIC uses 1-based arrays, and horror or horrors, allows you to change that behavior. I could go on, but other people will probably cover this subject adequately.

If you're doing .NET programming, which is a perfectly valid place to start, use anything other than VB.NET. E.g., C#, J#, Python, or one of about 20 other .NET languages. Don't bother with VB 6, it's going away.

It's because .NET is a platform, not a specific language. Microsoft also has a vested interest in making the platform more suitable for dynamic languages; see IronPython for an example.

The JVM was designed around the notion of Java as a language, whereas .NET was designed as a platform for multiple languages. That difference in approach changes how .NET competition and comparisons are formed.

I agree completely.

.NET for example, has a robust, fully developed design guideline to ensure that library developers are writing compatible code that extends the framework.

There is even a utility called FXCop available that can scan through your solution to make sure that your code is complying with the guidelines. Visual Studio 2005 has this functionality builtin by default.

It would be pretty logical that google would like to control something that is comparable to sun and microsoft's bigtime server languages. Python has moderately fast bytecode (google stuff could improve a lot here) and it's got a decent oop model and a threading api. i/o is also usable. i think zope fans can hype their favourite thing in the responding posts too.

Microsoft hasn't been asleep either when it comes to Python. They hired the original guy who worked on the Iron Python project http://www.ironpython.com/ which brought Python to .NET.

The latest updates on the Iron Python is right here
http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx ?id=ad7acff7-ab1e-4bcb-99c0-57ac5a3a9742

If you want to learn what "serious developers" think of Python just read articles at Python Success Stories.

While you are at it see Jython for Python interpreter for JVM. It has a very long track record already today.
Or take a look at IronPython from Microsoft: implementation of Python on .NET.

This is interesting because it already supports (albeit incompletely) more languages than .Net and is a whole hell of a lot newer

I'm all for another multi-language VM, especially if it's built from the ground up for dynamic typing, but you're joking about the languages, right?

I count 33 Parrot Languages (including duplicates) but only 15 that have ANY tests (even ones that fail).

Of all the lists that I checked, the only one that short was the one for the Mono Project (and they list 13)...

I mean, it's certainly fair to claim that Parrot is newer, if by newer you mean "still not done" (at the current rate, we might see .NET 3 before Parrot 1.0), or "released a beta most recently" (0.4 came out JUST after .NET 2 went gold). But to say it has more languages is just ignorant.

DasBlog
BlogX
tBlogger
.Text

There may be others.

I wonder how many people comply to my license for my custom RSS ASP.NET server control. The final requirement of the license reads: "If you use this control, you must stand on your desk, turn in a circle three times, and sing at the top of your lungs, 'If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.'"

I wonder how many people comply to my license for my custom RSS ASP.NET server control. The final requirement of the license reads: "If you use this control, you must stand on your desk, turn in a circle three times, and sing at the top of your lungs, 'If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.'"

Dood...

IronPython 0.9.2

"great! You can use Microsoft VC.NET, Microsoft C#.net, and Microsoft VB.net on any version of Microsoft windows. (Well recent)"

Right.. of course not all of these are completed, but still. There are also some implementations not listed there like IronPython.
Or you can install Mono or Portable.Net on Windows and compile without resorting to Microsoft tools. The resulting application will run just fine using the MS runtime or any other runtime on any other platform. (As long as you have the libraries you need on every platform.)

IMHO: .Net isn't perfect, but isn't fundamentally broken either. Unless of course you don't want to touch anything having to do with Microsoft, ever. That's fine, understandable even. Just check facts before flaming their software. ;)
Also, so now we have .Net as an alternative to Java. I thought more choice and competition was good?

About vendor lock in. In practice there is no lock in, as stated above C# and .Net applications are already quite compatible with non-Win32 platforms. Patent and copyright issues? Well C# is pretty safe, MS might somehow claim to 'own' the CLR standard .. but I think that would be highly unlikely. (And even more unlikely to succeed.)

