Nat Demos Dashboard

pheared writes "Nat Friedman from Ximian gave a fairly in depth, quite hilarious (got embarrassing screensaver?), and somewhat impromptu, talk about his project "Dashboard" at OLS. From his blog: "The dashboard is a piece of software which performs a continous, automatic search of your personal information space to show you things in your life that are related to whatever you happen to be doing with your computer at the time." Neat stuff, but I don't think I will be warming up to Mono and C# any time soon."

Comments

Making life easy for a hacker

[indiancowboy]

A hackers dreams come true? Get a log of everything you did today or in the past, all kinds of data passwords etc. all on a golden platter ?! What are the security features in this thing?

I'm warming up fast to .net

[Rogerborg]

In fact, the more knee jerk, unsubstantiated, unjustified snide throwaway comments I read about .net and C#, the more inclined I am to think that I'm seeing Ludditism writ large, and that .net is something that I should be taking a look at sooner rather than later if I want to stay employed in the tech business.

Re:Unnecessary commentary?

[IamTheRealMike]

Agreed, especially true because the full Dashboard system is written in a range of languages - the plugins/backends tend to use whatever languages are best for integration with the software. It's certainly not a pure .NET app, not by any stretch.

I was at the demo...

[Ron Harwood]

...and yes, I think you will find it useful.

Seriously, there will be a signal to noise ratio to begin with... but the concept of related information - it's like if someone did "pop up videos" information blurbs for all your computing needs...

So until you can start adding extra memory units to your brain - something like this may prove itself very useful indeed.

Re:Unnecessary commentary?

[plasticmillion]

I don't have any problem with inflammatory comments, but I am curious to know what exactly motivated the author's statement besides sheer bloodymindedness vis-a-vis Microsoft.

I currently have two machines sitting in front of me, one of which runs my "Microsoft" development environment (Visual Studio.NET, C++, C#) and the other my Java development environment (Eclipse). I use all three languages more or less on a daily basis, and I don't think I have any latent bias other than what actually works for me. From this perspective (pun intended) I would make the following observations:

• Eclipse is totally awesome. No other Java IDE comes close (and I've used a bunch). Not only is it a pleasure to use, but it has had a major influence on my view of software architectures in general by virtue of its elegant plugin architecture.
• C++ sucks. I've been a C++ programmer for 10 odd years, but after using Java and C# there's no turning back. I understand memory management, pointers and the like, but they are a major cramp on productivity and I'd rather do without them.
• C# and .NET look very cool as a replacement for venerable C++. C# has all of the obvious advantages of Java, and equally important, the .NET libraries are finally a worthy equivalent to all the J2SE foundation class that should have been in C++ but aren't (and don't get me started about STL). Ever try to, say, check whether a directory exists in C++ and, if not, to create it? I spent at least 20 minutes surfing through MSDN and ended up with 10-15 lines of code. I'm very much still learning C#, but I wrote:

  if (!Directory.Exists(str)) Directory.CreateDirectory(str);

  ...and it worked first time.

So what exactly is wrong with .NET? If you need to work on the Windows platform it's a godsend!