The .NET Framework attempts to maintain backward and forward compatibility between versions. However, a change to the .NET Framework that improves security, correctness, or functionality might also raise compatibility issues.

Backward compatibility means an application written for the .NET Framework version 1.0 can execute on version 1.1. The .NET Framework provides the highest degree of support for backward compatibility. Most applications that work on the current version of the .NET Framework will work on the next version of the .NET Framework.

Forward compatibility means an application written for the .NET Framework version 1.1 can execute on version 1.0. Although forward compatibility is supported by the .NET Framework, an application that uses a type or member specific to version 1.1 will never run properly on version 1.0. This is not a forward incompatibility because the application can never be expected to work. If you want your application to run properly on both versions of the .NET Framework, then your application should only use types and members in version 1.0.

Now, I'll admit it's not always perfect, but in my experience it works. I work on a large LOB application, which has been developed for the 1.0 framework. It runs fine (in fact, it runs somewhat better) on the 1.1 framework.

The only work we had to do to enable this was add a few lines to the configuration files on the machines which had both 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks installed. This forced the applications to use a specific version (1.1), not the version they were compiled against. I believe the middle-tier components, which are web services hosted in IIS, required a similar tweak to the IIS configuration.

Requiring specific versions of other libraries may well be an issue - I've not had any experience one way or the other. The project I work on deploys all the required dependencies alongside the application files, which I would expect to mitigate most versioning issues with the libraries we use.

FxCop.
- pd

> FxCop. www.gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop/

Very nice, looks like the message board for that project is hopping, too.

But is it open source? This is the EULA; and I don't see a source download... maybe I'm just missing it...

> FxCop. www.gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop/

Very nice, looks like the message board for that project is hopping, too.

But is it open source? This is the EULA; and I don't see a source download... maybe I'm just missing it...

I suppose you're talking about IronPython

He might prefer Microsoft's other dynamically typed .NET language: Iron Python. (by Jim Hugunin of JPython fame, now a Microsoft employee.)

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 vs. Linux
Competitive File Server Performance
Comparison

Test report prepared under contract from Microsoft

Executive summary
Microsoft commissioned VeriTest, a
division of Lionbridge Technologies,
Inc., to conduct a series of tests
comparing the File serving
performance of the following server
operating system configurations
running on a variety of server
hardware and processor
configurations:

Just to follow up on this, I found a .NET program that handles Markov chains and has some very understandable source code. I think that this link should get you there, but if not, look for the "Markov Babbler."

//kill all of the children

AI's are remarkably difficult to write... and if you're looking for a playground to experiment, I'd recommend Microsoft's Terrarium app which they released as a way to demonstrate features in the .NET framework. With that app, developers all over the world write insect DLLs in various .NET languages which then execute in your system with limited code access security and compete to dominate a distributed ecosystem. Fun stuff.

There is INETA, which has over 300,000 members worldwide and is promoted a lot by Microsoft.

There are many, many community websites put out or suppported in some way by Microsoft, like GotDotNet, MSDNAA (for students), Free ASP.NET starter kits, etc.

There are the helpful Shows and Webcasts highlighting and explaining new Microsoft products, which are especially helpful for .NET developers here.

There is the Student Ambassador (to Microsoft) program where a student serves as the liason between Microsoft and students and provides software, information, and community for students. This is run by Microsoft, and I play a small part as one SA among ~146 on college campuses in the US alone.

There is the Imagine Cup contest, which is geared for students which provides a programming competition for anyone interested. The website for that is here...

There's more, but you get the point.

As far as previous stuff (MFC, COM, etc.) I have not been involved at that stage, and a specific business may have had a different experience.

Why not just post a link?

<a href="http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspac e.aspx?id=e094bc77-2837-4ac3-997d-cd62a446342a">To rrentulla</a>

<URL:http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace .aspx?id=e094bc77-2837-4ac3-997d-cd62a446342a>

<a href="http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspac e.aspx?id=e094bc77-2837-4ac3-997d-cd62a446342a">To rrentulla</a>

<URL:http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace .aspx?id=e094bc77-2837-4ac3-997d-cd62a446342a>

Microsoft has not released the .NET framework on any platform but Widnows, and doesn't have any plans (that they're talking about) to do so.

That's assuming you don't count Rotor, Microsoft's reference implementation of the ECMA-standardize bits of .NET (the C# language, the CLR, etc, but not bits like WinForms), which at least works on various BSD platforms, and is licensed such that you can safely port it to other platforms, or use it as the basis for a reimplimentation (think BSD's network stack, for instance).

the only real worry for Mono is that Microsoft would change .NET enough to break what compatibility they have, but the Mono project has already explained why this doesn't worry them.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft has a 10 year support plan for each new version of the .NET framework. Tha means that 1.0 will be supported for another 7-8 years, 1.1. will be supported for another 9, and 2.0 will be supported for 10 years from release (which should be sometime next year?). That means that even if Microsoft does make breaking changes in a new version of the platform, you can still build applications against older versions that Mono does support. As well, each framework has some amount of backwards- and forwards-compatibility (for instance, it's possible to run 1.1-targeted .NET apps on the 1.0 framework, with a few exceptions). Microsoft generally does a good job of listing backwards and forwards breaking changes between versions of the framework. (Yes, GotDotNet.com is a Microsoft property.)

Microsoft has not released the .NET framework on any platform but Widnows, and doesn't have any plans (that they're talking about) to do so.

That's assuming you don't count Rotor, Microsoft's reference implementation of the ECMA-standardize bits of .NET (the C# language, the CLR, etc, but not bits like WinForms), which at least works on various BSD platforms, and is licensed such that you can safely port it to other platforms, or use it as the basis for a reimplimentation (think BSD's network stack, for instance).

the only real worry for Mono is that Microsoft would change .NET enough to break what compatibility they have, but the Mono project has already explained why this doesn't worry them.

Also keep in mind that Microsoft has a 10 year support plan for each new version of the .NET framework. Tha means that 1.0 will be supported for another 7-8 years, 1.1. will be supported for another 9, and 2.0 will be supported for 10 years from release (which should be sometime next year?). That means that even if Microsoft does make breaking changes in a new version of the platform, you can still build applications against older versions that Mono does support. As well, each framework has some amount of backwards- and forwards-compatibility (for instance, it's possible to run 1.1-targeted .NET apps on the 1.0 framework, with a few exceptions). Microsoft generally does a good job of listing backwards and forwards breaking changes between versions of the framework. (Yes, GotDotNet.com is a Microsoft property.)

Python, which also bears little resemblance to C#, also appears to run very nicely on .NET and pretty well on Mono. http://ironpython.com/. While they aren't all open source, there are also many other languages with compilers directed at the CLI: http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/lang/.

Finally, there seems to be no reason to suppose that Java is somehow more flexible than .NET because Java can be run on Mono via the IKVM project http://www.ikvm.net/.

I'm not advocating the use of Mono (and I'm certainly not advocating the use of Windows), but arguments against it should be technically correct.

Kluge

Chris Brumme at microsoft has some interesting discussion of this stuff in his blog. The post dealing with proxying talks about why value types are baked into the class hierarchy. For example, being able to remote a value type (to another machine, for example) by copying it can in some situations be a big performance win over having to forward method calls on the object back to the machine where it lives.

gotdotnet.com !!!

http://gotdotnet.com/Community/MessageBoard/Home.a spx

Oh Boy a new place to troll !!!!!!

• Don Box, Indigo
• Chris Anderson, Avalon
• Rico Mariani, Performance
• Brad Abrams, Class Libraries
• Chris Brumme, CLR
• Raymond Chen, win32 guru
• Chris Sells, MSDN strategist
• Andy Pennell, Debugger

Indeed, it's very unlikely that Clemens would have intended to say that you should never, ever get involved in Open-sourced software. After all, Clemens is the maintainer of DasBlog, a BSD-licensed weblogging engine for ASP.net, forked from Chris Anderson (M'oft employee)'s earlier BSD'ed BlogX software.

Since newTelligence AG's site is currently slashdotted, here's the Google Cache edition of the dasBlog homepage. And here's the GotDotNet collaborative workspace hosting the Source Code for dasBlog.

Give Clemens' letter a bit of thought - it's not the ravings of an anti-FOSS demagogue after all, but the view of a successful software businessman who also maintains some very useful Open-sourced software.

So has it made it onto Usenet yet?

ohhh yes.

Microsoft starts trying to tell people that "OO is soo... yeasterday. You want Indigo."

You're referring to Don Box, specifically, right? I don't think it's so much that Don is pooh-pooh'ing OOP in general, it's that he feels that a service-oriented architecture is better suited to the kind of problems we face today than DCOM or CORBA. His point is that trying to use an OOP metaphor for enormous, architecturally sound remote object invocation/data transfer systems is a terribly complex task.

Also, keep in mind that Don wrote *the* book on Microsoft's COM technology; OOP has its place, but CORBA and DCOM are not really the place.

Let's put it this way: it happens so often with Microsoft's competitors that it seems likely that either Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging rivals who code for Windows or Windows itself has some serious issues and causes a lot of programs to glitch. Either way it doesn't look good for Microsoft.

If you really do think this, I'd suggest reading Raymond Chen's blog. Raymond is a Windows shell programmer (and author of the famously popular TweakUI) and has been working with Windows since long before Windows 95. He's constantly adding entries on "why we did this" or "why it works like this" that shed a whole new light on the internal workings of Windows. Some of the more interesting articles are on his archived site, like The Story of the Shell Folders Key or What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS? Raymond does actively monitor comments to his blog postings and if you have a coherent question or comment, he will usually respond.

Let's put it this way: it happens so often with Microsoft's competitors that it seems likely that either Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging rivals who code for Windows or Windows itself has some serious issues and causes a lot of programs to glitch. Either way it doesn't look good for Microsoft.

If you really do think this, I'd suggest reading Raymond Chen's blog. Raymond is a Windows shell programmer (and author of the famously popular TweakUI) and has been working with Windows since long before Windows 95. He's constantly adding entries on "why we did this" or "why it works like this" that shed a whole new light on the internal workings of Windows. Some of the more interesting articles are on his archived site, like The Story of the Shell Folders Key or What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS? Raymond does actively monitor comments to his blog postings and if you have a coherent question or comment, he will usually respond.

Let's put it this way: it happens so often with Microsoft's competitors that it seems likely that either Microsoft is deliberately sabotaging rivals who code for Windows or Windows itself has some serious issues and causes a lot of programs to glitch. Either way it doesn't look good for Microsoft.

If you really do think this, I'd suggest reading Raymond Chen's blog. Raymond is a Windows shell programmer (and author of the famously popular TweakUI) and has been working with Windows since long before Windows 95. He's constantly adding entries on "why we did this" or "why it works like this" that shed a whole new light on the internal workings of Windows. Some of the more interesting articles are on his archived site, like The Story of the Shell Folders Key or What about BOZOSLIVEHERE and TABTHETEXTOUTFORWIMPS? Raymond does actively monitor comments to his blog postings and if you have a coherent question or comment, he will usually respond.

Have a look at Robocode or Terrarium
I am not sure about Robocode, I always assumed they addressed those issues. I know Terrarium does.

> Similarly, if monad is supposed to be a shell scripting language it too should be avoided

That was actually a "recollection" of what MONAD scripts look like. Note that Monad scripts can actually be written in pretty much any .NET language, such as C# or JScript.

Look at this slide 8 of this presentation, for an example of how to write something like a CommandLet like ps in monad.

Wow, you run dozens, maybe hundreds of different hardware configurations on a single Linux system for testing purposes? Doesnt seem a good way to test your app compatability.

And believe it or not, but some people at Microsoft actually run Linux too. This smart one is even in the CREDITS file.